Marathon man eyes 100 races

ON THE RUN: Graeme Tindall doing what he does best.

Masterton athlete Graeme Tindall is on the verge of completing his 100th marathon after debuting over the distance just 13 years ago.

Tindall, 41, will look to crack the three-figure mark at the Wairarapa country marathon at the Lee-Pakaraka road circuit on Sunday, October 13, after notching up No 99 in Sydney just a couple of weekends ago.

It will be Tindall's sixth attempt at the local event and, while he is "quietly confident" of making it to the finish line, he has absolutely no ambitions of bettering his best-ever marathon time of 3hrs 23mins recorded over the same course in 2002.

"These days, I'm just happy to break the four-hour mark, times really don't mean anything any more," he said yesterday. "It's all about completion, how long it takes doesn't really come into it."

Tindall admits the thought of reaching 100 marathons was probably the furthermost thing from his mind when he ran his first in Auckland in 2000.

"I didn't really know what to expect so I was pretty nervous about the thought of running that far. Just getting to the finish in one piece was the main aim back then."

Early on in his marathon-running career, Tindall was doing two or maybe three a year but that number grew steadily as the years went on and he actually completed as many as 20 in 2012. In New Zealand, he has run the famous Rotorua marathon 11 times and Auckland 10 as well as others in places such as Christchurch, Dunedin and Invercargill.

And he has been a frequent competitor overseas, having competed in all the "majors" including Boston, New York, Chicago, London and Berlin and several less high-profile events in Australia.

Of all the overseas marathons this year's Boston event is, not surprisingly, one of the more memorable with two bomb blasts killing a number of people but, fortunately, for Tindall he came through unscathed.

The surrounding chaos did mean, however, he was unable to make it to the finish, a situation which saw him head soon afterwards to Utah where he ran the Salt Lake City marathon, his 89th at the time.

Tindall's training schedule is rather different these days to what it was five years ago when he covered huge kilometres to prepare himself for each race.

It was then he suffered an Achilles injury which drastically reduced the distances he could cover without pain and, from that point on, he has basically used each marathon as training for the next.

"Once I decided time wasn't an issue, I cut right back on the training and have pretty much kept it that way," Tindall said.

"When you are doing so many, it's good to give the body a rest anyway, it seems to work out OK."