An eight-year climb that began with a walk in gumboots on a Southland hill farm has earned Liz Gill a place at Ironman New Zealand and turned her family paddocks into one of the most generous community events in the deep south.
Gill, 45, farms 365 hectares of beef country in the Lora Gorge in central Southland, about 50 kilometres north of Invercargill, with her husband Greg and their four children. The land looks out from Bluff Hill across to Stewart Island and around to the Takitimu Mountains. It is a long way from a start line, and for years Gill was in no state to think about one.
As she told RNZ, five years of broken sleep raising four young children and rearing 250 calves had worn her down. On the brink of her forties she was overweight, had recently given up smoking and, by her own account, running on empty. So she pulled on her gumboots and went walking on the farm hills. The gumboots eventually gave way to running shoes, the walks became walk-runs, and the walk-runs became something she could not have pictured at the start.
This year Gill won the 2027 Tony Jackson Scholarship, which will take her to the country’s toughest one-day endurance race in March. Ironman New Zealand, held in Taupo, asks competitors to swim 3.8 kilometres, cycle 180 kilometres and then run a full marathon of 42 kilometres, a total of 226 kilometres in a single day. For a farmer who once struggled to walk the hills behind her house, it is a striking turnaround.
“It’s going to hurt, but we’ve got an awesome committee who help,” Gill told RNZ.
The scholarship she has won honours Tony Jackson, a member of the Ironman New Zealand hall of fame who finished the race 28 times and lived by the idea that nothing is impossible to a willing mind. Awarded each year, it helps a first-time competitor reach the Taupo start line. Gill has said she was shocked to be chosen.
What lifts Gill’s story beyond a personal comeback is what she has built for the people around her. She and Greg turned their farm into the Gorge Adventure Race, an event that now draws people from across the region to the hills above the Lora Gorge each year. The course ranges from a three-hour trek to an eight-hour slog of mountain biking and tramping, broken up by the sort of mystery challenges that make farm events memorable, including a fire hose waterslide. It has become a fixture on the local calendar and a reason for townsfolk and farmers to spend a day out on the land together.
The race is not run for profit. Over its four years it has raised close to $80,000 for the community, according to the reporting on Gill’s story, with the money going back into local sports and community groups. Proceeds from next year’s event are earmarked for the local school and for buying defibrillators for the wider district, the kind of equipment that can be the difference between life and death in a rural area where an ambulance may be a long drive away.
Greg Gill farms alongside Liz and is the volunteer fire chief in the nearby township of Browns, so the family already carries a fair share of the load in a part of the country where community services often lean on the people who live there. Putting defibrillators into the district fits that pattern. In small Southland settlements, the nearest lifesaving gear is frequently whatever the locals have clubbed together to buy and maintain, and a well-placed defibrillator can buy precious minutes for someone in cardiac arrest before help arrives.
Through organising the race, Gill found her way into the Southland Triathlon and Multisport Club, where she is now the event coordinator. It is a neat closing of the loop for someone who started out simply trying to move a bit more. The woman who once walked her paddocks in gumboots to clear her head now helps run the events that get other people off the couch and onto the trails, roads and lakes of the deep south.
Her Ironman debut in March will be the biggest test yet. The distances are unforgiving, and Taupo’s course has broken plenty of fitter and younger athletes than a busy farming mother of four. But Gill’s story has never really been about the finish line. It is about the slow, unglamorous work of pulling on a pair of gumboots on a cold Southland morning and going for a walk, then doing it again the next day, and the day after that, until the hills that once felt like too much became the training ground for something few would have dared to attempt.
It is also a reminder of how much rural New Zealand still runs on the goodwill of people like the Gills, who take on the extra jobs, put on the events and quietly raise the money that keeps small communities ticking over. A scholarship to Taupo is a fine reward for eight years of graft. The defibrillators her farm race will pay for may end up mattering even more.
Do you know someone whose quiet effort keeps your community going, or have you made a health turnaround of your own? Tell us your story in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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