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Our Side of the Clouds

This essay was published in Entropy Magazine in 2021. Entropy ceased publication in 2022, so it is republished here.

My aunt and my mother finally stopped speaking to each other on an early-autumn morning in March ten years ago when my aunt met my parents off a six a.m. flight from Los Angeles, thrust ten thousand of my grandmother’s dollars into my mother’s hand and told her they were never welcome in her home again. Expecting to receive a phone call from within the warmth of the house in the Titigrangi hills, instead I opened an email from my mother, reading it in confused silence on my phone in the dark of a late-winter London morning. She explained the encounter that left them alone in the arrivals hall of Auckland International Airport after a decade abroad. My aunt hadn’t specified what they’d done to be excommunicated, but ever-practical, Mum got down to logistics.

… so right now we have a rental car, and are staying in a motel called Lincoln Court Motel, unit 7. 

We’ve found an internet cafe just along the road which is where we are right now. 

Apart from that, the journey from LA to Auckland was good. We were even treated to a glass of champagne by one of the crew as he was so happy for us to be arriving back in NZ. 

Possibly talk to you later on.

Love, Mum

Fifty metres down the little lane in which I’d made my home when I moved to the UK, London’s Smithfield Market was in full flight at dawn, butchers stained red from starched lapels to white wellies; stout shouts and slammed van doors providing the melody of the morning. But the ringing in my ears invoked the confused, silent terror of good news gone horribly wrong, confusion, happy endings shattered. This was not in the script.

I’d long harboured fantasies of what coming home would look like for all of us. My parents and I had been immigrants and emigrants for almost half my life. The journey to New Zealand is a lengthy one from almost everywhere on earth, more than enough time to let fatigue and pinot noir stir sentimentality into a furor. I had imagined my parents buckled in for the final descent, homeward bound after almost a decade in the hot yellow and green alien worlds of Florida and the Caribbean. In my mind, the sea and smattering of light clouds would appear from the soft morning gloom an hour before landing. Grease from sweaty foreheads and condensation from noses would cloud the window as they pressed their faces against the plastic, eyes playing tricks as low clouds morphed into dawn coastline. Bays and hills reveal themselves in the soft light until the shock of Auckland urban sprawl begins, then the inland water, and the plane sweeps over the Manukau Harbour with the airport on its abrupt eastern peninsula. I wasn’t promised this. I made it up.

I looked up the Lincoln Court Motel. One star. Every website. Grim as fuck. No stars, if the review site allowed. Photos taken under a mottled March sky. Cracked porcelain, broken furniture, dirty bathrooms, as if a stained and sagging mattress could metastasise into an entire business. A couple of suitcases and two black passports. No phones. No car. No internet. No family. Ten thousand dollars. A glass of champagne from the air crew on account of returning home. Nau mai. Welcome.

We do this. If you aren’t from New Zealand, you don’t know how this works. We demand homecomings; we demand good news. We revel in a failure. And then we punish all three, desperate to see and beat the world, and then woefully uneasy with the results. And maybe that, as opposed to only musings about compassion and strength, is the ironic side of how New Zealand faced 2020 with conviction and earned an odd place with its head above the parapet: an international “tall poppy.” A country known for exalting and then cutting down its home-grown tall poppies, insatiably keen to see its sons and daughters at the top of international stages, New Zealand is equally keen to take a swipe before the landing gear has descended above Manukau Harbour and the wings have turned into the bracing westerly hurling salt water into our faces from the Tasman Sea. They’ll clip your wings, when you get home, a line from a New Zealand novel, a book that shaped me more than I’ll probably ever know. We crave recognition more than any other nation I know of. We love to travel. We deify sportspeople to an unhealthy degree, grabbing hungrily at the shoelaces of our runners and rugby players, idolising musicians and actors, praying that someone peers over the equator and scans the vast emptiness of the South Pacific and says, I saw that, I see you. And when they come home, win lose or draw, we clip their wings.

I want to go home.

It was the winter of 1999, ten years before my parents’ fraught repatriation, and several of my friends were heavily invested in a project to ingratiate themselves to the filmmakers whose principal photography was about to begin on a series of fantasy movies in and around the city of Wellington. I had never read a fantasy novel in my life and my knowledge of films in the genre began and ended with Labyrinth. One friend in particular, two years older than me and on the hunt for something to do after high school, was particularly keen. It was, he said, going to be big. Put us on the map. So much more than rugby or yachting or bungee jumping: these films were going to change everything. I neither fervently believed nor disbelieved him, the film industry so far out of my area of interest that I both took his word for it and forgot about the conversation immediately. I was only reminded of him again while sitting in the drive-thru queue at the Jack In The Box burger restaurant in Spokane, Washington four years later when the girl handling my BNZ credit card asked, ‘Where’s New Zealand at?’ and her colleague replied, ‘Isn’t that like where they did Lord Of The Rings?’

Prior to this, many years and many international trips had gone by where I’d met people completely unaware of New Zealand’s existence. My time abroad had been exclusively for competitive swimming (I was in my late-twenties before I ever went on a trip overseas that wasn’t to work or compete) and more than once, I met people who hadn’t heard of us, or if they had, had no idea where the country was. Even into the late-nineties and early part of the twenty-first century, we simply did not register for a lot of people. We had never done anything noteworthy enough.

We started with films.

“The lady PM dreams of jabbing everyone by force and perma-prison for those who refuse?” It’s 2020, and it pops into a conversation with an industry friend about immigration and homesickness like so much wadded, stale bubblegum. “Nice place, no wonder people leave.”

“Seems a bit authoritarian down there. Aren’t they all still in lockdown?” Another friend, all information gleaned from YouTube, months after my parents had started going back to their, and my, favourite restaurant every Thursday night.

“New Zealand now has a fascist government under @jacindaardern. Are you going to act, @amnesty?” Former Deputy Chair of UKIP, Suzanne Evans, October 2020.

“While President Trump was labeled a “fascist” for suggesting the election should be delayed due to coronavirus, New Zealand’s Prime Minister just did exactly that with barely a whimper of dissent.” American political commentator, Paul Joseph Watson, August 2020. Ardern’s party won the election by a historic landslide two months later.

“New Zealand is a disaster in the making.” American journalist, Jordan Schachtel, August 2020

“New Zealand I would just get fed up and isolated, it’s not the utopia people make it out to be.” A former friend, whose knowledge of my country appeared minimal enough to be nonexistent when we were close.

“The places they were using to hold up now they’re having a big surge… Big surge in New Zealand, you know it’s terrible.” American President, Donald Trump, August 2020, as New Zealand recorded twenty-two new cases of the novel coronavirus in two days, to the United States’ 80,756 over the same two day period.

“Jacinda Ardern is a fascist. Change my mind.” – The chorus according to Twitter, 2020.

They say life comes at you fast, but for us it was a slower burn. I am locked in my home in England, unable to turn a screen to my face without seeing opinions about my country. Twenty-one years is a long time. I harked back to the drive-thru queue, Red Bull and curly fries marinating between the scratchy synthetic seats. Where’s New Zealand at?  From the starting position of barely existing, it was abruptly clear that our time as a backwater, an afterthought, a dot of irrelevance at the bottom of the world was over. 

Both the nation and its leader had gained global attention one year earlier when a terrorist opened fire in two Christchurch mosques: Ardern received immediate respect for her compassion towards survivors, victims’ families and the community, as well as notoriety for her government’s subsequent ban on semi-automatic firearms. But a year later, the country was faced with the same problem as every other nation, and rather than having the world watch on while one country dealt with an isolated incident, New Zealand’s response to a crisis was compared to everyone else’s. We started with films, and then there was wine, and there were singers and earthquakes and tourism and actually winning the Rugby World Cup for once, and TV shows that everyone quotes at you (“Murray, preesint”), and a fatal volcanic eruption just weeks before New Year’s Eve, 2019. And then there was COVID.

