Christine Pfitzinger always believed her daughter Annika would one day be well enough to run again.
The 1988 Olympian helped take care of her daughter, also a national champion runner, as she battled through five exhausting and frustrating years with chronic fatigue syndrome.
There were days when Annika was too tired to cook dinner, read a book or even raise herself out of a chair. Vexing days when she had to let go of her dream to run again, knowing just the notion of it might be detrimental to her mental health.
“It’s been a life-changing thing. But I always believed she would come back and run really well again,” her mum says. “At first, we just wanted her to be healthy enough to live a normal life, because she was that sick. Then we started hoping she’d be able to run.
“But she’s a fighter – a real little toughie. If anyone could come through this, it was her. We just didn’t know what the timeline would be.”
That time is now for 31-year-old Annika Pfitzinger. Last August, the former national half marathon champion was well enough to run at the New Zealand cross country championships, where she won silver.
This week she was named in the New Zealand team to contest the world cross country championships in Belgrade in March.
It will be her first time wearing the silver fern on her chest – and at a world championship that her mother competed in four times during her lengthy athletics career.
And what makes it even more special: It will be exactly 40 years, give or take a few days, since Christine Pfitzinger (nee Hughes) was part of the Kiwi women’s team who won bronze at the cross country worlds in the United States.
“I secretly had my sights on this one,” Annika says. “And it feels great.”
Countless times in the past five years she feared she’d never race again. “But I’m quite stubborn,” she says. “I wanted to give running another crack if my chronic fatigue would give me that chance.
“It’s nice to be healthy again, running well again. Just being myself again.”
And for that, she’s grateful to her Olympian parents, her Olympian fiancé and her coach (who helped a triathlete win Olympic gold) for their patience and support through the toughest times of her life.
The frustration of fatigue
Standing on the podium at the 2023 national cross country champs in Taupō, Annika Pfitzinger realised it was a decade since she’d been on this same step – finishing second at the 2013 nationals at 20, her first year running as a senior woman.
Over the next 10 years, her athletics career would follow a course of peaks and troughs – the troughs lower than she’d ever have imagined.
Born in New Hampshire, and moving to New Zealand at five, Annika grew up in a household of elite runners. Her dad, Peter Pfitzinger, competed in the marathon at the 1984 and 1988 Olympics for the United States, and is the former CEO of Athletics NZ. Her mum represented New Zealand on the track at three Commonwealth Games and the Seoul Olympics, where she ran the 3000m.
Is it any wonder their eldest daughter always wanted to run for her country?
She did cross country at school but Annika never felt any pressure to run. “It was always a self-driven thing. But when you see your mum still running at a high level when you’re young, and you’re hanging out at athletics tracks while your parents coach, it just comes naturally,” she says.
Genetics must have been involved, too. “She’s always had the ability, but then you have to have the character to go after it as well,” Christine says.
A typical sporty Kiwi kid, Annika was into football, combined martial arts, swimming and cycling. At high school, she chose to focus on running.
But in her late teens, Annika developed disordered eating. “I was restricting my calories and wasn’t eating enough for my activity level,” she says. A series of three bone fractures and six stress fractures followed – her body couldn’t take the running loads. So she put her cycling and swimming to good use, switching to triathlons, duathlons and half Ironmans.
But an “embarrassing” crash on her bike – while taking a photo on her phone inside a plastic bag which got caught in the front brakes – she tore the labrum in her shoulder. Facing surgery or two years of healing, she decided she didn’t like swimming enough to go through an operation. “I thought my body would be resilient enough to move back to running,” she says.
She was immediately comfortable – and fast. She won the 2017 national half marathon title, and was running competitively overseas and training at altitude.
In 2018, Annika did her third stint of altitude training in Boulder, Colorado, then back at sea level in San Diego ran a personal best over 10km (34m 44s). But a month later, at a race in Maine, her health went downhill fast.
“I just felt horrendous. I finished dead last, and I was almost caught by the men, who started their race after the women,” she says. “I was extremely embarrassed to run so poorly.”
She pulled out of her next race, feeling dizzy and ill. When she went down a path of medical tests, everything came back normal.
With splitting headaches every day for no apparent reason, a foggy brain and exhaustion, she returned home to Auckland to get more answers.
After six months of illness, doctors diagnosed Annika with chronic fatigue syndrome, a debilitating condition characterised by fatigue and exhaustion. The cause remains unknown, with no cure.
“I may have had glandular fever in my system, combined with running at altitude, and the mental and emotional stress of going through a relationship break-up at the time. The consensus is that it was a bit of all that,” Annika says.
