WORDS Sue Hoffart PHOTOS Graeme Murray

For four-time Coast to Coast champ Sam Clark, dodging explosives in China and kayaking from Sweden to Finland are what makes adventure sports not just a hobby, but a way of life.

Endurance athlete Sam Clark credits cartoons with kick-starting his career as a jet-setting adventurer and multisport titleholder.

In recent years, the tenacious Welcome Bay resident has managed to dodge explosives in a Chinese quarry and container ships in the Baltic Sea. In February, he ran, biked and kayaked across the South Island in just over 10 hours to scoop the prestigious Coast to Coast world multisport championship. It was the fourth time in five years that he’d won the gruelling 243km race from Kumara Beach to Christchurch.

His early forays into sport were far less successful. As a boy, Sam proved uncoordinated with a hockey stick and similarly awkward with a soccer ball.

By age 10, he had his priorities sorted. If the painfully slow school bus couldn’t deliver him home in time for his favourite martial arts cartoon, he would bike to and from Otakiri Primary School himself. Given the school was 11km from the Clark family abode in the rural Eastern Bay of Plenty, Sam easily clocked up more than 100km of riding each week. It also set a precedent; if he wanted to venture into downtown Whakatane on the weekend, his parents knew he could cycle the 70km round trip himself.

Young Sam had discovered the joy of independent travel and found himself quickly, accidentally fit.

“By default, I became one of the fast kids,” the 30-year-old recalls. “And winning cross country was pretty important at primary school. Once I was fit, running opened doors.”

Sam and older sister Sophia began training for triathlon competitions, piling in the back of their father’s ute to swim train at Lake Rotoma. From a young age, the siblings also embarked on challenging multi-day tramping and kayaking trips in Urewera National Park with their outdoorsy parents, Environment Bay of Plenty Councillor Bill Clark and recently-retired primary school teacher Alison. 

Sam suspects his thirst for adventure was inherited from his poetry-loving father, who had lived and travelled in Africa, owned sawmills and gave up an accounting degree to become a deer culler. Bill Clark also competed in the Coast to Coast multisport event that his son would go on to win four times.

“Growing up, complaining was not an option. I think there’s something in my blood that makes me push myself to do mad things,” says Sam.

The school teacher’s son was also studious and bookish and a trumpet-playing member of the Bay of Plenty Brass Band till age 14. To earn any screen-watching time, he and his sister needed to chalk up the equivalent period in music practice.

At Whakatane High School, Sam discovered interschool multisport races. He borrowed a mountain bike, dusted off his father’s old kayak and fared unexpectedly well against a much bigger pool of teenage peers. Hooked, he asked his parents whether he might perhaps have a racing kayak for Christmas. 

“I woke up Christmas morning to find there was a splitting axe under the tree. It was their way of giving me the opportunity to earn it, and I spent most afternoons and holidays splitting firewood,” explains Sam.

It took months of work to earn the $2000 ticket price.

“By the time I could afford the new kayak, I had the strength to paddle it.” 

Even before he was legally old enough to hold a licence, Sam would load up his prized craft and drive 10 minutes down country roads to the Rangitaiki River, to practice paddling. 

His final year of high school was a blur of entry forms and weekend races, including the rugged Motu Challenge multisport race where he finished fourth amid an adult field. He was only 18 when he entered and won the non-elite, two-day section of the Coast to Coast event for the first time. 

“I thought I might truly be good at this kind of racing, but how could I fund it?” recalls Sam.

Unwilling to face the prospect of more full-time study, he opted instead for a mechanical engineering apprenticeship at the workshop where he had spent his school holidays. While he was an able enough worker, Sam was not a model employee. 

“I was constantly at odds with my bosses about staying late or doing overtime because all I wanted to do was go and train. And I was taking a lot of unpaid leave to go do sports events around the country,” says Sam.

For four years, his apprentice’s wage was spent on race entry fees, travel and sporting equipment, ticking off Ironman events and world championships, eight-day expedition races with a team and individual challenges in New Zealand and overseas. 

Once he had his fitter and turner’s qualification in hand, Sam continued to mix work and sport.

“A lot of athletes my age dropped away. They went to uni or couldn’t fund themselves any more. But I was always able to find work and some way of getting to the start line. Eating baked beans, using borrowed gear; if you really want to do it, you’ll somehow make it work.“

Disappointments came with the wins and placings. A planned trip to Europe, for a season of  cycle racing, had to be abandoned when Sam tumbled off his mountain bike and broke his wrist. Those events that didn’t go well only served to spur him on.

“I thought I’ve got to train harder, come back better, more well trained, better prepared and faster,” says Sam.

“I made an awful lot of mistakes but I learned from them. What to eat, what not to eat. What gear to use. Lining up and doing ultramarathons, thinking running 90km will be easy, then having to walk 40km at the end because I didn’t fuel properly, or train. 