This is not to say that New Zealand has not made political waves before. In the late-1980s, the country outlawed nuclear powered ships and weapons, effectively making the nation and its waters a nuclear-free zone. This was a wildly popular policy with the New Zealand public, who had protested visits by United States vessels in the past and who were incensed by the 1985 French state-sponsored bombing of a Greenpeace boat in the Port of Auckland whose activism included protesting French nuclear testing in the South Pacific. Our anti-nukes stance went down poorly with much larger, nuclear-powered nations, but as it took place about fifteen years before the widespread availability of the internet, we were not beset with the barrage of relentless opinion about our decisions. And further, we weren’t subjected to opinions held by people who didn’t know us and who assumed we hold the same values and exhibit the same cultures as they do.

March 2020, ten years after my parents arrived home to find themselves excommunicated from my aunt and her immediate family, and New Zealand’s borders slammed shut to all but returning citizens and permanent residents. Still in the UK, my husband and I slammed our own front door too, briefly considering a run for Heathrow with our son but deciding to lock down instead. During those terrible early days, I watched in horror as Ardern announced the measures New Zealand would take to control and, hopefully, eradicate the virus within its borders. Horror, not because I disagreed with her decisions. Horror, because I knew those were the only correct decisions a leader could make. Horror, because on the twelfth of March, I watched the UK’s prime minister and top advisors give roughly the opposite press conference. They were pledging, amongst not much else, to do nothing.

The UK continued to dither as case numbers and deaths rose. New Zealand went into full lockdown long before they reached population-comparable standards of chaos: the entire country came to a standstill for a month from the end of March. After two and a half months, the country reported no active cases of COVID-19 and lifted all restrictions but for its closed border. Subsequent minor “outbreaks” were met with two short periods of heightened restrictions in the Auckland area, and an extensive test and trace programme to bring them to a quick halt. My parents worked from home, then went back to work, went back to their favourite restaurants and pubs and even took part in a week-long court hearing in central Auckland. They complained about the traffic and got coffee downstairs and even received a hug from opposing counsel. Meanwhile, in England in October, I was on the same tank of petrol I’d bought in February.

‘You must be very proud,’ my neighbour Kevin said to me, standing on top of his roof. There was nothing to do. No school, no work. A carpenter, Kevin had taken to DIY around the house on account of projects drying up and supplies being too hard to find. We had bought a football goal and anchored it under the blossoming cherry tree. My five year old son had learned too many swear words already in the first horrible weeks of lockdown. We played a lot of football, showing off to Kevin as the only spectator.

‘That Ardern, she’s just amazing,’ he continued, as I prayed my son wouldn’t repeat whatever it was I’d last said in front of a Boris Johnson presser. ‘I wish we had her here.’

And I was, so very very proud, and very relieved that my seventy year old parents, whose health had taken a hit in the pay-as-you-ail system of the United States, were back home in a nation that was looking out for them in more ways than one. That same week in April, the FT published an article whose title I will never forget, “Arise Saint Jacinda, A Leader For Our Troubled Times”: a piece whose honesty about both her great leadership in times of crisis and the 2017 election promises her government were yet to fulfil managed both balance and exaltation. But with exaltation comes so much more: expectation, envy, skepticism, intense scrutiny. I was proud as punch, telling Kevin that I couldn’t wait to vote for her in the general election later in the year.

Kevin didn’t ask, that afternoon with him on his roof and us running laps of our garden, but it was the question on everyone else’s fingertips: will you guys go back? And while we’d made our peace with no, we won’t–not yet–another stressor was looming, both online and between family members. As citizens, around one million of us abroad were still permitted to enter the country on the condition that we isolated for two weeks, first on our own reconnaissance and later in hotels managed by the government. But a growing, vocal sentiment was making itself known: We don’t want you to come back. “You are not welcome in this house.” Do not come home.

It pops into my timeline because of how many of the people I follow have liked it.

“Dear returning Kiwis. IF you haven’t bothered getting yr lazy butts back to NZ by now. Don’t bother coming home. If you’ve come home – we’ve run out of tissues to keep wiping your arses with.”

A small but very passionate minority let us know how they felt. Close the borders. You had your chance. You abandoned us, thought you were too good, thought this, thought that. They presupposed everything about why we left and why we continued to live abroad, seeing only a monolith of the othered: one million unique people, lumped together as out-of-luck traitors. They also seemed to assume that throwing together a bag of essentials and making a run for the airport was within everyone’s means, and that flights were not being cancelled and re-cancelled endlessly for those who did, or that many of us have mixed-citizenship families who require extra time and clearance to enter New Zealand at present. If you have never made a big geographical move, let alone an international one, maybe you don’t fully grasp what a herculean task it can be, even for those with relatively little belongings or responsibilities. When I left the United States for London in my mid-twenties, I did so with only two suitcases, no family, no pets and no kids, and it still took me a month with no pandemic to hold me back. Be kind had done the social media rounds mere months before these sentiments hit. My brain couldn’t piece together the first steps of moving us, right then, like this. We remained, but we still saw all those messages; digital renderings of my aunt pirouetting out of the arrivals hall.

A lot of the arguments about why New Zealanders shouldn’t be allowed back centred around the cost of government managed isolation and whether this cost should be covered by the government or charged to the returnee. And for the economic argument, I felt guilt and understanding. I had spent eighteen of my thirty-six years outside of New Zealand. I left when I was offered a full athletic scholarship in the United States, finding employment and eventually marriage and a family in the years afterwards. It was life, and it happened. I did not want to ever rip my country off. We would be able to afford a fee if one were charged for our quarantine. But I also found unease with the notion that a price could be put on the benefits of citizenship, namely for those people who can’t afford it or have no safe alternative than to go home. And while I believe the solution the government came to is largely fair (returnees pay three thousand dollars for their quarantine if they left New Zealand after the pandemic began, i.e. “You knew”), it was clear by this point that some would prefer we were not allowed to return at all.

I was reassured by friends that these views were indeed a minority, but I couldn’t help but think of my parents emerging from the wide gates of International Arrivals and facing sudden, unexpected hostility. And like my aunt who refused to articulate exactly what we had done to earn her wrath, it was clear that money was not the only factor in the hostility facing returning New Zealanders. For many, it was simply the safest and most tangible to express on Facebook. We were being punished for a transgression much older than COVID, much older than Ardern’s government, much older than Ardern and I alike. We were being punished for having left in the first place.

Some New Zealanders’ fraught relationships with their compatriots don’t end with unease at international success. The unease extends to prolonged international travel itself, regardless of what you did with your time or if you did it well. An air of resentment has long been leveled at those who’ve made lives abroad. There is also a strong denial that this phenomenon exists. But it’s a very understandable feeling, even when it’s being pointed at you. In short, it is likely that New Zealand spent so many years tolerating the first girl on the registers at Jack In The Box–where’s New Zealand at?–that resentment and indignation warped some people’s perspectives on citizens who’ve chosen to go abroad, as if we also thought that the country was irrelevant. It is the need to say, hey, don’t belittle me like that.

