When Lisa Tamati returned to New Zealand from Austria in 2007, at the age of 37, she had almost nothing: after 13 years away, her marriage was over, she didn't own her own home and she'd sold her business to break even. What she did have was the passion that has consumed her for the past two decades: ultra-marathon running.
Tamati, New Zealand's best-known exponent of running's most extreme and unusual discipline, admits it has become an obsession.
She can also concede that her adventures across the Sahara desert and Death Valley have come at a cost.
"I definitely do regret, sometimes, the fact I haven't got everything, because I have put everything into my sport," she says when we meet for breakfast in an Auckland cafe to talk about her latest project: running the length of New Zealand (basically 52 marathons) in just 33 days.
"But it is a trade-off, isn't it? When you get to 80, do you want to have a flash house or have experienced life? I have chosen the latter, more or less, and I have paid a price for it sometimes too. You want to add something there, mother?"
Oh yes, I forgot to mention: Isobel Tamati is sitting quietly across the table from us, smiling broadly and saying nothing.
"I haven't had kids, things like that," Lisa Tamati continues.
"It's not always a conscious decision, but you go through life, and it's the next race, the next target... you think `oh shit, I was meant to have kids somewhere along the way'... I think I've missed that one, but I am trying to get a life as well."
She has run 222km across the Niger desert while suffering dysentry. She has hiked across the Sahara in borrowed boots (a size too small), run across Death Valley in 47C heat with damaged stomach lining while hallucinating about giant penguins, and finished a tramp across Libya with one kidney swollen to double the size of the other, spinal damage and despite undergoing a vitriolic break-up with her boyfriend.
When I first met Tamati earlier this year, she was running 100km on a treadmill as a fundraising gimmick to help cover the $70,000 cost of returning to Death Valley for another crack at perhaps the world's toughest footrace.
She's such a genuine enthusiast that within a fortnight, I was out on a four-hour training run with her around Auckland's eastern beaches. As the sun set on Tamaki Drive, she bluntly told me then, while jogging along as unruffled and relaxed as when we'd started, that she should never have been an athlete. She was an asthmatic child, broke her back at 21 and was told she'd never run.
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Running was an accidental byproduct of an otherwise destructive long-term relationship, her first, with an Austrian backpacker she met while he was recuperating from serious illness in a New Plymouth hospital. Paul showed her there was more to life than Taranaki beaches, but he also sowed the seeds of a self-doubt that dogged her for years after.
It was Paul (who is probably pleased his surname is omitted from Tamati's new autobiography, Running Hot, given the criticism he cops) who took Tamati around the world on a string of low-budget adventures until their relationship collapsed in that Libyan desert. "He definitely introduced me to the world, to adventuring, to pushing your limits," Tamati says, before giggling. "And nothing will ever be that hard again: ultra-marathon running is a piece of cake in comparison to life with Paul.
"I am thankful to him for opening up different horizons for me, but he was a hard man, he was a very hard man. He's still doing the same kind of stuff, and he still thinks I am a hopeless runner."
She's far from a hopeless runner. Ultra-marathoning came after Paul, and flourished during her second serious relationship, with another Austrian, her ex-husband Gerhard Lusskandl, who is also a world-class ultra-marathoner.
Tamati has tasted the domestic drear, settling happily in Austria with Lusskandl, before eventually feeling the pull to come home, but he had no intentions of leaving Austria. When Tamati returned to Taranaki for a holiday, he posted on the divorce papers.
She's happy to be back in New Plymouth, where she runs a jewellery shop with her mother, and the book's afterword is a dedication to Lusskandl, which reads "you are part of my soul and I will carry you forever in my heart, thank you for everything".
When she first ran Death Valley, he was her pacer. They both competed this year, with Tamati running alongside Lusskandl for the first 30km before he raced away to finish a creditable 11th. "Coming from different ends of the earth can be a problem in a relationship," she says. "But we're very good friends and that's the neat thing... but he's a superior runner."
