Simone Maier is going for her fourth straight Coast to Coast crown on Saturday. Photo / Cheeky Weka
Warning: This article discusses suicide and self-harm.
As Simone Maier gears up to try and win her fourth straight Coast to Coast title on Saturday, she recalls surviving abuse, suicidal thoughts, a debilitating eating disorder and how the resilience she has now built is an advantage when she hits the wall in endurance races.
It may seem a curious comparison, but multisport adventure racer Simone Maier sees parallels between her suffer-fest endurance races and her long road to recovery from a traumatic childhood that haunted her teenage years.
Sport actually saved her life, she told the Herald, as the reigning one-day Coast to Coast champion prepares to defend her crown for what would be her fourth straight title and fifth overall.
It’s a gruelling and iconic race that attracts athletes from around the world, starting at Kumara Beach on the West Coast and then crossing the main divide to finish at New Brighton Beach in Christchurch.
Competitors run, bike and paddle their way across the 243km course, including a 30.5km trail run over Goat Pass, a 70km kayak down the Waimakariri River - where they face grade-two rapids - and a 70km ride across the Canterbury plains. It requires supreme fitness and skill, strategy, untold amounts of training, a good support team and, of course, a bit of luck.
Another key ingredient is stoic preservation in the face of adversity, something Maier has unique experience with.
“I probably have a high pain threshold. In an adventure race or multisport event, sometimes you just have to be in an uncomfortable position and push through, even when you haven’t slept and your body is under immense pressure,” she said.
“I’ve also had to overcome my trauma where I just had to hang in there, just keep plodding along, putting one foot in front of the other to get out of what I was going through. It took years.
“I feel there’s a parallel there.”
It’s a lesson that’s served the 43-year-old well, having topped podiums around the world in a variety of individual and team events, including GODZone, Red Bull Defiance, the Adventure Race World Championships and Multi-Challenge Wānaka, as well as being the first woman to win the Coast to Coast in her 40s.
But it’s not a path she would have taken were it not for a key support person in her life who, decades earlier, rekindled Maier’s love of sports at a time that was particularly dark and tumultuous.
Maier would be a national celebrity with flattering endorsements if multisport racing was as popular in New Zealand as rugby.
That’s not the case, however, so she supplements her coaching business by working at the outlet campground in Wānaka, where she lives with her partner Marcel Hagener in a humble wooden cabin.
It’s a private, secluded spot where Hagener, now retired from adventure racing, continually renovates the cabins nearby while Maier plans her next race - often out of financial necessity.
Last year was the first time since the pandemic she was able to race in China, with its more lucrative cash prizes for races that are not without quirks; in one of them, she had to catch fish with her hands, while in another, she had to string dried chillis together.
She’s laser-focused when it comes to her training, but underneath that is a vibrant, fun-loving person whose nickname - Bounce, or Bouncy - is indicative of her contagious energy. She is known for dressing in bright colours and for the ridge of ponytail nubbins that run down the centre of her head like the tiny scales of a dinosaur mohawk. She speeds around Wānaka on her electric unicycle, often alongside Hagener on his own unicycle, decked in fluorescent lights and often with opera music blaring from its speaker.
Her disposition, in other words, gives no indication whatsoever of what she’s been through to get to where she is today.
Growing up in a small town near Black Forest, Germany, she was sexually abused by a neighbour when she was 4, attempted suicide in her teens and then developed eating disorders. Today, Maier is fit and muscular and looks like she could bench-press an entire football team and then run a marathon. But she was skeletal when she was 18, weighing only 35kg.
She had compartmentalised what had happened to her as a child, but it came creeping back when she was 14 and playing basketball. Her boyfriend at the time - her first - reached over from behind her to try and stop her from getting the ball. The movement was a trigger. Images of an old man in a similar pose started to leak into her mind.
“It started like a little crack and it just kept on cracking. I was so upset about these flashbacks. I thought I was going insane, like I’d watched too many crazy horror movies,” Maier said.
“I had severe issues at school because I started freaking out. Every time a guy came close to me, I started having these anxiety attacks. It really changed me from this happy, active teenager to being severely depressed, just not going out anymore. It was like a switch.”
She even tried to kill herself, but failed in what she now says was a cry for help rather than a wish to die.
When she eventually opened up to her parents about the flashbacks, her mother said that she’d actually told her about “the weird things the neighbour was doing” a decade earlier. But her parents hadn’t known what to do, so they did nothing except make sure she didn’t go next door anymore.
“When your mum tells you you’re not actually crazy and these things actually happened, I was like, ‘What?!’ I felt like I got stabbed in my heart.”