I had experienced that insulted indignation myself, on account of my American college boyfriend and now ex-husband of a decade, who pestered me several times during our marriage about “making sure to get my American citizenship.” He incorrectly believed that I would have to give up my New Zealand citizenship to do so. He also firmly believed that being American was “worth” a lot more than being a New Zealander and had no particular interest in visiting, harbouring the “backwater afterthought” sentiment to which Kiwis are very sensitive. We knew we had value before the films and the wine and the ads and the progressive young female leaders. We knew we had cultural uniqueness and that we shouldn’t be consistently left off world maps, assumed to be on the hunt for other citizenships to replace our own, or equated with nothing more than colonial suffering and sheep. And so when COVID hit and New Zealand’s swift, self-assured and effective response left it as one of the most functional societies on earth, some of us decided to take the collision of that ingrained frustration and sudden success out on each other.

… it’s not the utopia people make it out to be…

Being forced into an international spotlight is rarely an experience free from contradiction and confusion. I stood in my kitchen and looked at those words, tweeted by a former friend who had briefly joined the New Zealand-bashing bandwagon. And I thought to myself, how can you be cross with that statement when it’s true? The picture of a progressive, trouble-free paradise was far from complete, no matter how deep my love for it ran and how desperately proud I continued to be with its efforts and successes, and how proud I had always been to be a New Zealander. People impressed with New Zealand’s response idealised the nation’s population and its leaders with blind praise. Sainthood was bestowed on the PM by a leading London newspaper. The picture of my country painted for me by well-meaning friends in the US and UK was one of beauty, care, courage, understanding and universal good-will. And while I knew a lot of that existed, I also knew the perspective lacked nuance. 

It knew nothing of the damp, leaky houses that plague the country. It knew nothing of the ongoing child poverty. It knew nothing of racism. It knew nothing of classism, domestic violence, inequality. If it did know about any of those things, it didn’t know what forms they take in a unique environment that isn’t a little Britain or a little United States, or even a little Australia. People idealising New Zealand didn’t know that I’d recently blocked two cousins on Facebook for meanly implying that I shouldn’t be allowed to come home and that I was selfish and greedy for wanting to come back. And the people decrying New Zealand didn’t either. For those of us who sat through so many conversations with people who didn’t know we existed some twenty years earlier, it grated. Everyone’s an expert now. It’s not the utopia people make it out to be.

Of course it isn’t. But it showed excellence. The former afterthought showed strength and forethought. Just as it had turned away nukes in the eighties and semi-automatic weapons in 2019, it made a series of difficult decisions and it made those decisions to save the lives of its people, not for the sake of adulation, domestic or international. The government received plenty of criticism at home for some of its measures, but they largely prevailed in achieving and maintaining their goals: eradicate COVID-19 in New Zealand, or keep a very tight control of it when it was found to have snuck in. There was no point in reductive musing on whether or not New Zealand is a utopia because such things don’t exist. It is complex, unique, flawed, brilliant.

I realised I was insulted and defensive when I read foreign critiques, not because I thought the country was perfect, but because they were simplistic and uninformed, and often from people who’d never spared us a thought before. The country itself was now a tall poppy, and social media had done what it always does, giving people a limited space to air their complex emotions, jealousies, insecurities and fears. Disaster in the making, fascist, isolated: at least they knew where we were now (highlighted by how many were keen to downplay New Zealand’s success as being due to its isolation, rather than geographic position being just one important tool at the government’s disposal). But their opinions displayed little more complexity than the second teller at Jack In The Box, correctly identifying the filming location of Lord Of The Rings.

When you come into land at Auckland on an international flight, it’s usually early morning. From their home in West Auckland, half a mile from the Lincoln Court Motel, my parents can hear the jets at five, six, seven o’clock. In the height of the pandemic’s first wave, there were very few, the silence in the sky mirroring that on the ground. On account of the border restrictions, the only passengers were Kiwis or their families, and when she heard them early in the morning, my mother told me how much she liked the low roar of a 777 coming into land. You’re back. Welcome home.

The last time I flew into Auckland was my mother’s birthday in late 2019. While we didn’t know what was about to befall the world, we’re always aware of the vast distance we have to travel to get there, and how even if it’s “only two flights”, they are some of the longest flights anyone can take. Despite it being summertime and just after dawn, fog and low cloud hid the bays and city alike until we were right over the harbour. I understand simplistic emotion; in those moments there is nothing but excitement and gratitude. There’s no complexity or shades of grey. Long before COVID, I imagined being on that plane over and over again. If there is a contradiction between someone finding that their choices have led to a life abroad, and an insatiable desire to come home, I don’t mind owning it. There was never a government or a population or a family or a person free of contradiction, hypocrisy, confusion, fear. There are no saints. There are no utopias.

They’ll just leave again. If you take us back, the wanderlust may sink but it will forever simmer like the cauldrons at the heart of our mountains. Our last great contradiction is how many of us keep that eye on the sky no matter how often we’ve wished we were home. They’ll come for their holiday until COVID is over and then they’ll be gone. But would I, if it were me? And if they do, whoever they are, does it matter? As frozen fog sinks around my house in England the day after American Thanksgiving, a house I have barely left since February, I know as much about how I’ll emerge from my personal tussle with being a Kiwi abroad as I do about anyone else’s. If only it were easier to admit how many things you don’t know, even about yourself. That simplicity, the black-and-white thinking, the monolith: I stopped replying to it, stopped sharing posts and tweets that refuted it. I tried to stop being angry at those wide-handed swipes of generalisation, so readily slapped across our uncertain faces. I have tried to become more comfortable with uncertainty and contradiction. I have tried to understand that when the script calls for fog that reaches the ground, at some point the sun will shine on the other side of the arrival gates.

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Courtenay Place, Two Sections Please

This story placed third in the Tandem Press short story competition for young New Zealanders in 2001, written when I was 17 years old. The accompanying anthology was published later that year. It was one of my first pieces of flash fiction and my first published story.

When Olivia’s parents separated, her mother went to live on Mount Victoria. Her father Liam got the better half of the bargain: house in Wadestown, swanky Merc, nice collection of children.

Olivia’s life was conducted in a kilometer radius from her home on Grosvenor Terrace to Wellington Girls’ College and back again. Some nights she went to Island Bay where Tom lived, the boyfriend at the time. A skateboarder, all her friends disliked him.

Her father was often stressed. His job involved much driving out of town to the Hutt Valley and up the Kapati Coast. She saw little of him after beginning Year 13. A lot of the time she was alone at night, watching the Interactive Shopping Network on television.

Liam started bringing home women, too. Olivia didn’t know how old they were, but he was forty-five and they weren’t. She guessed the youngest to be in their mid-twenties. The one who lasted the longest was Emma, thirty and a bank clerk.

‘You don’t talk much, do you Olivia?’ Emma said one morning, out of the blue, standing in the doorway of the kitchen. Olivia spun around, caught unawares as she stared out at the road below and the people in their suits and trainers walking to work.

‘Huh?’

Emma strolled in, wiping her hands on her silk dressing-gown. Olivia wasn’t sure about the way Emma walked around in her pyjamas. It reeked of the fact she and Liam were sleeping together, that it wasn’t his wife in his bed anymore.

‘I notice that you never talk. Why, Olivia? Is there something wrong?’

Emma’s hair was sleep-tousled. It was dyed a dark red although Olivia could tell it had been blonde before Emma had taken to it with her rubber gloves and supermarket Nice ‘n Easy. She stared at the cherry-topped, silken princess.

‘Of course there’s nothing wrong,’ she said. Emma pulled out a mahogany chair and sat down. She was eyeing the half-full French press but Olivia wasn’t about to take the hint.

‘Your father was wondering if you wanted to talk to me about your plans for next year?’

Next year Olivia would turn eighteen. She was smart enough to know what was being asked. When was she moving out?