But even during those happier years, she fought her own perception that she simply wasn't an athlete and only overcame that self-doubt by continuing to compete.
"I've had a harder road than a lot of these guys [her competitors]... but it makes it more interesting, the journey I've gone on. If I had to decide between pure talent and determination and willpower, I'd pick determination and willpower any day."
Tamati has the intangibles mental strength, guts, courage, experience and determination the factors that mean the most in this most individual of sporting pursuits. But she does also have the data to prove she shouldn't have been a top-class runner: a pre-Death Valley session with some Auckland University scientists showed she simply doesn't have the Vo2 Max (maximum lung capacity) to be a serious athlete over shorter distances. Marathon runners need to be lightweight, ultra-marathon runners need a bit more muscle and fat to sustain themselves through the punishment as their bodies begin to eat themselves.
When we talk, Tamati is about to depart for the Commonwealth 24-hour championships in England, where she ended up running 161km for 19th place, 39km below her target.
Such comparatively staid races are simply too short for her, she says, but she competes because she has the desire to take on such measured challenges to prove herself ultra-marathon running doesn't have anything as formal as a world title or rankings. Tamati has a disguised but simmering dismay at Athletics New Zealand's failure to fund these more extreme events. The Commonwealth Championships cost her $8000 "from the budget we didn't have" but were worth it for the carrot of the event potentially becoming part of next year's Commonwealth Games.
Trudging a track is not her thing, though. "Put a backpack on me, send me over some sand-dunes in a sandstorm that's where I'm good," she says.
Tamati's big idea for 2010 is a five-day, 250km self-sufficient stage race across the Gobi desert in Mongolia, on which she plans to lead a team of endurance-race novices and a camera crew.
Before that, on October 31 this year, she embarks on what she describes as a long-time dream, to run the length of the country, a task which is due to finish in Auckland in early December and will fundraise for CanTeen and KidsCan.
None of these endeavours makes any money. So to make it work, you have to become a product. The American Dean Karnazes is far from the best ultra-runner in the world, but his tales of eating pizzas on midnight dashes made him a celebrity and gave him a livelihood, and his bestseller Ultra-Marathon Man may be the only thing most people know about this underground world.
Tamati has likewise become a saleable product: she plans to make a TV show around the Gobi race, and she funded and oversaw the documentary on her Death Valley exploits. There's the crafty idea of making bookstore appearances along the route of her New Zealand run to promote Running Hot, which is released next week. And while she's far from a clothes-horse, she looks good in black so there's plenty of improbably-perfect images of her striding across windswept landscapes.
"You have to have the whole commercial marketing package," she admits.
She deserves the publicity, for few could probably comprehend the extreme nature of the Badwater Ultramarathon, the 217km, invitation-only race through Death Valley which she has now completed twice (she's only the third New Zealander to compete).
This year's race she finished eighth woman, in 37 hours and 14 minutes was tough. Even by local standards, it was hot, the temperature reaching 47C in the shade.
Tamati tried some new nutritional gels, which began to damage her stomach lining in the heat. She vomited, became dehydrated, her digestive system shut down, her blood pressure dropped and she collapsed several times. Oh, and she hallucinated giant penguins in dinner jackets, almost trod on a rattlesnake, and the finish line was diverted because of forest fires and bears ransacking the food tent.
"I just lay down in the road, and said `let me die, let the next car run over me, I don't want to carry on'," she says. "But I just kept fighting my way back. I went through absolute hell, it was torturous."
I point out that this is hardly a positive sell for ultra-marathoning. "It does happen sometimes," she says. "Then it is down to your willpower."
At first, Tamati admits, running was about proving herself to Paul. Now, it's about "pure enjoyment".
"It is an obsession. I am obsessive. It has opened up a life for me that I never thought possible."
So what if she had to stop? "I actually don't think I could cope. I can't contemplate retirement or anything like that. It doesn't compute in my brain."
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