"It was harder than recovering from a broken neck"
Tony Herring admitted to our club on 14 June that he has "quite a big ego" and he needs to feed it. The challenge of what failure to complete a 5km work place fun run might mean for his ego planted a seed 25 years ago that lead to big things. "Something got into my psyche and bloodstream..I was hooked". He told us he HAD to do a marathon. Fuelled by OCD and perseverence, Tony has now retired, having completed his 20th marathon - Antarctica. He has completed the Six World Marathon Majors, competed on seven continents, and pleaded that if anyone hears him say he's thinking of doing another one to please intervene.
Anne Hare reports
Tony Herring spoke about his marathon journey, having completed 20 marathons, with the final one being the Antarctica Marathon 2023. Tony is a Commercial Lawyer, who grew up in Rotorua and spent a year in New York as a student. He was a lawyer in Christchurch when the Corporate Challenge 5km event was being held and his 6-year-old daughter at the time said "Daddy doesn’t run"! Well, that gave the hulking no. 8 the inspiration, so he tried to run, got the gear, and trained up to run the 5k which he did. The next event he trained for was City to Surf 14k. He then preserved and did some 1/2 marathons Christchurch, Auckland, and Sydney. He had the running bug!
Tony picked up a book of marathons and used this to train for the 2005 Christchurch Marathon. It was a typical cold June morning, and he didn’t have enough warm gear but he did have $300 shoes which saw him reach the finish. He ran 3.28 in Queenstown and ran New York in 2009 - that was no. 10 marathon. Unfortunately, Tony was in an accident falling off a balcony and broke his neck. The recovery was long, but a friend called in to see him and encouraged him to have a goal – Ironman! Now that was crazy, but it gave him the continuing goal of running marathons. He got down to 68kg, had run the 6 world major marathons and had the medal to prove it. Tony got to 17 marathons and thought 'shall I retire?' but he wanted to now run a marathon on all seven continents (gosh there is always another goal). So, it was off to Rio and then South Africa for continents five and six, then the Antarctica marathon although very expensive and a long time to get there - he was on a mission.
Tony used the tried-and-true training plan from his book and in 2019 thought he was off to do Antarctica. Unfortunately, this was cancelled by Covid 2021 isolation rules which made it far too time consuming and of course time was ticking. Getting older makes it much harder to train for a marathon but using his trusty training programme, Tony did every run. A new role as President of the Auckland Law Society also made it harder due to commuting etc. But the story about getting to the 20th marathon was very entertaining. It included experiencing South American hospitality and seemed to include quite a bit of beer drinking (carbohydrates) at the world’s most southern pub. Despite this and the 8.5m swells on the 4-day boat trip, the delay to the marathon start due to bad weather, the race was underway. Tony found the course was hilly and he had been training on the flat, so he suffered severe cramping but kept going to finish in 5.45 - 46th out of 81 finishers. He also became one of 579 people that have run a marathon on all 7 continents. Tony highlighted that this was an epic trip but was harder than recovering from a broken neck. He claims to have retired from running because he doesn’t like it!