‘Because,’ Emma continued, ‘Liam and I are thinking of selling this place and moving to an apartment in town.’

Her hands were clasped in front of her. Olivia’s eyes wandered to the window and gazed out over the water. The prison on the other side of the harbour was grinning at her.

‘You needn’t worry about me, Emma,’ she said. ‘You won’t see me again.’

School beckoned downtown. She didn’t go. She boarded a bus at Grosvenor Terrace and rode to her mother’s house. Courtaney Place, two sections, and she had left home. It was quite funny, really. She had always hated public transport.

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Pretty Girls In Places Like This | Flash Fiction

This story was longlisted in the London Independent Short Story Prize in December, 2019. My interview with LISP talks about the story’s theme and writing in general.

By the time I was standing on stage at the Congress Centre in Bloomsbury, plastic clicker in hand and a mic tucked behind my left ear, my sense of being othered was keen enough. He stood up in the middle of the full crowd. His hands rested on the back of the chair in front of him, inhabited by a woman whom I found myself watching as he spoke. She leant forward as if the embarrassment of touching a stranger in a crowd was on her, not him.

He was gesturing, almost shouting. You’re fundamentally wrong, he bellowed. I’ve been in this industry for twenty-three years and it’s never been done like that. You can’t waltz in and say, I’m the expert!

He stood back. I noticed a flex from the woman as she checked: is it okay to move? She eased back cautiously. He was still standing, waiting for his answer.

I think, I said, that we’ll have to agree to disagree.

Chuffed but indignant: could you be both at once? He puffled.

Whatever, Melissa, he said.

It sounded like a cop-out but I had spent thirty-five minutes delivering a presentation with the opposite opinion to his, an opinion based on my ten (not twenty-three, woe is me) years’ experience. Pray: pray to the ceiling-mounted stage lights, pray to the softly brushed floorboards, pray to the MC, pray that nobody else asks a question. The man sat down and folded his arms. A quick turn of the head to nod at his neighbours. Showed her.

His review of my talk, emailed to me by the organiser two weeks later, called me shrill. Another reviewer noted that I was hot.

How can you tell me you’re lonely? I’ll show you something to make you change your mind.

We need more female speakers, they’d kept saying. Females, they’d said. They’d copped some shit on Twitter last time because there weren’t any, they’d said. They hadn’t put it like that. How few could they get away with? As a first go-around they’d settled on one.

Afterwards, we were shepherded to a pub, far too small for the five-hundred attendees. The soles of my Mary Jane heels made sick cracking sounds, sticking to the lager-soaked floor.

What’s a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this? the next bloke asked, jovially overbearing, and for a moment I became the woman in the seat, leaning in embarrassment away from an awkwardness that I didn’t create and that would sound fake when I retold it later. He grabbed my chair. He used the ‘pretty girl in a place like this’ line. Five-hundred people, and here were two of them, making their mark.

I did the talk about attribution modelling.

At least he blanched. I’m sorry, of course. Of course! Here are my thoughts. Have you ever considered that fact that you know nothing?

I took my beer with me on the bus home. A bitter, a free token, like it knew and it understood.

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Win Some

You loser. You: loser.

And me.

Last summer, the English football team did well in the World Cup in Russia and a lot of people in this country were elated and surprised in equal parts. It was a lot of fun, even as someone who was raised on a steady diet of All Blacks rugby: the weather was hot, the theme song was catchy and England was winning. And then this advertisement surfaced, shared repeatedly on social media

I already knew about the documented rise in domestic violence incidents on days England played football; the research from Lancaster University was widely-reported in 2013. Even a win resulted in increased violence: a 26% rise was found after a win or a draw, and a 38% increase after a loss. The photo above, however, probably did more to drive home the severity of the situation: a St. George’s Cross scrawled on a woman’s face from her own bloody nose was a sobering antidote to the 32C afternoons and gleeful hollering at a laptop showing the games from the cool of a paddling pool. Not all of us are having a good time.

I had been interested in the topics of winning, losing and sportsmanship as a concept for a while before this. In 2017, I took a course through the University of Oxford about ethics, and I wrote my final paper on cheating in amateur athletics and which ethical theories are best suited to countering the phenomenon. Covering both drug abuse and physical cheating (i.e. cutting the course of a race or having a faster athlete compete in your place), the project took me to sad places. Some of the saddest involved people who had been caught cheating on a rather grand scale, only to discover how far they’d strayed not only from honest participation, but from happiness and true self-satisfaction altogether.

The initial motivations people have for cheating differ but those who come clean often display bafflement that they allowed themselves to descend into outright deceit. Analysing and documenting distance running cheats since May 2015, Derek Murphy of marathoninvestigation.com (a venture that has raised ethical questions of its own) published an anonymised interview with a woman he discovered to have cheated in multiple marathons by having her faster husband run with her bib and timing chip. Her reasons for cheating were characterised by a search for external validation: according to the interviewee, she stopped competing under her own name because of a negative comment from a contact on social media regarding a slow race result.

Other people double down. A lot of people. Murphy’s site alone is rife with stories of people who’ve become obsessive and threatening upon being exposed. Some of them seem to have cheated for roughly the same reason as the anonymous interviewee (social media recognition; impressing friends and family; Instagram likes) but others cheat in attempts to qualify for future events, often the Boston Marathon and other prestigious races like Ironman competitions.

Not to mention the growing problem of drug cheating in amateur sport, which was heavily covered in recent years both by the BBC and the documentary Icarus, which started as the story of an amateur cyclist doping himself and morphed into something completely different.

Between the fans who can’t deal with losing such that they beat their family members and the competitors who can’t stand a bad race result and resort to cheating, we have a fundamental problem with how people view winning and losing in sport. The violent eruptions and cheating is on one side. On the other–possibly a misguided effort to control this as well as to protect people’s feelings–we have the desire to eliminate winning and losing as concepts altogether.

It’s pretty well documented that the “everyone gets to win; there are no winners and losers” model is extremely unhelpful, but it exists in sharp contrast to the even more toxic mindset a lot of people bring to sport, sometimes as competitors, often as parents and most commonly as fans, that “losing” is reason for violence, bitterness and terrible behaviour. Both of these constitute bad sportsmanship and in the context of why sport “matters”, learning and applying good sportsmanship is surely one of the only important reasons.

Good sportsmanship is sometimes really difficult. It hurts to lose, or to feel that you have performed badly. It’s frustrating as a fan with no control to watch something you cared about go wrong. But being a good sportsperson shouldn’t necessarily be easy, and we’re failing at it both when we declare that everyone gets a trophy regardless, and when we are so dissatisfied with a loss that we act out in the worst ways. The toxic attitude to competitiveness is uniform when it pops up. It doesn’t differ in its basal nature to hitting your girlfriend because England lost or trashing IKEA because they won.

Put losing into perspective: I’m a fairly decent amateur runner for a 35 year old woman. I have a 19 minute 5k, a 40 minute 10k and an unofficial 1:38 half marathon. I have only won one running race in my life, ever, and I’m unlikely to win many more unless I deliberately avoid events where women much faster than me are likely to enter.

As a child and into my early twenties, I was a swimmer and after a decade of 30 hour training weeks, I was good enough to win some decent races, once or twice. I won three national titles before I left New Zealand for an NCAA scholarship (200 breaststroke in September 2001 and April 2002, 100 breaststroke in April 2002). In contrast, the races I’ve swum where I didn’t touch first are countless, dating from my first Auckland Champs aged 10, where I came last. This record of not winning is to be expected in sport. Anyone who consistently wins at every level is a household name (Michael Phelps, Katie Ledecky… and even they have been and will be beaten, albeit irregularly). Team sports differ from individual ones in that there are often only two “competitors” in a match, and it could be argued that your chances of winning are higher than in a running race with hundreds or thousands of other athletes. All the same, endless winning streaks simply don’t exist. Ask any All Blacks fan.

