From Couch Potato To Jogging Juggernaut!

Kerris Browne Aims for 10 Rotorua Marathons in a Row

- Steve Landells

It was 10 years ago that Kerris Browne had an “epiphany”. Aged 39 at the time, the Rotorua woman knew she needed to change her increasingly unhealthy lifestyle.

“I’d become unfit sitting around an office every day,” explains Kerris, who works as a chief executive at a sawmill. “I was eating the wrong foods, I was struggling to lose baby weight and not happy. I’d lived in Rotorua for many years, seen the impact of the Rotorua Marathon, so I said, ‘I’m going to do the Rotorua Marathon’.”

Little did Kerris know that her decision to transform her life through fitness and healthy living would have a seismic impact, and lead to hundreds of people getting off the couch and changing their lives the same way.

“I never started out with any real plan but to see my own life improve 100% through exercise, and now to be able to help others has been an amazing gift,” she says.

Born in Canada to American parents, Kerris grew up in Fiji, arriving in Rotorua as a 17-year old refugee following the Fijian coup. She settled into the New Zealand lifestyle and eventually married husband Chris, with the pair taking over her father’s sawmill business.