After 10 heart attacks Robin Judkins knows he's on borrowed time. The charismatic raconteur and founder of the world-famous Coast to Coast multisport endurance race gave up the piss in 1978, as his rollicking memoir Mad Dogs opens. The fags were stubbed out recently. Writing is where gets his kicks
Coast to Coast founder Robin Judkins on writing, theatre, multisports, and life
Robin Judkins has turned his creativity into a new rock musical which premiers in Christchurch this weekend. Photo / George Heard
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Over the next few months, in a torrent of creativity, Judkins knocked out 67 paintings, made half a dozen tables, and finished three sculptures.
"What happens, for me, is you come out of an operation, like a quintuple bypass and your oxygen levels in your blood are much greater, your brain works faster, you can do things you couldn't do before," says the 73-year-old.
"I'm on a very short string. I don't think about it because if you did... you wouldn't do anything, you'd just lie in bed all day, waiting for the end. I'm not f******* doing that."
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The inspiration has often come in bursts. A "madcap bundle of energy", a Herald sports journalist once called him.
The spark for the Coast to Coast event came while Judkins was living in Wanaka in the late 1970s. He was head of ski patrol at Treble Cone, while running a kayaking business.
He'd managed to organise one major event while still a "pisshead", the 1975 New Zealand freestyle ski champs.
But it wasn't until he corked the bottle in 1978 that he found the energy required to realise all the visions he was cooking up. He devised the Alpine Ironman, a gruelling event that would pave the way for the Coast to Coast, which, after two years of planning, was launched in 1983 with 79 competitors. Judkins tried the course himself, to see if it was doable, and managed to complete the first practice run in over 22 hours on a borrowed bike.
It's always been an active life. So when the first nationwide Covid-19 lockdown came, like many New Zealanders, he was left wondering how to keep entertained.
He dug out some old diaries. Two lines caught his eye: "A band of musicians with nowhere to rehearse use an old municipal bus to drive around the city on Sundays, collecting the players from their bus stops and anybody else standing there."
Judkins had already written two books of poetry, a fantasy/comedy about a dog that becomes a rock and roll blues singer, his memoir Mad Dogs, and what he thought was a novel that has morphed into a screenplay for a 13-part TV series called The Comedian ("Nobody's picked it up yet, but it's out there").
And so, the concept bore into his brain like a worm. He had jotted down dozens of songs, poems, bits of dialogue, and odd phrases, and with the world shut down by a global pandemic, he started writing Free Bus To God.
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In his lounge, he allocated seats and tried to visualise how it might look on stage.
Then, to "see if it was any good", he road-tested the material himself at various open mic nights across the city. Warm receptions encouraged him to plough on.
Local musician Adam Hattaway turned Judkins' lyrics and tunes into proper songs and the show soon became fully realised.
"The songs have played out to be a helluva better than I thought and have some really nice tunes to them now," Judkins says.
Saturday night's one-off show at the quake-refurbished James Hay Theatre at Christchurch Town Hall is a dream come true for Judkins - who worked on building the town hall as a university student in the late 1960s.
It's not his first time on stage, however, after two years in Canterbury University's student revue.
"We were the bare-breasted African dancers... plastic rugby balls cut in half, that made a bra, you see, and we'd wear those with a grass skirt... Wow, we got some good laughs when we started doing our high kicks."
Judkins hopes to fill the main body of the theatre – 500 people – and even have the audience up and dancing along to the songs.
"I love the Town Hall, I really do. It's a beauty. And it looks better now than when we built it," he laughs.
Putting together a full musical production has similarities with organising a big multisport race, Judkins says. Months of planning, long hours, and being prepared to change everything at the last minute.
He recalls running the Alpine Ironman every Labour Weekend for a decade.
"Never once did it run on the right course on the right day."
What he thrived on was the buzz of a live event, "getting extremely into the moment, which is what Free Bus To God is".
"Over a weekend, in an event, I can get everybody on my side and get everybody in a really amazing state of hyper-intensity about what's happening," Judkins says.
"In the theatre, I've got an hour: to grab them by the balls and give them a good twist!
"Events and performances give me the same level of anxiety and stress. It appears that is what I run on. I get so hyped up myself. It is good fun. The key part is to make sure that they are having fun, otherwise, they will never come again and think you're a dick."
The most memorable Coast to Coasts for Judkins were the ones marred by bad weather.
One year, organisers airlifted 95 contestants off mountains. In 1992, famed helicopter pilot Bill Black landed on a tree in a swollen river during a nasty weather bomb to rescue a group of eight - including a woman who refused to get into the chopper for fear she would be disqualified from the race.
"The worst one was bursting into tears twice, when the stress had become so great," Judkins says. "Nobody sees you, of course, you whip around behind a tree and just have a good bawl, then out in front of them again and you're all bright and cheery."
Judkins sold the Coast to Coast to Queenstown-based Trojan Holdings in 2013. But every year he still blows the starting hooter at Kumara Beach on the Tasman Sea and is there to shake the hands of the shattered two-day competitors at Sumner Beach.
He's also stayed in touch with nine-time winner Steve Gurney. They phone each other all the time.
"He's madder than I," Judkins roars.
The art collecting has slowed because his house is too full and he's given up car racing, even reluctantly selling his beloved 1972 Ford-powered Begg FM3.
But his focus is more on writing these days. He has no interest in owning houses or running businesses.
He hopes to take Free Bus To God around the country before hitting the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland next year.
And while he was fully focused on his production when the Herald interviewed him this week, he already has another project underway.
It's a thriller called The Butcher, The Sniper, The Journalist and is set at the end of the last century during two European wars.
Judkins says writing "kind of gets in your blood".
