Run the Planet Start in the Australian Outback

News Release - Chris Ord/Adventure Types / 15.02.2012

Two Antipodeans are about to embark on an endurance run challenge that will see the pair retrace the footsteps of an Indigenous stockman who, in 1922, ran 252km through harsh desert country to save the life of a dying missionary.

On 25 February, 2012 Victorian Chris Ord – a novice to ultra running – will join experienced ultra runner, New Zealander Lisa Tamati, to run the 126km leg from Hermannsburg to Alice Springs through Australia’s scorching Red Centre, battling temperatures of up to 40 degrees Celsius.

The pair will tread in the historic footsteps of little-known Indigenous stockman, Hezekiel Malbunka, who took up the gauntlet to run 126km from Hermannsburg, a Lutheran Mission desert outpost, overland to Alice Springs in order to save the life of missionary administrator, Carl Strehlow.

Regarded as one of Australia’s most important anthropological experts on the local Arrernte Indigenous culture, Strehlow lay dying at the mission homestead. As horses were being saddled to dispatch a message to the Telegraph Station at Alice Springs requesting medical assistance be sent from Adelaide, Malbunka declared that he would go faster on foot. From his sick bed, his friend Strehlow agreed and so Malbunka set off, arriving at the Telegraph Station a day and a half later, quicker than station hands agreed could have been achieved by their horses. Incredibly, he then turned around and ran back, taking only a day.

The pair will film their attempt for a pilot television series dubbed Run The Planet, in which Tamati, who has run a distance equivalent of around the world four times, along with crossings of nearly every major desert on the globe and the length of her country besides, joins forces with Ord, who is, he says “decidedly not an ultra runner.”

Ord will be her protégé for the series as she attempts to prove that an ordinary fun runner has the ability to achieve extraordinary running feats, setting the pair up for a series of challenges in locations around the world.

Tamati and Ord will travel the globe, searching for legends of extreme endurance undertaken on foot. They will then attempt to recreate each run, attempting distances of between 80km and 350km while asking the question: were humans really born to run?

“I argue yes,” says Tamati, who is constantly queried about her sanity. “I don’t think I’m crazy at all; anyone can do what I do, anyone is capable of it, it just requires training and the correct mindset – a will to overcome.”