Sarah's uphill battle
At 40, Queenstowner Sarah Douglas is competing again at the New Zealand Mountain Running Championships at Cardrona today, but will need her feet to behave on the day.
Douglas has won four NZ titles, the first in 2014, and competed in five world champs, but has been battling a recurrence of Morton's neuroma — a condition in which the tissue around the nerves leading into the toes thickens — for the past year and a-half.
She first experienced it in 2014 and took almost a year off till she had a procedure which burnt the nerves.
She says "some days are OK, some days are really bad — it's both feet, but the left one is worse".
Douglas in fact hasn't competed since August when she completed a bucket-list event, the Sierra-Zinal Race, in Switzerland.
She's since pulled out of last October's mountain run nationals and December's Kepler Challenge.
Afterwards she reset her sights on Saturday's 11km uphill run — "I love the specific training for a set goal and I love competing".
"I did struggle for a few weeks trying to adjust back to having to deal with that pain on a daily basis, but you learn to live with it a little bit, and it's gotten easier the last few weeks."
She also underwent that same procedure on her feet again, but with less success.
"I'll just give it my best on the day," Douglas says of Saturday's race.
"You never know when you can do it again, so I might as well do it."
She created history last year by becoming the first three-time winner of Fiordland's Routeburn Classic run.
Meantime, a top under-20 prospect this Saturday will be Queenstown's James Weber, who this month became the first runner to win simultaneously the 800 metres, 1500m and 3000m at the South Island secondary schools athletics champs.
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