When Daisy Ruthe was 12, she started a countdown until her 13th birthday. Not to celebrate the day itself, but to mark when she was allowed to have her own running coach.
The younger sister of Sam Ruthe, the 16-year-old Kiwi breaking records, Daisy is making her own name as a middle distance runner, despite only just starting proper running training.
At just 14 years old, Daisy won the under 20 3000m race last weekend, the youngest in the field. She wasn’t intimidated though, finishing with a time of 9:46.56.
“I love racing people better than me and I don’t mind that most of the time they are older,” Ruthe says.
“They are all really friendly and good about racing together. There are so many good runners in New Zealand and I’m lucky I have them to race.”
The dad of the Ruthe family, Ben, was a runner himself but never pushed his kids into the sport, with Daisy playing hockey when she was younger.
“We really encouraged our kids to play team sports, so she just loved hockey, but she always showed a bit of a flair for running. But we didn’t let our kids train or be coached at all until they were 13,” he says.
When Daisy was in year 7, she won the AIMS Games cross country, with no training. The next year, she came third, with her peers who trained overtaking her. So the countdown started.
“It felt like I waited for ages and could see Sam training with the group,” Daisy says, two years Sam’s junior.
“It’s such a good group and there were girls much better than me and I just remember straight away trying to hang onto them which was so much fun.”
Both kids are coached by Craig Kirkwood, but they bring different approaches to their running, says their dad.
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“She’s never been afraid to go out there and give it her all. Sam’s always been a lot more focused and diligent and quietly working away on things, whereas Daisy’s quite a lot more bold I guess.”
That translates into their running styles too, with Daisy being unafraid to lead the pack.
“In one of her very first races, she was in a race with some older girls, and two laps in to a four lap race, she just put in a huge surge to try and drop them, and that’s not normal,” Ben says.
“She was racing tactically to try and outwit her competitors, and that’s the sort of thing that you don’t often see in young teenage girls, but that’s how her mind’s wired, she just wants to be bold and have a crack. That was evident as soon as she started racing.”
Daisy showed that attitude in the 3000m race, confident to lead the pack, despite being the youngest.
“My friend who I train with Eleanor Pugh took the pace out fast for the first 1km and then I overtook her and felt pretty good until Lennox Dyer came past on the last lap,” she recalls.
“I felt like I had a sprint left and I was just relieved that I had a bit left and could win and then just really happy with how it went.”
You might expect the Ruthe family home to be covered in medals and trophies, and conversations at the dinner table to revolve around running. But that’s not how it is at all.
Parents Ben and Jess are both accomplished runners, but never push their kids, only support and encourage.
“All of it is the kids,” says Ben.
“We’re really lucky that we’ve got a really good knowledge of what the ingredients are to help somebody achieve if they want to in running, because we made plenty of mistakes, and so all we do is just try and make it easy for them to do well.”
Daisy attends Ōtūmoetai College, and as part of a team of six girls, won the national teams title, coached by Kirkwood.
“To have those groups of friends is really the sort of environment you want, where a group of friends turn up and just have that real social interaction, but push each other and support each other on their journey, and Craig’s created that,” Ben says.
The support from her parents doesn’t go unappreciated by Daisy either.
“They make training easier and Mum is always taking me to training and they all come to my races. They make it all easy really and I know they will support me no matter what,” she says.
And Ben doesn’t mind being on chauffeur duties – enjoying the car rides to trainings just as much as watching his kids race.
“We really just want to be there, because it’s just so entertaining. There’s nothing better than seeing kids try as hard as they can,” he says.
“We’ve never really celebrated their winning, we’ve always celebrated their effort and how hard they’ve tried, and they both try really hard, and I just love watching them race.”
Daisy says her preferred race length is the 1500m, and she has a goal she’s working towards.
“I would really like to get the New Zealand Secondary Schools Junior record which is 4:29 from Toni Hodgkinson who went to the Olympics. I have to do that in December and my best is 4:31 at the moment,” she says.