KEY POINTS:
When Robin Judkins spun out during a classic car race this week - "a near-death experience" - his life flashed before his eyes.
"Speights Coast to Coast 25th anniversary" is the only sponsorship sign Judkins carries on his 1972 Ford-powered Begg FM3 car, a famous Southland creation in the world of motor sports.
When a rival clipped Judkins at 200km/h on the Ruapuna back straight, those were the words that stared at him in his side mirror as one of his wheels tore off into the distance. How appropriate.
It is almost impossible to contemplate this country's pioneering long-distance multisport event - which celebrates its 25th birthday today and tomorrow - without thinking of the 57-year-old Judkins, the race inventor.
The event began as a comment by a fellow adventurer on a South Island outback excursion in 1980. From the moment Judkins heard his mate utter "coast-to-coast" he was transfixed with the idea of a race.
"We had another day and a half to finish but I couldn't stop thinking about designing the course," he says. "It seemed so obvious."
To save breath, you can describe the Coast to Coast as a race of one or two days from the Kumara to Sumner Beaches. Add in that this eastward haul involves running, kayaking and cycling 243km over terrain that includes a stab through the Southern Alps, and the pulse quickens.
Listen to Judkins excitedly skip back over 27 years of planning and organising the race, and it is easy to feel his pain and pleasure, because he is a man who gives just about everything away.
This is a madcap bundle of energy, no longer fuelled by alcohol or tempered by cigarettes. He put down the fags five months ago and put a cork in the bottle in 1978.
"Alcohol was the big bastard in my life," he says, while lamenting that the booze and the fags also brought good times. Of course, when you remove the drink, there is more time to think.
For a man who likely started off with an extra dose of adrenalin anyway, the sober possibilities are endless and very likely extreme.
There is more than a hint that an obsessive gene races around the Judkins frame and for the past quarter-century or more, it has latched on to the Coast to Coast race.
"It's got bigger, the race and the impact and sometimes the expectations are hard to live up to," he says.
Along the way, he has cajoled gasping, beaten competitors to keep going, to make the finish line, essentially because it will make it easier to experience the race again the following year. Twelve months is a long time to contemplate the ultimate pain of quitting.
There have been desperate rescues, both of people and of the race financially, battles with bureaucracy, and a mysterious illness.
He lost his marriage to Lorraine, who walked out nearly five years ago. And he has found new romance with a woman who values privacy and is to be known only as "V".
At every turn, it sounds like a wild ride.
Judkins has tried all of his own events. He completed the first Coast to Coast practice run in over 22 hours, borrowing a bike to do so (the best do it in less than 11 hours).
By his meticulous count, which has gone astray at the last minute, he has organised a total of either 79 or 89 events, including the once-only Cape Reinga to Bluff race in 1990 that was so tough, only a dozen or so entrants showed up.
Where did this all start? This son of a farmer who was schooled in and around Christchurch dabbled with university and teacher-training college then flirted with normal work before falling headlong into adventure.
He suited up for corporations around the world, including Chrysler, where he was the complaints officer for the African and Middle East regions.
The two banes of his life were cars, namely the Hillman Hunter and Hillman Avenger, "two of the most awful cars made by anybody".
The way Judkins describes it, the customers were always right, to the point that the company decided Judkins was wrong.
Moving on, he formed an adventure company and one thing led to another.
The Coast to Coast is now a national institution and its mad inventor accepts, almost happily, that others including sponsors and councils claim it as their own.
"I say no, no, it's mine, get your hands off it, it's mine," he screams, in a Monty Pythonesque voice.
What is his may not be what everyone else sees.
In an hour-long interview, Judkins never mentions Steve Gurney, the nine-times race winner, or any winners, for that matter.
"The only events I remember are the bad-weather ones," he says.
"I couldn't tell you who won in 1997, there are too many races, they just don't mean anything to me any more. But the bad-weather ones stand out like crazy."
Maybe this is because Judkins tries to keep his hands off on race days but must leap into action in the danger years.
His favourite memory, possibly, is of a two-day competitor who was impossibly late and then refused to shake Judkins' hand in the dark.
It turned out that he had fallen off his bike and broken a wrist on the old West Coast road, been rescued by a passer-by, taken to hospital, X-rayed, put in a cast and had then returned to finish the race. These are the people who get the lavish Judkins treatment at the prizegiving ceremony.