When it comes to attitudes towards participating in sport, your choices are not between “win at all costs and trash everything in the process” and “everyone gets a trophy”. There is a world of difference between being disappointed because you didn’t win, and believing that “it’s only the taking part that counts”. Being able to maturely cope both disappointment and success, either from the field of play or the sideline, intrinsically acknowledges that results matter. That concept alone underpins one of the primary reasons why sport matters at all, and the domestic violence stats cast a bright light on how badly we fail at it. So does the cheating. We seem to be caught in a binary trap between pretending none of this matters to us at all, and melting down the moment we suffer even the more minor defeat.

It’s a concept I want to look into further, but last summer was also a positive time. English football showed all of us, including its regular supporters and once-every-four-years opportunists like me, what being good winners and good losers looks like. The thing I liked the most about watching the 2018 football World Cup was Gareth Southgate’s reaction to both beating Colombia and losing to Croatia: he hugged the player who missed the Colombian penalty, and he and his team applauded and Croatians and the crowd after their loss. I want to be more like that as a runner, I can think of times I wish I had been more like that as a swimmer and I hope to be like that as a spectator.

Via the Guardian

Losing is necessary. In sport, everyone does far more of it than winning. This doesn’t mean that losing should be erased as a concept and that you should only expect mediocrity from yourself or your favourite teams, but we need to be much better at handling it when things don’t go our way.

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Women as Entertainment in the SEO Industry

First published 21 December, 2011

“You, guy,” he said to my boyfriend across the table. “It’s not fair. You bring this girl here. It’s not fair.” We asked why not. “Because all women who come to conferences should be available,” he replied. Available to him. Throughout the evening, whenever he got the chance, he repeated that it “wasn’t fair” and that a woman like me shouldn’t be at a tech event if the opportunity did not exist for him to have some of me. He made it clear that he was finding it hard to control himself, and if a breakdown in his self-control happened, that would be unacceptable, but only because I had a boyfriend. This happened in London in late 2010.

Five days later, a woman at a tech conference in Atlanta publicly accused a male delegate of sexual assault. And you think, is it any goddamn wonder?

What would have happened had I actually been single, or if he had found opportunity to be alone with me? And would that too have been my fault for not coming along with a partner? If you show up alone and he tries to hurt you? All women who come to conferences should be available.

I began writing this blog post the day after the event took place, but was talked out of its importance by my own conditioning. Nothing happened to me. So it’s okay that he said that and that he travels the world (he is not British; he flew here for the conference) treating female conference attendees in that way? I find it hard to believe that I was the only person he’d ever spoken to like that. I talked myself out of it because I was scared.

At my second Pubcon, in December 2007, I learned that another attendee had said he was going to “hook up with me.” The people he said it to told him that was unlikely, as they didn’t believe I was single. The guy’s response was that he didn’t care, it was going to happen anyway, and I was going to like it. This one is closer to home. If you’re reading this because you know me through SEO, you know of this person. These are some of our own.

On both nights, I made sure not to let myself be alone with either of these people. Was it paranoid to believe there was a certain degree of risk from the unwanted attention? From the stories other women tell about their experiences at conferences, I don’t believe it was.

These are just two examples.

There is also the man who announced in front of seven or eight fellow conference attendees that he found it strange I claimed to be very happy having lived in London for two years, since there was no ring on my finger. Me being female, he said, made it hard for him to believe that I could be truly happy without being engaged or married. The people he said this in front of had paid hundreds of dollars in ticket fees, accommodation and travel to hear both him and me speak at a conference, and there he was – reducing me to a ring-hungry twit in front of them.

He apologised to me over email, saying he was only trying to find out if I were single. Which, clearly, he felt was appropriate conference banter as well. I never replied.

From many other conferences I’ve attended over the past five years, I have similar–albeit sometimes less eyebrow-raising–stories or being treated inappropriately, in one way or another, because I’m female. Many of us do.

It’s not as if people are silent about it, and it’s not as though it’s uncommon. When I worked at SEOmoz, my female colleague and I received the odd email from people who saw it fit to approach us inappropriately based upon our being women. And I can’t shake the frustration that there is nothing I can do about it.

What can I do about it?

I can decline to be featured in stupid posts about “the sexiest women in social media”, because it belittles my talent to have to tie it to what I look like, and belittles people further who aren’t deemed suitable for such acknowledgement, solely based on their appearance. When I declined to be in that post, the post’s writer clearly had no idea why I’d feel the way I do about it. In fact, he found it “hilarious”:

An apology for such a list is that “success is sexy” and acknowledgement is benign. But the author won’t feature people he or she considers physically unattractive, and someone shouldn’t be given press above her peers in a profession unrelated to appearance because of her face or her body.

To the small percentage of the population–and of our industry–who are not decent people, seeing ten women given press because of their looks helps to confirm that our presence at a conference is for others’ entertainment. To the man at Conversion Camp in London who told me over and over again that my presence wasn’t fair, because I was not available for him, my only worth was physical.

And I’ve been on the other side too, which is where I think this becomes less of a two-dimensional whine about sexism and more of an argument.

This is why public judgement and objectification reaches so far down my throat and twists my guts so hard. I’ve been on both ends of this shit. I’ve listened to how much men in our industry love going to conferences that used strippers as marketing tools and attendee bait, and I have compared my figure and desirability to those of the women in question.

Not that they ever would after this, but if I were asked to speak at an event like that, I’d turn it down. I’ve turned down a couple of events in the past for similar reasons. You think there are too few women at tech events, or you hear from organisers that they asked women to speak, but that they were turned down? Have you considered the environment you create? Is it exclusionary and primarily for the benefit of straight men? Have you managed to find one or two women who find it acceptable, and do you then hold those women’s testimony up as sterling proof that you aren’t doing anything wrong?  Do you use the excuse that “it happens everywhere – look at the automotive industry!” as a reason why you shouldn’t be held accountable in your own back yard?

We keep reading about how the women used as bait make the conference so much better. It comes up over and over again. Regular girls are not plentiful enough, nor good enough company. When this post was originally published, it went up on the same day as another tacky video with Playboy girls front and centre. But the rest of us still receive our fair share of unwanted sexualised attention. Huh? Interestingly, this video has since been removed from the organiser’s website.

It sickens me that I even allow myself to do that! Do I not have high enough self-esteem to be proud of a body that put up with me through twelve years of competitive swimming, an activity that paid for a university degree and saw me represent my country and become its national champion and record holder? Am I not proud of a personality that is what it is after some difficult battles, accomplishments, agonies and victories from which I’ve emerged the adult I am?

Of course, I am. However, mine or other women’s prides aside, facts about our bodies or our faces or their comparison to any other woman’s have no place in our work or our industry. This stands, no matter whether I am judged as having lived up to an ideal, or not having achieved someone’s ideal of physical attractiveness.

And yet I read these posts and I associate with these people whether I want to or not, so the primal doubt climbs back up my spine and taps on the back of my neck. Which am I? Good enough a female specimen to be harassed and fawned over at conferences, emailed sexual requests and asked to flaunt myself in posts on the basis of my looks, or are my female industry peers and I so dowdy that a conference is seen as significantly more desirable if boobier, taller, curvier women are shipped in?

