Keeping up with the Jones HADYN RUNS FOR THE HILLS!

Some men decide to buy a sports car, vigorously grow facial hair or spend hundreds of dollars on a pair of sneakers they used to covet in their (vanishing) youth

- Fleur Guthrie

But Fair Go presenter Hadyn Jones tackled his mid-life crisis a different way, by signing up to run 60 kilometres around rugged mountains in Fiordland National Park.

His friends thought he had gone insane.

And with walking the family dog and lugging his camera gear to filming locations appearing to be the 47-year-old’s only exercise, he admits doing an ultramarathon was either “superb confidence or utter foolishness”.

“I became invigorated by the challenge because I didn’t know if I could do it and my window for this sort of malarkey was starting to close,” tells Hadyn, who hosts Good Sorts, a weekly yarn that airs at the end of the Sunday 1 News bulletin and celebrates ordinary Kiwis doing something extraordinary.

It was last May, while out filming a Good Sort story about a DoC ranger on the Routeburn Track, that the seed was planted for Hadyn’s rebirth as a mid-life runner.

“We had to walk three hours to the first hut,” he recalls. “So we had all this time to chat and examine one’s life, and the ranger was telling me about how he had run the Kepler Challenge.

“It sounded ridiculous. He told me about spending his whole weekend training and I thought, ‘Well, that’d never go down well in the Jones family.’ It sounded so unattainable in my life stage.”

Hadyn reckons Facebook must have been listening to that conversation in the bush.