Polly Taylor has a real issue with years that end with a nine.
In 2009, she was riding her bike through the Waihopai Valley, training for the Taupō Ironman, when she was struck by a car from behind. She couldn’t feel her legs – her pelvis was broken in four places and a hip socket cracked.
She spent three weeks in hospital and six months in a wheelchair and on crutches. But Taylor – from strong, resilient Canterbury high country stock – recovered following months of rehabilitation. Eighteen months later, she lined up in the Coast to Coast individual race – an event she’d go on to do five times.
Then the mum-of-two and grandmother started trail running and quickly established herself as a champion ultramarathon runner. She even qualified to run her dream race, the legendary UTMB in France, in 2019.
But before she left for Europe, Taylor was walking on a pedestrian crossing in Blenheim when she was, again, hit by a car. She was thrown 20 metres and the injuries to her body were extensive – but it was the damage to her brain that would cause her the most pain and anguish over the next four years.
Horrendous headaches, vomiting and exhaustion plagued her whenever she tried to run. “Every time you tried to climb the mountain, you fell back in the hole again,” she told the Dirt Church Radio podcast.
But the former sheep musterer and fashion designer, who’s now a guide on the tracks of the Marlborough Sounds, had unfinished business in the hills. After four years of “trying everything”, she finally found relief from a chiropractor who worked on her skull plates. A running coach and a sports nutritionist also helped her, and last year she was back running competitively again.
“When the medics said, ‘Look, you cannot do UTMB’ in 2019, that was a real bitter pill to swallow. And I just went, ‘God, life sucks’. But then I think ‘Yeah it might, but you’re still here’,” she says.
This month Taylor ran the Tarawera Ultra 100-miler – more than 160km for over 28 hours – and won her age group.
It put the 64-year-old one giant stride closer to finally getting to run the race she was robbed of: The UTMB – one of the largest and most competitive ultramarathons in the world. Now it comes down to a lottery.
By finishing Tarawera, a UTMB World Series event, Taylor earned four ‘running stones’ – which equates to four entries in the UTMB lottery.
“If it happens… and I get an entry, well, that’s pretty cool and it was meant to be,” she says. “But if there’s something this has taught me, it’s just don’t stress about the small crap because it’s not worth it.
“You know, just find something else. But it will not be crocheting, I can tell you that.”
Taylor spends up to five days in a stretch hiking the hills of Marlborough, guiding walking groups from around the world. She’s worked for the Marlborough Sounds Adventure Company for nine years.
She loves her job, but it also doubles as great training for a hilly 100-mile race. “It’s perfect because it’s time on your legs,” she says. “I’m used to climbing 40,000 metres, up and down, up and down.”
Throughout January she worked five days on, one day off. But she spent her days off going to a boot camp followed by a three-hour run. “Then I was back out guiding; no time off the legs,” she says.
Taylor grew up in the hills – her family owned Ben McLeod Station, a high country sheep station in Canterbury’s Rangitata Gorge. One of four daughters, she left boarding school and got a team of seven dogs to go mustering around Ōmarama and Wānaka.
She then became a wool classer of fine merino wool before moving into fashion design, developing her own merino knitwear brand, Hawkesbury Road Clothing. She made merino suit jackets for Melbourne Cup winner Bart Cummings. She’d travel the country marketing her wares, taking her truck loaded with a bike, kayak and running shoes so she could train for multisport events.
She sold the business in 2015 to focus on her sport (she climbed Mt Kilimanjaro in Tanzania that year) and become a walking guide. Now she’s also a holistic movement coach, training and motivating people.
It was while training a group of clients in a Blenheim gym in 2019 that Taylor had her second accident. She decided to cross the road for a coffee and didn’t see any cars approaching as she walked out onto the zebra crossing.
“I can’t remember a lot, but all I know is that this guy who was doing 50km hit me… and threw me 20 metres,” she says.
When she became conscious, the pain hit. “It was just incredible,” Taylor says. “I had a bit of a smashed-up body.
“I had eight broken ribs in three or four places and a collapsed lung – with holes in the lung – and a neck injury. And I had a real brain injury and internal injuries.”
Her bones and lung healed relatively quickly through rehab, but her traumatic head injury lingered for four years.
“As I tried to run, I kept thinking, ‘Start running Poll, get the endorphins going, you know you’ve got UTMB in August, you’ve got to keep training’,” she recalls. “But it was like a watermelon sloshing in my brain. I’d come back and I’d start vomiting. You have bad thoughts; you are in a deep black hole.”
The headaches were constant, she couldn’t tolerate noise. “My poor partner. Honestly, he would eat yogurt and it sounded like a bloody horse eating chaff. It was so loud in my brain,” she says.
“I tried everything and I remember the All Blacks doctor [Deb Robinson] said to me, ‘Poll, don’t put too much in front of you’,” she says. “But you go do stupid things like put your car on Trade Me, your skis, your kayak, all your bikes…your head is not your head. It’s something in there that’s really, really messed up.”
Then her running coach, James Kuegler, suggested she see chiropractor Chris Vickers. “He’s holistic, and he started working on my brain plates. Now I go to him every week. He bangs the body back into gear.”
“Last week, I said to him ‘You know, if it hadn’t been for you, I actually don’t know if I’d be here’. And he said, ‘I always had faith that you would; I just had to work on the plates in your brain and all your body.”
The turning point, she says, came when he told her to go home, turn everything off, lie on the couch for 20 minutes and “just hear the birds”. It was then the headaches faded, and she was able to run long distances again.
Taylor started seeing a sports nutritionist to help her run ultras again, like the Northburn 100, a gruelling mountain race in Central Otago (She won the women’s race there in 2018, and last year took out her veteran’s category, finishing in 38 hours). The headaches still return, but she’s got better at looking after her body.
She had Kuegler drew up a plan to keep her racing schedule “really light” – something she’s admittedly struggled with. But the plan centred around getting Taylor an entry into the UTMB 100-miler around Mont-Blanc in Chamonix in 2025.
For a long time, Taylor was angry with the driver who hit her on the crossing five years ago, “because he took UTMB away from me,” she says. “I’d get up on a hill and I’d just bawl my eyes out. And then I have to talk to myself again. But that’s behind me now.”
With all she’s endured in her life, Taylor hopes the luck of the draw will finally go her way.
Dirt Church Radio is a Kiwi trail running podcast hosted by Eugene Bingham and Matt Rayment. Learn more at dirtchurchradio.com
