After this week, Queenstown mountain runner Sarah Douglas will be among those rare Kiwis who can say she has competed in five world champs.
The 38-year-old last week arrived in Innsbruck, Austria, for the World Mountain and Trail Running Championships, selected to represent New Zealand after winning the NZ women’s mountain running title for the fourth time at Mount Maunganui in March.
In the past fortnight she’s been training at altitude in the Dolomites in northern Italy with her Kiwi coach, six-time world mountain running
champ Jonathan Wyatt, who lives there in a village of 1700 people.
‘‘It has been a great training base with incredible trails on my doorstep,’’ she says.
Her first race in Innsbruck, tomorrow, is the 7km Vertical Uphill, which has 1050m of vertical climbs and starts in the town itself before there’s a steep narrow climb of almost 500m in 1.7km.
‘‘I think that’s where I’ve got the best chance of performing better,’’ Douglas says.
Then, on Saturday, she’ll compete in the Mountain Classic over about 14km which features 780m of uphill and downhill on a two-loop course.
These world champs come just seven months after she competed in her last worlds, in Thailand — her other worlds have been in Bulgaria (2016), Andorra (’18) and Argentina ( ’19).
Once again, Douglas is aiming for a top-30 placing.
‘‘I haven’t cracked the top-30 yet, so I’d be real stoked with that.’’
Her training for Innsbruck was truncated somewhat after she sprained her right ankle over Easter.
However, that had corrected itself just before she headed off to Italy, for which she thanks, in particular, her physio Laura Wallis.
