The Kunner Runners
WORDS : Alys Marshall IMAGES : Tom Schubert
In Australia’s remote northwest, where the air is thick with heat before the sun even rises, a group of determined runners gathers at dawn, ready to take on the red-dirt trails that snake through the Kimberley. Among them are dogs, friends, and first-timers — all drawn by the magnetic pull of movement, community, and challenge. The Kunner Runners, a trail running club forged in the unforgiving climate of Kununurra, where temperatures regularly soar into the forties and the air hums with humidity. Born from one woman’s simple desire to find a running buddy, the club has become a beacon for resilience, routine, and connection in a place that most would consider inhospitable to such an endeavour.
In Australia’s remote northwest, where the air is thick with heat before the sun even rises, a group of determined runners gathers at dawn, ready to take on the red-dirt trails that snake through the Kimberley. Among them are dogs, friends, and first-timers — all drawn by the magnetic pull of movement, community, and challenge. The Kunner Runners, a trail running club forged in the unforgiving climate of Kununurra, where temperatures regularly soar into the forties and the air hums with humidity. Born from one woman’s simple desire to find a running buddy, the club has become a beacon for resilience, routine, and connection in a place that most would consider inhospitable to such an endeavor.
It’s five o’clock in the morning and it is already thirty degrees. A group of fifteen people mill around – a couple of kelpies, a beagle and a border collie amongst them – and everyone is already sweating, or panting. Despite the conditions, everyone is eager to get started on the red dirt trails that trace jagged tracks through the outskirts of Mirima National Park in the remote east Kimberley. These are the loyal attendees of what might just be the toughest run club in the country.
When Amy Wright moved to Kununurra two years ago, driving from the vast open plains of the east Pilbara, she had a small but hopeful plan. “I wanted to find other trail runners to run with.”
In her previous role as an environmentalist on a cattle station, Amy had already been testing the waters for a trail running group of sorts. “I was enlisting whoever was around the station on any given afternoon to come for a run,” she said. “Sometimes it would be a ringer or two, one time it was the visiting plumber.”
And so, when she moved to the relative civilisation of Kununurra, home to 4500 or so residents, Amy was more determined than ever to get a run club running. “I had the mindset of ‘I’ll be running every Sunday anyway, so I might as well see if other people want to join me,’” she said. And so, over coffee with friends, the name Kunner Runners was workshopped and the trail running club was born.
She is the first to admit she couldn’t have chosen a worse time of year to kick it off. November in the east Kimberley makes hell look like an icy chest freezer. Temperatures rarely drop below the low thirties, rising rapidly as soon as the sun comes up to reach highs around the mid-forties. Then there is the humidity. The last few months of the year are aptly named ‘the build-up,’ as in the atmospheric build-up you’ll experience in the hours before a storm. But in Kununurra’s case, the storm doesn’t arrive until Christmas usually, and instead the humidity stays stubbornly high around the clock.
The town effectively shuts down over this period. Any team sport operating outside of an air-conditioned room goes on break and swimming laps becomes a popular form of exercise. But Amy started putting the word out – meet at the end of a dirt road outside of town at 5am on Sunday morning for a five-kilometre trail run. “The attendance at that stage was mostly just very loyal friends,” she explained.
Then the wet season rolled around and Kununurra’s population dwindled, as it does around the early months of every year. Amy kept running every Sunday. “Honestly there were times when no one showed up and it would just be me and my Kelpie, Ivy.”
But the rains eventually eased and come Easter the dry season reared its head, bringing welcome cool mornings and dissipating the cloying, clinging humidity. The change brought new people into the seasonal town and Kunner Runners’s weekly attendance steadily rose.
“I remember one Sunday around Easter we had five people show up and I was blown away,” Amy said. “From then it just kept building and building.”
In her mid-twenties, Amy is no stranger to trail running. As a young teenager growing up in Queensland, she watched her older brothers compete in the fifty-kilometre Kokoda Classic one year and signed up the next. From age fourteen onwards, running the ultramarathon had become an annual addition to her calendar. “It was a stunning trail run through the Gold Coast hinterland,” she said, “and it was a real mental and physical challenge that just got me hooked.”
It’s an itch she’s never been able to fully scratch – as we speak she’s training for the Margaret River Marathon, a sandy stretch spanning forty-two kilometres of South West WA’s famous Cape to Cape trail. A testament to the community she’s built within the eighteen months since starting Kunner Runners, she won’t be doing it alone. Eight run club members will join her on the gruelling run from the top of the state to the bottom.
The dedication of these runners – most of whom are new to trail running in the past year – is an indicator of the broader appeal of run clubs right across regional Australia. And these clubs are prolific. When Kunner Runners members visit Darwin they rush out on a Saturday morning to join the hoard that tracks down the esplanade for Run Club Darwin. I’ve never been to Rockhampton, yet somehow by osmosis, I know Run and Rump happens on a Wednesday night and is followed by a steak at the pub. I see blokes well known for their love of beer and big nights sharing Instagram tiles promoting a five am start for 2400 Run Club in Moree.
Of course, any run club is designed first and foremost around exercise, but it’s the social aspect that makes them thrive. Many members will tell you it’s the coffee afterwards that gets them out of bed at ungodly hours [or, in Rockhampton’s case, the steak]. Run clubs are the social outlet for a generation of people for whom a Sunday morning is more appealing than a Saturday night. And while it is a vastly different form of socialising than that centred around booze, it is one that takes notably more dedication. “In the case of Kunner Runners, you have to take it really seriously,” Amy said. “You can’t really do the runs that we do hungover. We really encourage everyone to carry water and some form of emergency communication device.”
She lists snakes and dingoes as potential threats faced, and worries that someone will drop off the tail of the group and become disoriented and lost amidst the hills and cliffs. “We go through terrain that’s hot and rocky and steep. It’s not for the faint-hearted,” she explained. “But that’s what makes it so good, it’s why everyone who comes really loves it.”
In a bit of a peek behind the curtain, I wrote this story while on the road for a work trip that took me to a cattle station in the west Kimberley. While on this trip I stayed a night at Fitzroy Crossing. Crime in Fitzroy Crossing is notoriously bad, so you will forgive me and my colleague for initially assuming a group of noisy young people milling around the gate of our accommodation were kids doing something they shouldn’t. We both looked a little closer through the evening light only to realise what we were seeing was the beginning of a run club.
Fitzroy Crossing, with its population of a little over a thousand and its evening temperatures that regularly sit in the low forties, has a run club.
As the humidity lingered around eighty per cent and an evening storm rolled in, there they stood, about fifteen people greeting each other and stretching – gearing up for potentially the only run club I would concede could be more difficult than Kununurra’s.
