This weekend, The Spectacle brings road, trail, ultra and elite races and relays to our central city in a spectacular festival of running. The dozen events range from a 1-mile to a 100-mile course and is for world-class athletes, amateur joggers, walkers and children. My ambition is for this inaugural event to be so successful that it becomes an annual event for our city.
I witnessed how much fun a city could have with running events when I participated in the New York City Marathon last year. It celebrated incredible athletic achievement and amateurs like me just wanting to finish. My greatest surprise was the community involvement, festival spirit and the life it gave this massive city. The Spectacle has the same potential for Nelson.
We are a natural home for a national running festival. We have the climate, scenery, and back-country trails. We are recognised by Sport NZ as New Zealand’s most active region. “The Spectacle” provides a great end-of-year finale to the many successful running events such as the Nelson Half, Active4Good 5k Series and the parkrun, which has just started at Neale Park.
We have a rich heritage of Olympian runners with Harold Nelson (1948), Rod Dixon (1972, 1976), Toni Hodgkinson (1996, 2000), Julian Matthews (2016) and Paralympian Liam Malone (2016). We also have an extraordinary depth of talent in our athletics clubs highlighted by Lifetime Contribution to Sport awards presented to Derek Shaw, Dave Dawber and Stuart Hague last Friday night at the Sport Tasman awards.
The vision for this new event has come from Michael Cochrane, Julian Matthews and Annika Pfitzinger. They are passionate about running, community and Nelson – and are giving their all for this event.
The festival is centred around the top block of Trafalgar Street and the Church Steps. The ultra, 100-mile trail starts on Friday but the road racing gets underway at 4.30pm on Saturday with the Elite Mile at 8.10pm and The Black Seeds band playing from 9pm.
I encourage Nelsonians to join The Spectacle as runners, joggers, walkers or spectators. Help us re-energise our city and celebrate being active.