“The frustrating thing about chronic fatigue is there’s still not a lot known about it. One doctor told me to take it easy and rest a lot, and hopefully I’d feel more like myself in two years. That’s pretty frustrating.” Especially for a high-performance athlete.
Much medical advice didn’t help her. “I stopped all sport and I was too tired to cook, or bake, or read a book – various things that would make me happy normally,” Annika says. “I was lucky I could live with my parents.
“I didn’t have it as bad as some people do – I wasn’t bedridden, and I was lucky to still be able to work part-time.” She’d manage a couple of hours a day working for a neighbour, “but I’d come home drained; I’d lie on the couch most of the rest of the day.”
An important part of her recovery was letting go of her running dreams. “I was terrified of making myself worse,” she says.
After two years of rest, Annika had “glimmers” of feeling better. She’d moved to Nelson with her partner, Julian Matthews, a top middle-distance runner who competed in the 1500m at the 2014 Commonwealth and 2016 Olympic Games.
She could manage day-to-day tasks and walks, easing into 10-minute jogs in the evenings. But she had to take care not to over-exert herself.
At a stage of being able to run consistently, Annika entered the national road relay champs. But the pressure of a last-minute promotion into the A team led to a relapse of her chronic fatigue symptoms.
“I learned a lot from that – to make sure mentally I was ready to race,” she says. “That one was pretty terrifying. ‘What if I just put myself back two years; are we really starting again?’”
Annika worked on her mental health with a psychologist and went on medication for anxiety and depression. “That’s been game-changing. I feel so much more like myself,” she says. She got into rock climbing, too.
In mid-2022, she felt well enough to return to competitive running, finishing eighth in the cross country nationals, and seventh in the 5000m at the national track and field champs. She was back working, too, as a digital media manager and running coach – she works with high school endurance athletes for Athletics Nelson.
“They helped my return to running. I’d warm up with them on a 15-minute run, then got to the stage where I could pace them,” she says.
Annika’s coach, Chris Pilone (who coached triathlete Hamish Carter to Olympic gold in 2004, and also ran at the world cross country champs) has helped her back into more structured training. “But he never puts pressure on me, letting me have plenty of flexibility and understanding I know myself well now,” she says.
A race like no other
Annika wondered if she’d run out of time to achieve her goal of following her parents and her fiancé (they got engaged earlier this month) to run for New Zealand.
“There was a long period where I thought, ‘You probably should have had your breakthrough by now’,” she says. “But when I see all these women running really strongly in their 30s and 40s, I feel like I have time. And I hopefully still have time to make more teams and break PBs I set in my early 20s.”
Her mum has been a role model. In 2000, she won the national 1500m title at the age of 40, when she was still breastfeeding Annika’s younger sister, Katrina.
Christine will offer her daughter advice about running at a world cross country race if she’s asked. “This is all her achievement, and we are just really proud of her,” she says.
“The main thing I’ll tell her is we always had a tremendous amount of fun. World cross country is like no other race. It’s fast and furious. If you’re feeling good, fit and healthy, it’s a lot of fun.”
In another fascinating twist of fate, Christine ran at a world cross country champs in the 1980s with New Zealand team-mate Glenys Kroon – whose daughter, Anneke Arlidge, is in the current New Zealand team with Annika.
A fortnight ago, Arlidge won the national 10,000m title – exactly 40 years after her mum was crowned national champion, and just four-hundredths of a second faster.
“We’re great family friends,” Annika says. “For the last 15 years, our families have gone camping together. When I head up north, Anneke and I are going to do some training together, running up lots of grass hills.”
Annika says she feels stronger after her five-year comeback. “I have much more resilience now. With every week, I get a little more confident, and feel less on a knife’s edge of potentially falling back into how I was.”
NZ Teams:
Senior women
Georgie Grgec, Auckland City Athletics, Coach Geoff Jerwood
Anneke Arlidge, North Harbour Bays, Coach Paul Hamblyn
Annika Pfitzinger, Athletics Nelson, Chris Pilone
Caitlin McQuilken-Bell, Auckland City Athletics, Coach Melissa Duncan
Katherine Camp, Te Awamutu, Coach Craig Kirkwood
U20 women
Catherine Lund, Ariki AC, Coaches Rebekah Aitkenhead and Alan Moir
Boh Ritchie, Hamilton City Hawks, Coach Angela Russek
Zara Geddes, Hill City, Coach Dave Stinson
Poppy Martin, Lake City AC, Coach Jason Cameron
Siena Mackley, Queenstown Athletics, Coach Neville Britton
Ava Sutherland, Olympic Harriers, Coach John Cope
