Life on the run! DOM & SUE CAN'T BE BEAT

At 71, the star's marathoner mum is hard to keep up with. Luckily, he's pretty quick too

- Fleur Guthrie

There are some runners who only compete against themselves, quietly chipping away to beat their own personal best times. And then there’s Dom Harvey’s mum Sue.

The gregarious 71-year-old recently ran the Boston Marathon and became the first New Zealand woman in her age group to receive the Six Star Medal. (This was introduced in 2016 to honour runners who complete all six major marathons.)

And she’s also the first to admit she can’t help but compare her 42-kilometre race times to those of strangers.

“Mum saw someone at a Starbucks wearing a Boston medal and bowled up to them to say, ‘Congratulations! How long did it take you?’” recalls Kiwi radio veteran Dom, laughing. “Another time, we were at a memorial for the Christchurch mosque terrorist attacks, paying our respects at a mosque near us in Auckland. After we’d had a minute’s silence and everyone was sort of reflecting, Mum sidled up to [reality TV star] Art Green and whispered, ‘I beat you in the New York marathon!’”

“I did do that,” she admits, with a mock grimace. “Well, my mouth goes quicker than my legs! I’m just very competitive. I come from a big family of 14 kids – we’re all like that.”

When the running-mad pair chats to the Weekly at Dom’s inner-city apartment, Sue is beating herself up a bit over her respectable Boston race time of four hours and 53 minutes.

“It was my hardest and slowest race out of all of six,” she reflects. “I ran for 30km and then walked a lot. I feel like my mind is willing but my body is letting me down now I’m in my seventies.