Dirt Church Radio Trail Running

Kia Ora Whanau. This week Eugene and Matt speak with Lisa Tamati about love, loss, change, and whanau. Lisa’s list of accomplishments is well known, having completed over 140 ultra marathons and being the first Kiwi woman to finish the Badwater 135. Lisa has raced the Sahara and Gobi deserts as well as the Australian outback the himalayas, as well as running the length of New Zealand for Curekids...

Kia Ora Whanau. This week, Eugene has the distinct pleasure of welcoming back to the show Scotty Hawker. Scotty had unfinished business with UTMB this year, after having to pull the pin with 30 miles to go in 2018 in fifth place. Scotty did what elite athletes do, and went back to work, addressing the issues that had ended his 2018 race and built towards 2019 and what would be the standout perform...

Kia Ora Whanau. Under the umbrella of mental health, substance dependence has a place that is most often misunderstood, reviled, largely silent. There are judgements, myths, and a largely held view that somehow, substance dependence is a moral failing of the user. These views have been shown to be uninformed, unhelpful, and demonstrably false and ignore the simple fact that trauma, familial disloc...

Kia Ora Whanau. This week Eugene and Matt have the utter pleasure and privilege to speak with Nikki Kimball. Nikki is a legend in ultra running, and one of the pioneers of the modern age of the sport. In the 2000’s and early 2010’s Nikki was arguably the greatest female ultra runner in the world, a three time winner of Western States Endurance Run and winner of Run Rabbit Run, Speedgoat, The Bear...

Kia Ora Whanau. Last time Matt spoke to Dr John Onate, they were sitting in Matt’s lounge in the heat, luxuriating after a beautiful trail run and drinking a cold beer. This time, Dr John is calling in from a sweltering Sacramento and Eugene and Matt are shivering in the Auckland rain. This episode of Dirt Church Radio covers the topics of running and depression. Mental health is an increasingly i...

Kia Ora Whanau. This week Eugene and Matt have the distinct pleasure of speaking to Rod Dixon. Rod is a legend in the sport of running - his highlight reel is simply incredible. Rod won an Olympic bronze medal in the 1972 Olympics in the 1500m and his incredible win at the New York Marathon in 1983 is a masterclass in running your own race, process, tenacity, and geometry. Rod also ran what was th...

In 2012 Executive chef Pat Bowring was at the top of his game in the hospitality industry, running several restaurants, and living the relentless and hedonistic lifestyle of a professional chef. It was at this point that he realised that he needed to make, in his own words, some significant changes in his life. So, as most of us do, or have done at one point in our lives, Pat started running. Run...

Kia ora Whanau. This week, Eugene speaks to Fiona Love, Women’s winner of the 2019 WUU2k 63km. That’s right. The mighty DCR robot had to split into its component flannel shirts for this episode, with Matt on whanau duties Eugene had to bring it on home solo with the mighty Fiona Love. Fiona is relatively new to the ultra marathon scene, heck, WUU2k was her FIRST ONE (for those of you who’ve not ru...

Kia ora Whanau. This week, Eugene and Matt have the pleasure of speaking to Jason Koop, the Director of Coaching for Carmichael Training Systems. Jason is one of the premiere coaches in the ultramaraton world, and has coached many professional athletes to high levels of success within the sport. Koop’s roster has included such names as Kaci Lickteig, Dylan Bowman, Mike Foote, Timothy Olson, Jen Be...

Kia ora Whanau. We would like to thank you for being with us for the first year of Dirt Church Radio. What follows is the live recording of our special at Hallertau Brewery. Eugene, Matt, and a barrell room full of enthusiastic trail runners reflect on the year that was, highlights, more highlights, and an enduring love of sharing interesting conversations with interesting runners. We speak to And...

It’s our birthday!! So we are giving you the present of A) Jared Hazen and B) the correct way to say Coconino (COKE-A-NINO). Jared Hazen is the second-fastest person ever to run the Western States Endurance Run, with a time of 14:26:46. Eugene and Matt attempted to do the math on Hazen’s average pace at kilometer 61 of the WUU2k last week and failed miserably, BUT, the man is fast. Bested only by...

Kia Ora whanau!! For our second-ever race special Eugene and Matt took a tilt at the (if-not-by-now) soon-to-be-iconic WUU2K - The Wellington Urban Ultramarathon. The race is the brainchild of Wellington’s Gareth Thomas, a dyed-in-the-wool creative who decided that the trails he and his friends ran in the hills surrounding Wellington would make a pretty decent race if you strung them together and...