And a good solution is not for women to post images of whatever their sexual ideals might be either. It is not to jokingly suggest that we stage our own event with male strippers as our dancers and butlers. The answer is not for girls to waltz around Pubcon smacking boys’ bums in a pathetic attempt to reverse our lot. The solution is to stop engaging in abhorrent behaviour, whether at conferences, over email or elsewhere.

Harassment and assault happens to women in our industry at large, at our industry’s events and as a result of connections made through our industry.

It’s very simple. You’re smart enough people and good enough marketers and–I hope–good enough human beings to knock it off. Stop accepting sexualised female entertainment at professional events, and stop jointly insinuating that women like me are not good enough for you, but that you have the right to treat us as entertainment to which you are entitled nonetheless.

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Running Into Obsession: The Church of Arthur Lydiard

In the haze that rises off Manukau Harbour, the hills stretching beyond West Auckland are known for little but their leafy suburbs and relative inaccessibility from the city by public transport. After homes at the end of Titirangi’s evergreen crescents give way to bush, Auckland’s city limits are thought to come to an end, but once the sharp, clean asphalt has surrendered to trails, there begins a trek through the ranges that has become synonymous with a coming-of-age of runners. A handful of people began pounding out this route through Auckland’s volcanic hills in the 1950s because a burgeoning coach called Arthur Lydiard told them to.

People like Arthur shouldn’t usually be trusted. Normally, you’d be advised to steer clear of someone as zealous as this man, a young man in the late 1950s, who had some brilliant ideas that were completely at odds to the common practices in New Zealand athletics training. In the 1950s, Arthur’s idea that runners should complete one-hundred miles per week of endurance running for ten weeks before embarking on speed work was unproven and virtually untested but the sharp-tongued, gruff Lydiard managed to convince a small number of people that he was right. Not often are someone’s initial guinea pigs the most successful athletes in a nation’s history.

Short, wiry, seemingly ever-weathered and grumpy if he didn’t think infinite justice was being served to the creed of running, Arthur’s utterance of “hello” felt like a lecture. The sparkling blue eyes at the top of a prominent Roman nose were visible from quite a distance and you always knew when you were being watched. Chances were, if he was watching you he was on your side. Arthur Lydiard did not waste his time on people who did not want to spend their time doing what he told them. He did not ask questions and he did not make suggestions: he told people things, instructed people as to what was fact and what was crap. You, he’d say, can be a champion. No reasons, unless you probed him. No explication. You can.


From the Arataki Visitors Centre, Waitakere, New Zealand, May 2008

There’s a period of certainty right before you embark on something like Arthur’s athletic regime. It is Sunday night and in front of you are ten weeks of training, mapped out for you by a man who claims he can take you to the Rome Olympics and have you win. You could have been down the track Monday morning, running eight-hundreds and practicing victory salutes but this coach who you’ve entrusted your career to is instructing you to hit the streets instead, pounding around the city of Auckland in the morning and again in the afternoon.

And on Tuesday, too, he says: just run. There is the certainty. It can’t be that hard to just run.

Six days later it isn’t hard anymore, it’s goddamned torture and you’ve yet to complete a tenth of an Arthur Lydiard training programme. This man, an unknown in the field of coaching, competed in the marathon at the 1950 British Empire Games for New Zealand but now he is telling you to leave the streets of Waitakere City, run through Titirangi and lose yourself in the bush behind civilisation, so far away from the Auckland Domain where your counterparts and milling around, waiting for their next time trial. And you don’t give up, return to town and find a coach who knows what a stopwatch is for?

View from the training ground: modern day Auckland City from deep in the Waitakere Ranges

As you disappear into the clouds onto some of the region’s most unforgiving hills and trails, hot and sticky in the summer, cold and sticky in the winter, the safety of the infield at a track, a passing motorist or a nearby payphone becomes as distant as the pavement. Aside from any training partners, people who have also been suckered into this deal and promised outstanding success, you are completely alone. Arthur Lydiard does not care if you crawl back into his house in the suburb of Mount Albert after you have completed your Sunday run around the Waitakere Ranges. He has promised you that in ten weeks’ time, you will be fit enough to run all the way to Italy. Sunday’s weekly journey around the Waitakeres was at once famous and infamous: hated and admired by those who laboured through it every seven days. In the ten years between Arthur’s participation in the 1950 Empire Games and the Rome Olympics of 1960, the people who ran that course would include future Olympic Champions.

Arthur Lydiard was born in 1917, and he died on a December afternoon in 2004 after going running in the morning. His critics will tell you that it was his training that killed him: all that distance can’t be good for the heart, after all. Sometimes it seems that people were waiting a good forty years for him to kick the bucket just so they could blame his ideas on physiology. A man who avidly practiced what he preached, Arthur’s idea was for athletes to ultimately achieve supreme fitness by running extreme distances. If being supremely fit means that one dies at the age of eighty-seven, then maybe that’s just the price you have to pay.

Long periods of aerobic running (that is, running at a pace that can be sustained without a person going into oxygen debt and having to stop) aren’t all that much fun. Neither are long periods of aerobic swimming, kayaking, or cycling and to top off the fun, an “aerobic” pace is by no means “slow”. There is an intensity involved in completing an Arthur Lydiard-style programme that will wear a person’s body down to their last shreds of fat, sometimes producing athletes who look like they would be better off in hospital, or at least at Burger King, than out running.

All that messing around in the bush behind Auckland definitely prepared one athlete rather well for his Olympic event. Barry Magee competed in the marathon at Rome, a race whose passage up the Appian Way took runners over ancient rocks, in the dark, with the flashbulbs of photographers going off in their faces.

Magee first came to believe that Lydiard was onto something decent when he was eighteen, eight years before Rome, and “all the boys in Arthur’s stable were improving faster than anybody in the country.” Magee saw himself and others progress quickly from day one. Up and down New Zealand, Arthur’s name was gaining infamy but true to human nature’s stubborn form, nobody outside of his small circle was listening.

“In (my) first year, there was one Auckland coach who was emphatic that Lydiard’s training would kill me and others. He said this to my face so I know it’s true,” says Barry Magee. This is a notion that is hinted at often by the non-believers, the critics and the doubters, of which there are plenty. You will end up in a wheelchair. You will be plagued by heart problems. No human body can stand that kind of work. You will lose your speed and never get it back. To the last assertion, Arthur’s response was always, where exactly would said speed go?

“I did not have many others tell me directly that his training would not be successful as the results we produced soon squashed the critics, but I did hear of the murmurings around New Zealand that Lydiard’s training would put us on the scrap heap and we would all burn out by the volume,” Magee continues. “Most of it came simply through professional jealousy. We all either ignored it or said, “watch our backs!” or something similar, as we demolished the rest of New Zealand.”

Both of the warnings Magee heard never bore fruit as many of Arthur’s first athletes are still alive or lived long lives, and many had very long, successful careers, not “burning out” at all. But despite this, through the fifties, the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties, followers of Lydiard’s programme have been threatened with death, illness and other equally unlikely side effects. Exploring why it is that people just won’t convert to Arthur’s way is an extensive exercise in itself.

The reason his programme, with its emphasis on aerobic activity, is relatively unpopular seems to stem from three sources. Firstly, it’s boring. Oh hell, it’s boring. It’s endless and relentless and the moment an athlete finishes a workout, she knows that she has little time before she’ll be up and running again. No day of the week was spared for rest.

“If you have a day off every week, that’s fifty-two days a year,” Arthur barked on many an occasion. “That’s a month and a half. How are you going to beat someone who’s trained for a month and a half more than you have?”

The second reason is that it isn’t rocket science. Somehow Arthur’s plan seems too simple to be true. You run a long way. Then you spend some time back at the athletic track, running fast. Then you win races.