“There’s nothing like the absolutely darkest moments to learn from.”

In China, Sam has raced through northern provinces using Soviet-era maps to traverse roads that no longer exist. He has paddled on the Yellow River and through one of the world’s largest cave systems. In later years, mobile translation apps have helped him communicate with friendly, curious locals as well as fellow Chinese competitors. Once, he and his teammates found themselves in the middle of a quarry, surrounded by explosives. 

“There were sticks of dynamite and blasting caps in the rocks around us. What did we do? We ran extra fast to get out of there! No, my mum doesn’t know about that,” laugh Sam.

“But part of what makes racing in China so appealing is that when you finish each day, all the teams sit around a dinner table and share war stories, so there’s a lot of camaraderie involved. It’s the hardest and most challenging races I’ve ever done, in places nobody has ever heard of.”

Some destinations are easier to love than others. He talks fondly of a particularly satisfying world swim-run championship event in Sweden that involved 72km of running and 12km of swimming between islands in the Stockholm archipelago. The spectacular scenery was part of it, and the Baltic Sea’s low salinity level meant he didn’t need goggles and the water tasted almost sweet.

Sam has become far more appreciative of the places racing takes him. He now makes a concerted effort to stay with local residents, to explore and try the local cuisine rather than focussing solely on race preparation and recovery. His favourite memory of a French alpine event involves staying with a local family for a week and helping them concrete their driveway.

The failed soccer and hockey player has certainly discovered the joy of being a valued part of a team. He has found his tribe; a like-minded international group of adrenaline-fuelled athletes who have taught him about organisation, team dynamics, friendship and the thrill of pitting himself against a series of outrageously difficult challenges.

Two years ago, when he raced – and won – with the Swedish military adventure team, he found himself paddling from Sweden to Finland.

“It was terrifying. You’re in the middle of the open sea with towering waves, in kayaks that aren’t up to the job, trying to avoid enormous container ships and knowing you just have to keep going, turning back’s not an option,” says Sam.

“For me, it’s such an exciting, unpredictable way of living.

“I don’t always look forward to a race, sometimes I dread it. I put an awful lot of pressure on myself… And yes, I do that in life as well, because all this has an opportunity cost. I look at friends who have gone to uni, have steady jobs, own houses and sometimes you can’t help but compare what you have.

“But of course, I’ve now had 15 years of travel and adventures. It opens you up to having these absolutely wild experiences you could never hope to achieve any other way. I love the sense of fulfilment. I certainly wouldn’t change it.”

Boy meets girl

Sport and social media brought Welsh medic Zoë Cruse into Sam’s orbit.

The pair became Facebook friends after he spotted the dreadlocked doctor out for a run in Whangarei, where she was working in urgent care after emigrating from the United Kingdom.

Then, when Zoë was living in the Philippines and Sam was racing in China, they found themselves in similar time zones and began chatting online. Once they were both back on New Zealand soil, they met in person for the first time. On their second date, mutual love was declared. By their sixth date, in the summer of 2018, she agreed to move to Tauranga with him.

Since finishing her medical degree, Zoë aims to spend six months practicing medicine and the other half of the year travelling and teaching yoga or scuba diving.

“The reason we are so good together is because our lifestyles are similar and we have similar values,” she says.

“I think I’m a bit nomadic, I have the worst itchy feet. Helping people and making a difference to people is a big part of what I do but I’ve never wanted medicine to define me. It’s one of the things I do.”

Zoë is also an amateur triathlete and a current member of Tauranga’s musical theatre group.

A locked-down world

Sam and partner Zoë ought to be in Europe right now, recovering from an Ironman-style event in Germany. But the global COVID-19 pandemic has scratched almost everything from the international racing calendar and removed Sam’s ability to earn from sport.

“COVID-19 really forced me to evaluate the way I’m living a little bit,” Sam says. “Without having an income stream from overseas races, I’ve had to go back to doing a bit more work using my trade.”

He is currently working as a landscaper, taking engineering work when he can and studying towards an engineering diploma, while fitting in 14 to 20 hours of training each week. And he considers himself one of the lucky ones.

“There are an awful lot of athletes out there stacking shelves or making coffee to make ends meet. They are really struggling with their own sense of worth because there aren’t races to target and work towards. And that’s not just professional athletes.

“For now, overseas events are not going to be a reality for most Kiwi athletes. It certainly makes you appreciate what we’ve been able to do in the past.

He says domestic events are starting to pop up again.

“One I really want to do is the Geyserland Mega Grind, a 700km bike packing race from Rotorua to Gisborne and back via Urewera National Park,” says Sam.

“In the absence of overseas travel, I’m turning my sights back on grassroots New Zealand events. This is a great opportunity to look at what we have in New Zealand. People flock here from all round the world to fulfil their sense of adventure and there are still many parts of the country I have not been to.”