Josh Harre was running alone through a small American desert town when things got hairy.

“You’re getting chased by dogs and it literally gets to the point where the dogs are so loud that you cannot hear your footsteps,” Josh recalls. “You turn around – three of them chasing you. Then you’re on the ground yelling at these dogs and kicking at them to get them away from you.”

Moments before, Josh had called Grave Runners co-founder Connor Adams for help. But as Connor describes the SOS, “Josh called and I could hear all the dogs barking – and then the phone cut out.”

Connor and fellow Grave Runner Nick Phipps were in the support Jeep, which wasn’t quite where it was supposed to be. “We were a little bit late to follow on from Josh,” Nick explains. “So he was left running a K or two in probably the sketchiest segment where we should have been with him. We had taken a wrong turn, so we flipped a massive U-turn to chase after him. He’s kind of panicking, the dogs are barking – and then his phone goes dead.”

When the team finally located Josh, he had fallen on the gravelly surface, his phone had disconnected, and he was sheltering behind a car as the dogs continued to snap and snarl. But he took it all in his stride, Nick says. “Poor Josh, bless his soul, didn’t even flinch. After that, he just carried on and we drove next to him in silence for about a K. But it was pretty scary.”

It was just one of countless unpredictable moments during the Kiwi crew’s first attempt at The Speed Project, the infamous ultra-relay race from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.

Almost two months after our first article about Grave Runners, the scattered crew of six runners from Auckland, Melbourne and New York came together to make history as the first dedicated New Zealand team to complete TSP. They reached the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign (the official finish line) 51 hours and 30 minutes after setting out from Santa Monica Pier in the pre-dawn darkness of a Friday morning in late March.

4am Energy

The start line at Santa Monica Pier presented its own unique challenges. The team – six runners and five support crew had assembled in LA a couple of days prior after dealing with pre-race challenges that included a cancelled flight, a cancelled Jeep booking and being “catfished” on Airbnb with bogus accommodation. All of them were opportunities to build pre-race resilience, Connor wryly notes. Coming to early Friday, the team had gotten just a few hours of sleep after a chaotic day of preparation; Connor admits they were all “tired but wired” as they arrived well before the designated 4am start time.

Though they were perhaps a little frazzled, by this time they’d already received nationwide recognition back in New Zealand, after being featured on the evening news. “It was always really important for us to feel like we were bringing Aotearoa with us, so to get on the national news was huge,” Connor says. “With The Speed Project being an unofficial, elusive thing – and people in New Zealand not having seen a crew do it before – we got so many messages after that. It felt like an army of people were really invested and keen to see more. So that was dope.”

Josh, selected to run the first leg, was also knocked out by the energy at the start line. “No matter how many running events you’ve been to, you’ve never seen anything quite like that,” he says. “I’m someone that can get pretty excited and jacked up pretty easily. So honestly, I was standing at the start line with my eyes closed trying to calm myself down.”

Fortunately, before heading to the start line, the team had participated in some grounding breathwork led by Ursula, one of their support crew. “We all held hands and shared desires and what we thought would be a successful TSP for us as individuals,” Connor says. “That was really invaluable, because if we didn’t have somebody like Ursula, we may have just stayed in that chaotic frame of mind that we’d been in getting to the start line.”

And then Josh (SC Trainers on foot for the faster paved segments) and around 1,000 other runners headed from the pier towards the Hollywood Hills in the distance. As they set off, Lorna Denholm, normally based in New York but connected to the team’s Auckland roots, had a moment of clarity. “I remember just sitting there in the RV being like, ‘Okay, this is me for the next two days.’ This is the thing that I’ve been thinking about for months.”

Into the Desert

The crew entered the race with varying levels of fitness and injuries. The harsh New York winter had hampered Lorna’s ability to train consistently, with a lot of her speed sessions forced onto the treadmill. “There were weeks where the track was just way too icy and, even if you had the right gear, it’s not worth risking a broken ankle,” she says.

In Auckland, Samantha Nicole was recovering from illness just before the race: “I was pretty good up until two to three weeks before. And then the wheels kind of fell off and I got quite sick. Then, because I got sick, all my injuries started creeping up on me as well.”

Over the ditch in Melbourne with Connor and Nick, Annabelle Raimes was able to put her prior triathlon training to work when tendonitis flared up during her preparation. “I had a bit of a tweak when I was out on a trail run,” she says, “but because I come from a triathlon kind of background, my physio was like, ‘bike heaps, swim, keep your cardio fitness up.’

“When I’m told to do something, I go hard. I just wanted to get back to running as quick as possible. So I went really hard on my rehab – it paid off and I didn’t have any issues during the race.”

Connor and Nick both reported solid, injury-free training blocks – though juggling 100km weeks with a busy work life is never going to be easy. “I absolutely loved the Rebels during training in the lead up to TSP,” Connor says. “They resembled a barefoot style feel to me while still being supportive enough to go the distance. I enjoyed them so much that I got another pair for TSP!” At the top end of the team’s fitness spectrum, Josh completed a training intensive designed to simulate TSP conditions, running “4 by 4 by 48” – giving up solid sleep for a couple of days to run four miles (6.4km) every four hours for 48 hours.

For some of the team, the most challenging aspect of TSP wasn’t the running itself but everything that happened between segments. Despite extensive planning, the reality of coordinating six runners plus five support crew across 550 kilometres of desert brought inevitable complications.

“You get to the point where the running is the easy bit,” Josh reckons. “It’s all the bits in between that are the actual challenge. Where do people sleep? When do you eat?” He remembers an RV dilemma when one team member was trying to get some much-needed sleep but another exhausted runner badly needed to use the noisy massage gun.