Across all sports, many coaches and athletes can’t handle the idea that it’s this easy and this hard at the same time. They want to find a scientific formula that will make the process seem more complicated and will cut out the gruelling work. Tables and charts and monitors and tests, wires attached to every limb and tubes shoved in every orifice makes athletes feel like a mathematician and a doctor will feed their statistics into a computer and print out a ticket to success, where the backside of West Auckland will only be seen on a flight to the World Champs.

Thirdly, results are slow to be seen during the hard, hard training. Out in the bush behind Auckland, athletes can time how long it takes them to get back to town, aching and miserable, but imagine the disappointment and demoralisation when Week Four’s run took ten minutes longer than Week Two’s! Arthur will have explained that sometimes your body will be slower than before and that the training is still working, but shit. How do you look him in the eye and tell him you still believe?

And be prepared: if you don’t believe, you won’t be required to pretend for very long. Famously, Arthur never took back a runner who had left him for another coach and subsequently changed their mind. The most striking example of this was Nyla Carroll who held the New Zealand record for the half-marathon at 1 hour, 10 minutes and 53 seconds from 1996 until 2011. After leaving Arthur’s coaching regime for that of former New Zealand running great Dick Quax, Arthur virtually ceased to care whether or not Carroll existed, cutting her dead and refusing to take her back when she changed her mind about Quax.

“There were no shades of grey with Arthur,” says New Zealand swim coach David Wright, who also coached runners during the seventies and eighties, using Lydiard principles. “He was your very best friend and would die for you, or you didn’t exist. Your dedication and your faith determined how you were treated.”

Wright was also responsible for much of the work that went into converting Lydiard training from running to swimming, spending almost ten years perfecting a regime in the pool. He has published three books on the subject, Swim to the Top, Swimming: Training Program and Shaping Successful Junior Swimmers. As orthodox as they come in terms of Arthur’s believers, Wright made sure to adhere to the doctrines initially set forth in the 1960s.

“The job I had was to use what I knew about swimming to adapt his principles for the pool, but not to change them one bit. To change them would be virtually sacrilegious.”

Sacrilege. Unorthodox. Believers. Passionate people use words like these. They hint at an element of obsession. One could wonder why Arthur Lydiard cared so much about what he did. A man who died on tour in Texas coaching Houston’s offering of athletes, something drove him to distraction about both his principles and those who believed in them. Renowned teacher, writer and runner Roger Robinson thinks that Arthur’s fixation with athletics stemmed from a few places. First and foremost, his obsession was personal.

“(His programme) wasn’t just a scheme,” Robinson says from his home in New York City. “It was not just a teacher teaching chemistry; he was teaching something that he had invented. It was highly personal.”

Robinson, who lived in New Zealand for many years, knew Arthur well. Amongst Robinson’s achievements in sport was a victory in the Master’s section of the New York Marathon. He sees Arthur’s personality as being highly fueled by personal interaction, and he had respect only for people who showed him their worth through actions, rather than words.

“I wrote to him after the death of his (second) wife, Eira,” Robinson continues. He is talking about how he and Arthur first became friends. He had met Arthur and Eira at a function only six months before she died of cancer. “I told him that I felt bad for him. Arthur never forgot that. The personal contact. From then onwards, we were friends.”

And why shouldn’t a man like Arthur take things personally? He’d fought a personal battle to gain what he had. Having never attended university, in the days before earning Olympic success his work as a coach was supplemented with employment in a shoe factory and as a milkman. Part of his motivation seemed to be the desire for people to be like him: willing to work really, really hard. After a day’s work in the factory or delivering milk, Arthur would come home, drink some tea, and go for a run. Why the hell couldn’t everyone be that dedicated?

“What frustrated him the most was when people didn’t work,” Robinson says. “He realised that hard work had made him successful. He felt betrayed when people expressed an interest and then didn’t work. Why am I wasting my time?”

This sentiment is echoed by Magee in a tribute he wrote about Arthur on runningtimes.com. Six other tributes appear on the site, written by some of athletics’ more influential people. Magee recounts the first time he met Arthur. His coach Gil Edwards had decided that Magee was too talented for Edwards but that Arthur could do Magee justice.

“Son, are you prepared to run 100 miles per week? If not, just tell me, because you would be wasting your time and mine,” Arthur said. Having “stuttered out the word yes,” Magee found himself in Arthur’s care for another twelve years.

The refusal to be shortchanged by anyone, whether it be by someone’s criticism (which he took extremely badly) or by their lack of dedication, could often come across as qualities bordering on stubbornness and an opinionated vanity. However, those who knew him recognised that what was really present was, in Roger Robinson’s words, a complete conviction in himself. He was a “compulsive teacher” whose passion in life was helping others. Incidentally, he used the word “coach”very rarely. He referred to himself as a “teacher” and claimed to have “helped” people with their athletic careers.

“I helped the Finnish national team,” Arthur would say, referring to his time in Finland as a national coach. He’d say the same thing about being in Mexico and when referring to various other places he’d visited and runners he’d known. From his words, you’d have thought he’d just sent these teams and people a few letters, watched them run a couple of miles and gone home. In some ways, his programme was all about him – he invented it, he fought for it and he believed in it fervently. On the other hand, once his own running career was over, it was not about him in the slightest. When I was in his home, it was all about me.

Arthur Lydiard and me, Beachlands, Auckland, January 1999

People of my age and even those slightly older won’t recognise how pioneering Arthur’s attitude towards women athletes was. Women and men who grew up in the eighties and nineties have spent their entire lives understanding the notion of gender equality in sports. Of course to a certain extent, hangovers from the days when women were not considered fit to partake in heavy exercise still exist; however, in the time when Arthur was developing his initial programme the idea of anyone, let alone a woman, exercising as tirelessly as Arthur proposed was truly revolutionary. Arthur was an avid feminist in his refusal to entertain the thought that women couldn’t take part in his training.

Someone who should know about sexism in sport is Kathrine Switzer. She was, after all, the first woman to officially enter and run the Boston Marathon. Her 1967 entry of “K.V. Switzer” was assumed to be male. Switzer survived race co-director Jock Semple’s attempt to forcibly remove her from the event by leaping from a press bus and grabbing her. With her coach and boyfriend, Switzer finished the race in around four hours and twenty minutes, even though her time was never officially recorded and her participation not made official either.

Her experience in Boston and in future races gave her the determination to work for equality in sport. Seven years after her first Boston Marathon, Switzer completed the same race in two hours, fifty-one minutes, smashing the three hour “barrier” and running the race officially, as women had been welcomed to the event in 1972. Her efforts in Boston and worldwide are remarkable. She is married to Roger Robinson and talks about Arthur Lydiard with huge admiration.

“He believed in women’s ability to succeed when most people didn’t. He thought there was no difference. It was just a matter of making them believe,” Switzer says. But his belief in women, she thinks, also stemmed from a more personal source.

“Another motivation was his sex appeal. He was a sexy guy. Charismatic. Vain. He loved women’s attention, but didn’t like silly women. There were sunbeams bouncing off him! He was quick and critical and witty. Because of his personal belief in his success, he radiated a kind of aura. Arthur really knew that he was charismatic and he loved the attention that this brought him. He was motivated by his own charisma.”

Robinson and Switzer also point out Arthur’s egalitarian qualities when it came to runners. Not only did he take people to international glory, he also made people get out of bed after heart attacks and do some exercise. His knowledge of the human body and its physiology led him to believe that exercising after an illness is often the best way to a speedy recovery. Now, Nike does a roaring trade and “joggers” are prolific worldwide. Also laying claim to the coinage of the term “jogging,” Arthur wrote the first book on the subject, Run For Your Life. The single person who sparked this trend that now has everybody from high school students to pensioners pattering around the sidewalks, a half hour in Italy in 1960 is most certainly not the defining moment of Arthur Lydiard’s life.

