About
History. Culture. Ethos.
Blue Lake has never been designed to be easy.
That would rather defeat the point.
There are plenty of events with aid stations every few kilometres, motivational signage, carefully measured nutrition and enthusiastic volunteers telling you how amazing you are.
This is not really one of those.
Blue Lake is a 6km loop around Lake Tikitapu.
You have 24 hours.
Off you go.
History
Blue Lake started back in 2014 with a fairly simple idea:
How far could you go if nobody told you to stop?
More than a decade later, people are still turning up to find out.
Over the years the event has grown from a small gathering of runners into something of a Rotorua endurance institution.
Some people come for a few laps.
Some come to run their first ultra.
Some arrive intending to run 100 miles.
Others arrive with spreadsheets, pacing charts and nutrition strategies that generally survive until sometime shortly after midnight.
Then the real event begins.
Thousands of runners, walkers, crew members, families and assorted supporters have now spent long weekends circling the same lake.
And strangely, people keep coming back.
We take that as a good sign.
Culture
Blue Lake is deliberately a little old school.
We don't particularly believe endurance events need to remove every inconvenience.
Sometimes you're cold.
Sometimes you're tired.
Sometimes it's dark.
Sometimes your legs hurt.
Sometimes you discover that the food you've been dreaming about for six hours is sitting back at HQ.
Excellent.
Problem solving is part of the sport.
Blue Lake is self-supported because we think there is something worthwhile about figuring things out for yourself.
Bring what you need.
Look after your crew.
Help the person next to you.
And if things go wrong, which they occasionally will, work it out.
We won't baby you.
But neither will the community leave you hanging.
That's the strange contradiction at the heart of Blue Lake.
The event itself doesn't make things particularly easy.
The people do.
At 3am you'll see complete strangers sharing food, helping someone fix a headlamp, walking a lap with somebody who's struggling or convincing a runner who has dramatically announced their retirement from ultrarunning to perhaps just sit down for ten minutes first.
That's Blue Lake culture.
Ethos
Blue Lake remains intentionally simple.
Free. Self-supported. Community driven. Slightly unreasonable.
There are no prizes for having the fanciest setup.
Nobody cares what shoes you're wearing.
Nobody is particularly impressed by your Strava history.
Eventually everyone gets reduced to roughly the same thing:
A tired person walking around a lake wondering why the next hill appears to have become steeper since the previous lap.
And that's where the good stuff happens.
Blue Lake isn't meant to manufacture achievement.
It gives you the space to earn it.
You carry your own responsibility.
You respect the lake.
You respect the trail.
You take out what you bring in.
You look after the people around you.
And you keep going until you've had enough.
Then, occasionally, you discover you haven't had enough after all.
We're not interested in making Blue Lake bigger, shinier or easier simply because that's what events are apparently supposed to do.
Some things are better left a little rough around the edges.
A little old school.
A little hard.
Because when nobody has cleared the obstacles out of the way for you, finishing something actually feels like finishing something.
That's Blue Lake.
No fuss.
No shortcuts.
Just 24 hours, one lake and whatever you've got.