Baynes, 28, will compete at the championships in the port city of Gdynia on March 29.
After winning both the New Zealand marathon and half marathon titles in 2019, he will now take on a field of competitors all running at an extremely elite level.
At the recent Buller Gorge half marathon, Baynes set a new personal best of 1hr 4min 50sec.
At the last world championships in Spain, Kenyan runner Geoffrey Kipsang Kamworor won gold in a time of 1hr 2sec.
Baynes’ time in Buller would have been good enough to finish 84th.
“It will be the biggest event I’ve run in and certainly the furthest I’ve traveled for a race. The weather forecast there is for about -4 deg C and light snow,” Baynes said.
If the Polish winter sticks around for the world championships, the conditions may not be all that dissimilar to the ones Baynes experienced in what he rates as one of his best runs to date.
Last year Baynes won the Christchurch marathon in a personal best time of 2hr 18min 11sec – almost 10sec clear of his nearest rival. The event on June 2 was run in freezing, wet conditions.
“To do that sort of time in those conditions was awesome. There were some pretty deep puddles out there. To have my family there to celebrate was special as well,” Baynes said.
The win was a hat-trick of titles in Christchurch to go with his winner’s medals for the 10km and half marathon distances.
It hasn’t come without setbacks though. In 2018 he contracted chickenpox for a second time. He also discovered he had viral pericarditis – which is an inflammation of the sac around the heart.
The heart issue played a role in one of the darkest moments of his career – quitting the 2018 Gold Coast Half-Marathon after 9km.
In Poland, Baynes is expecting the race to be a mental challenge as well as a physical one.
In the days leading up to the race he will jog the course and remember certain landmarks at different distances. He does this to give himself a gauge on how he can expect his body and mind to feel at different points of the race.
“An hour is a long time to be out there. You’re basically running as hard as you would for a 5000m race, but sustaining that for an hour. It puts the body under a lot of pressure,” Baynes said.
The last New Zealander to compete at the world championships was Ben Ashkettle in 2014. He finished 87th in the men’s field with a time of 1hr 6min 39sec.