Before I met Arthur personally, I knew him more commonly as God. This nickname was given to him by my mother, Alison, who was a middle distance runner in New Zealand and trained under a regime that mirrored Lydiard’s in many ways. She recognised his deity-like presence: the authoritarian air he carried with him, which often alienated those who did not know him.

My swimming career was what brought my mother into direct contact with Arthur as he was very much my mentor, but she remembers the first time he spoke to her well. It was 1977 and she had just won the New Zealand 1500 meter championship on the track. Her experience is telling of Arthur’s legend.

“I was walking along behind the grandstand and he was walking in the other direction and he said ‘hello’ to me. I was blown away because I didn’t think he knew me and he was Arthur Lydiard!”

She was rightly impressed. Arthur did not acknowledge people unless he thought them to have a touch of class, an obvious work-ethic and drive.

Alison Wright, Windsor Great Park, 1978

“I just thought (he had) done a fantastic job of changing athletics throughout the world. Although he didn’t coach me, it were his principles that were followed with any minor modifications that Arch made along the way,” Alison says, when asked what she thought about Arthur. Her coach, Arch Jelley, was also responsible for the career of John Walker, who won gold for New Zealand in the 1500m at the Montréal Olympics. Alison held the New Zealand national record over 1,000m from 1979 until 2014.

Arch is now in his nineties. He certainly employed some of the same principles as Arthur and enjoyed some similar successes, however Arch’s view of Lydiard training appears to be more cautious than some of Lydiard’s most devoted disciples, such as David Wright.

“While I believe in Arthur’s main training principles, I do not subscribe to the idea that there is only one way to achieve sporting excellence in any given field,” Jelley says. The former principle of Sunnybrae Normal School on Auckland’s North Shore holds the belief that the ways he and Arthur coached have extensive room for improvement.

“The coaches and physiologists in the more advanced sporting nations have taken Arthur’s ideas on board but have then grafted on their own ideas and philosophy to produce athletes whose achievements are far superior to those of Peter Snell and John Walker. I believe that training programmes should be regarded in a developmental way. That is to say, the ideal programme for any individual athlete has never been devised, but as greater scientific knowledge becomes available, training programmes change to take advantage of this new knowledge. Thus there will always be different approaches to what is the best way to train an athlete to reach his potential. Another way to say this is, ‘Many roads lead to Rome.’”

Until she met him and saw the way he cared about athletes who operated under his system, my mother assumed that this iconoclast, who inspired a religion of his own, was as cantankerous as his mannerisms would have you believe. What people who never encountered Arthur personally usually do not know about him is that he was an extraordinarily caring man who, as Wright said, would and did go out of his way for anyone who he felt merited his attention. He was blind to age, past achievement and talent when it came to those whom he cared about, and he would put as much thought and effort into a thirteen year old as a thirty year old.

When Arthur died, many people whose names never appeared on world or national rankings, and many who never competed in a single race, could relate to the internationally accomplished athletes whom Arthur helped. He’d made such an immense impact on all of us who’d believed in him and followed his lead. There are tales from New Zealand to Finland of his dedication. In London, England, my experience is one among many.

The man who watched Peter Snell and Murray Halberg run from Mount Albert to Olympic gold also drove for four hours in 2001 at the age of eighty-three to watch me and my one teammate compete in the New Zealand Winter Swimming Championships. As he sat on the Rotorua Aquatic Centre’s temporary bleachers, the pundits of New Zealand swimming eyed him with caution. They knew that they were in the presence of an icon whose reputation and worth they’d helped refute over a period of years. They’d told me and my coach, David Wright, many times that the doctors and the mathematicians could do more for me than some argumentative old bugger from the sixties. Arthur watched me win the two-hundred metres breaststroke and then he drove back to Auckland. You can be a champion, he’d once said to me. And, thank God, I’d bought it.

*   *   *

Never officially retiring, Arthur’s last home was in Beachlands, a settlement southeast of Auckland. Despite its close proximity to the new, gaudy Formosa Country Club, Beachlands is no Palm Beach County. Its charm comes from the streets without sidewalks, properties that end in the ocean and complete lack of influence from the city to the north. Arthur had hundreds of people come to his home over the course of his coaching career: he seemed to view it as a common courtesy to invite people to eat or stay with him at any time.

Sitting in the log-cabin style house with coaches and athletes and instructing them in his stern choppy manner of his opinion on their careers, his speeches on training, fitness and dedication would be interspersed with constant offers of coffee, tea, biscuits, glasses of water, or anything else a guest to his home might want.

“Jane,” he would almost snap at me, midway through a lecture. “Jane. Have a banana. Have a glass of orange juice. In the fridge. Or maybe the cupboard. Jane. Have a glass of juice.”

And he would never be satisfied until a guest had accepted the offer of hospitality. Contrary to many coaching beliefs, his kitchen was full of candy and treats, although he would insist an athlete put honey in her coffee instead of regular sugar and I still do. He had honey specially shipped to him from the South Island. It was, he believed, the best honey in the country. Even regarding details as small as the quality of honey, Arthur passionately believed what he was saying and so you did too. In Barry Magee’s words, “when Arthur Lydiard told me I could win a race, I knew I could.”

The first time this affected me personally was in the way Arthur approached me when I was thirteen and needed to swim a freestyle race in Auckland. I had spent the weekend swimming the breaststroke races at the Auckland Age Group Championships but on the last day of competition, the breaststroke events having been completed, I had been entered in the one-hundred metres freestyle. In the morning preliminaries, I had qualified for the final in second place. The girl who had qualified first had swum two seconds faster than I had. My family and I were staying at Arthur’s Beachlands house, forty-five minutes east of the swimming pool. Arthur decided half way through the afternoon that he would come and see me swim in the evening. We had been in the car for two minutes, driving west, when Arthur turned to me in the back seat.

“Do you think you can win tonight?” he asked. I was hesitant. Of course, with Arthur Lydiard coming to see me I would have to look slick, but the girl ahead of me was two seconds faster, a virtual eternity in sprint events.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I can swim faster than I did this morning.”

Arthur turned back to the front seat and rummaged around in his carrier bag. When he turned back to me again, he was holding a Rocky Road candy bar, full of marshmallows and milk chocolate.

“Eat this,” he said. “And you’ll win the race.”

Of course, I did.

There are so many sources, so many stories and far too much information to soundly bring together a coherent summation of a man who never forgot, never gave up and always cared so very deeply for many people. Towards the end of his life, during surgery to replace his knees, Arthur was beset with a stroke and heart attack but fought through his illness with his wife Joelyne to embark on more projects, such as a U.S. tour in 2004 from which he did not return.

But that was his nature, and if faced with a choice, there is no doubt which scenario Arthur would have picked as his last: sitting at home, inactive and old, or on the road, teaching, helping and encouraging the twenty-first century’s athletes. Someone who had to run twelve miles a day in Rome just to get to and from the athletic track where his runners were training isn’t the kind of dude who would want the rest of us to sit around and mull over how much we miss him or how we wish he were still here to tell us what to do.

He was alive for eighty-seven years and he did not put up with fools. The majority of his life was spent imparting his knowledge, and those who were paying attention know what he said. Lip-service is sacrilegious, because he had no time for pretty words and inaction. Believing in Arthur Lydiard is a religion not just of faith, but of works. And he sure proved that work, it does.