Kia Ora whanau!! This week we speak to Rachel Grunwell. Rachel is an award-winning journalist, a runner, a yoga instructor, and wellness expert. A long time investigative journalist, she had her head turned by a fitness challenge that she was undertaking for a story and transitioned from (in her words) being an “unfit mum to a multi-marathoner”. Rachel is an ambassador for the Achilles Foundation,...

Kia Ora whanau!! Say Yes To Adventure is not just the title of the magazine that Hollie Woodhouse put out, it is a defining character trait. The term “Adventurer” gets bandied about a bit these days, anyone with a social media account and a penchant for camera angles can put a claim in but Hollie Woodhouse is the real deal. After growing up in the rambunctious outdoorsy way that is typical for man...

Kia Ora whanau!! These days with running it can feel that is not just about running, you know? There is always someone around the corner saying that we need to do this, that, and the other thing to maximise our enjoyment of the thing we love the most. Can it be that to enjoy more of what we love, especially as we get older, we need to do other things? Well. Yes. If we take the view that running an...

Kia Ora whanau. Josh Komen grew up on the West Coast of the South Island and spent most of his younger years outside with the sky and ridges as boundaries. Josh loved movement and physicality- playing rugby league and running with past and future legends Ruth Croft, Eddie Gray, and Boston Marathon winner Dave McKenzie. Josh, as many people on The Coast do, equated being busy with being happy. So J...

Kia Ora whanau!! When Kathrine Switzer laced up her trainers on the morning of April 19th, 1967, there is no way she could have anticipated the seismic shift in world history that she would trigger. Kathrine was the first woman to officially enter the Boston Marathon, which was a male-only event. Kathrine could not have known that one simple act of defiance from a 20-year-old would begin a career...

Kia Ora whanau!! This week on the podcast we speak with professional ultramarathon runner Coree Woltering. Coree loves to run, and notes that he will race any distance or any surface. From his start racing 200 and 400 metres at high school Coree then took up swimming and cycling to manage injury and before-you-know-it had qualified twice for the world 70.3 Ironman championships, all the while runn...

Kia Ora whanau!! This week on the podcast we speak with Peter Maksimow. Peter is an invo8 athlete, a mountain runner who has represented the USA, a connoisseur of fine beer, and the Partnership and Outreach Specialist for the American Trail Running Association, a non-profit organisation that seeks greater engagement, organisation, advocacy, and education around what trail running is and the myriad...

Kia Ora whanau!! After  just missing out on a spot in the New Zealand Junior Development Squad for orienteering Andrew Thompson’s life steered away from running into university and a love of Drum & Bass, frequenting the amazing scene in Wellington in the early 2000’s and quickly becoming a DJ, VJ, and successful promoter and curator of Bass Drop, a popular NZ Drum & Bass forum. It wasn’t u...

Kia Ora whanau!! In 2018 Dr Katie Wright quietly moved to New Zealand. She’d quietly run around the coast of Wales and had quietly completed an Ironman as well as several road marathons. Katie quietly ran her first ultra marathon in October last year, the Taupo 100km, and what better way to back that up than to quietly place second this year behind Camille Herron at the Tarawera 100 mile run in Fe...

Kia Ora whanau!! The concept of adventure in our culture is one that is generally associated with the most. The most vert, the most trail, the most difficulty, the most. Mostness. Our conversation with Chris Ord certainly covers this facet of adventure, but also challenges us to think that adventure is something that is individual and that we can intertwine with our everyday lives. But hey, we’re...

Kia Ora whanau. This week it is Matt’s turn to spread his wings and wobble away from the nest on his solo conversation with the one and only Zach Miller. Exploding onto the ultra scene in 2013 out of nowhere (okay, a cruise ship) with a win at the JFK 50 mile, Zach followed up the next year with a win at Lake Sonoma, has gone on to become the first American man to win CCC and is the 2015 and 2016...

Kia ora whanau. In 2015, having ran a marathon whilst dressed as a crayon, Elise Downing decided to set herself a bigger challenge. I mean, if you’ve run 42.2 in crayola cosplay anything else is gravy, right? To cut a long story short, in 2016 Elise ran the entire coast of Britain - London to London. That’s 5000 miles, 301 days, 7 pairs of running shoes, and according to Elise, approximately 987 s...

Kia Ora whanau, this week Eugene and Matt have the distinct pleasure of speaking with Roger Robinson. Emeritus professor at Victoria University Wellington, Roger taught English for over 30 years, in that time writing several books both on running and literature. Roger is an acclaimed commentator for TVNZ  and stadium announcer at the Christchurch and Auckland Commonwealth Games. Running is deeply...