At age 15, she dropped out of school and started working in a bakery, but her struggles were far from over. First came self-harm, cutting herself with glass. “It sounds like a paradox, but somehow creating pain can numb you from pain.”
Then came anorexia, which she now says was a coping mechanism: seizing control of something in the face of something she couldn’t control - her past.
She eventually began throwing up so much that her kidneys started failing and she had to be hospitalised. After collapsing in a nightclub on New Year’s Eve in 1997, Maier went into rehab for several months.
When she came out, she was encouraged to live in a home associated with the rehab clinic where caregivers were assigned to each patient. For Maier, this was the turning point.
“My caregiver was a runner and a cyclist himself, and he basically got me back into running and cycling. He built me a mountain bike. I would say that was probably the beginning of my new life.”
She still remembers the first time they went running together, barely covering a single kilometre. “But I was so happy, just being out there, and having someone to get me out running again - so much joy.”
Maier had had a precocious appetite for sports when she was young - competitive athletics, gymnastics, football, basketball, volleyball. Being active again reignited something and by her mid-20s she was competing in triathlons and had done her first Ironman event.
“Sport just always made me feel so alive. I always biked the long way to work. One year, I biked 50km every day. And when you have a bad day, you can just go out for a run and you feel so much better.”
It also helped her realise that food wasn’t the enemy. “I know now that it’s actually my fuel, helping me with performing and recovering. It’s a weapon. I am what I eat.”
Maier gets on better with her parents now, she says, but when she was 27, she felt like she needed a fresh start. She looked at a map and found a little country at the edge of the world.
She didn’t know much about New Zealand, nor was her English particularly flash. But she had a contact, a friend’s sister, who welcomed her into the multisport community in Wānaka, which has been her home for the last 17 years.
Within two years of arriving, she’d competed in Ironman New Zealand in Taupō, winning the women’s 25-29 age group in 2009 with a time of just under 10 hours and 20 minutes. This qualified her for the world championship race in Hawaii, where she improved her time by seven minutes and placed third in her age group.
Today, Maier has competed around the world, winning events in Australia, Paraguay and China, where she met Hagener, a fellow multisport racer at the time. She and Hagener used to compete together in events such as the two-day Red Bull Defiance, which they won four times in the “mixed elite” category.
She has competed in GODZone several times, winning in 2019 - the first time it was won by a team with two women.
And in 2022 Maier was invited to join New Zealand team Avaya, which won the Adventure Racing World Championships in Paraguay - a 550km race. She said they slept maybe 60 to 90 minutes each day, though there was no sleep on the last night as the team just pushed through to the finish.
“I had a blast. It’s just so unknown because you go all day long - for five days. So many things can happen. It’s fascinating but it can also be scary - how will you handle the uncontrollable, the sleep deprivation?
“It teaches you a lot about yourself, how far you can push the limits. You can learn a lot, and apply it to whatever happens in your daily life.”
Maier is now trying to pass on the physical and mental resilience she has developed over her lifetime; her new business Level Up, with fellow adventure racer Emily Wilson, offers a host of courses on all the skills needed for adventure racing multisport.
She and Wilson were recently runners-up in reality TV show Tracked, but Maier is perhaps best known as the reigning Coast to Coast champion, having won the day-long race for three straight years - four of the last five competitions.
Is this year her swansong?
“I always say each year that this is going to be my last. I want to do a lot of things in life. But what keeps me going is that I feel like I’m still getting better. I want to keep exploring and see how far I can push.
“I feel like I’m still in the prime of my years.”
Whenever she eventually hangs up her Coast to Coast bib, she will always remain active.
“It’s good for your stress, your tension at work, even if it’s just a walk, something. It’s really good for your mental health, the fresh air, reconnecting with nature, a bit of sunshine. It has an amazing effect on your mood.
“The outdoors is a really great place. We get off our devices and connect with ourselves, what’s surrounding us. It’s actually joyful - pure bliss.”
Where to get help:
• Lifeline: Call 0800 543 354 or text 4357 (HELP) (available 24/7)
• Suicide Crisis Helpline: Call 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO) (available 24/7)
• Youth services: (06) 3555 906
• Youthline: Call 0800 376 633 or text 234
• What’s Up: Call 0800 942 8787 (11am to 11pm) or webchat (11am to 10.30pm)
• Depression helpline: Call 0800 111 757 or text 4202 (available 24/7)
• Helpline: Need to talk? Call or text 1737
If it is an emergency and you feel like you or someone else is at risk, call 111.
Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the press gallery and is a former deputy political editor.
A three-week inquest in Hamilton will investigate the Olympian's death in 2021 aged 24.