He also regales, with great joy, the time that he and the famed helicopter pilot Bill Black landed on a tree in a swollen river during a huge storm in 1992.
They were there to rescue a group of eight, including a woman who refused to get in the chopper.
Believing her to be helicopter-phobic, Judkins assured her that Mr Black was the best pilot in the world.
"She says 'the race rules state that if I get in your helicopter I'll be disqualified'."
The story ends with Judkins slapping the short-stature woman on the rear to ensure she makes a safe leap into the helicopter. Great laughter follows.
More weather. In a 2004 "horror show", 101 people were airlifted off the main divide by four helicopters in three hours.
But his favourite moments don't just include storm clouds. There was also the time when a film crew discovered that the timekeepers were missing. They just hadn't turned up, and Judkins gleefully remembers that he was caught yelling @#$% on film.
Judkins admits to his angry moments, and impatience. The public is generally safe, although the people who ring him on Christmas Day get an earful.
Bureaucracy is the first among enemies. Rules and regulations in a "nanny state" mean he needs 460 mainly unpaid race helpers, compared to 12 for the first event.
He can't stand what he sees as a state-inspired risk control obsession that has no sense of adventure.
Transit New Zealand regulations cost the race $60,000 compared to $5000 eight years ago.
"I have a way of dealing with people who deliberately obstruct me," he says. "I say to them 'your days are numbered. You will not be there in a few years ... you'll have to find some other form of employment'."
The cost of compliance pushed the race close to its third and final financial collapse in 2002, he claims.
But Judkins wants it to endure, with or without him, and is wondering how best to make that happen.
He is vulnerable. Since the late 1990s, stress-related attacks have caused eight or 10 collapses a year. He loses energy, suffers a dry mouth and "huge diarrhoea", although he never loses consciousness.
The best way to recover is to run madly on the spot.
Still, this is one of life's mad bastards, proud of it, and "if you get nailed you get nailed and so what?" Who wants to die wondering?
They say you can tell something about people by what they read. In Judkins' case, it might be what he writes and the titles.
There are two books, a 1970s work of poetry entitled Burning Days and his 1999 memoirs Mad Dogs - A Life on the Edge.
Then there are four (unfilmed) scripts, based on people he has known.
They go like this, and get ready: Daylight Robbery, The Patrol, Party Man and Sex, Drugs and Rock'n Roll.
His current novel is, hold tight, The Butcher, The Sniper, The Journalist.
Okay, so who is the craziest character he has ever met? Answer: the predator controller for his Blue Duck recovery programme, Sam McLeod, an exterminator of possums, ferrets, rats and weasels.
McLeod starred in Judkins' first alpine ironman event, when he chopped his skis in half and put them in his pack so as to complete the downhill run faster.
Such inventiveness and defiance of convention is a sitter for a reverent recall by Judkins.
Not only this. McLeod borrowed the skis from his brother on the morning of the race.
"He is wonderful, outraaaaaaageously crazy. I'm considering writing a book just about Sam," says Judkins.
Some accolade. Getting the gong for outrageousness from Robin Judkins is an automatic pass into the Crazy Hall of Fame.
Coast to coast - By the numbers
* 17,500 entries over 25 years
* Dollar prize pool: $240,000
* 8 serious injuries(they all came back)
* 12 The number of officials in 1983
* 460 Race day helpers (and there's a waiting list)
* 3 full-time office staff
* 800 - this year's likely number of competitors
* Youngest racer: 16
* The oldest: 73
Couple go for the double
Two-time winner Richard Ussher, of Nelson, is favoured to win the men's title this year while his partner, Elina Maki-Rautila, will be pushing hard to improve on her second placing in the women's race 12 months ago.
Ussher, 30, believes he is in better shape this year than for either of his previous wins.
Rated the world's best adventure racer, Ussher knows that winning the anniversary race would be a memorable achievement.
"I've had a much better build-up this time. Last year I had no break after the adventure racing season and I was rundown and got sick."
Canadian nutritionist Emily Miazga had the recipe right last year to become the first overseas competitor to win the women's race, 12 minutes ahead of Maki-Rautila.
Miazga has improved considerably in the kayak in training and other events, and unless her challengers are well clear before Mt White Bridge, it could be two in a row for the Canadian.
