Runners love to rank races by a single number — total distance, total climb, total vert-per-km. By that logic, WUU2K's steep Wellington hills should crush Taupō's rolling lakeside trail every time. But athletes who've done both will tell you it's not that simple: Taupō's 100km asks a completely different question of your legs than WUU2K's 65km, and "which one is harder" depends entirely on what you mean by hard.
Two courses, two different personalities
WUU2K is a point-to-point race across the hills that ring Wellington, starting in Khandallah and finishing at Mt Victoria — taking in Mt Kaukau, the Tip Track, and other Wellington landmarks along the way on single track, four-wheel-drive trail, and rocky ground, almost all of it exposed to whatever Wellington's weather is doing that day. The 60km ultra packs somewhere in the range of 2,500–3,000+ metres of climbing into a relatively short distance, and it does it in short, sharp, repeated pitches. You don't ease into these climbs; you're straight up a wall, then straight back down it, several times over.
Taupō's 100km is a different animal. It follows the Great Lake Trail around Lake Taupō — forested single track, farmland, and forestry road, with somewhere around 2,800 metres of gain spread across nearly twice the distance. The organisers themselves market it as one of the most runnable ultra networks in the country. The climbing is real, but it rolls; there's no single wall like the Tip Track, and long stretches genuinely let you run.
That contrast — steep and short versus rolling and long — is the whole story.
It's not the elevation total, it's the density and the duration
Do the simple math and the picture sharpens: WUU2K crams its climbing into a shorter distance, so the rate of vertical gain per kilometre is meaningfully higher than Taupō's. That's the grounded principle behind our Climbing pillar — the energy cost of climbing rises sharply with steepness, so a course that stacks steep pitches close together asks something different of your legs than one that spreads similar total gain over twice the ground. WUU2K's climbs (and, just as much, its descents) are the kind you feel as a sequence of hard punches. Taupō's are more of a long, steady lean.
That's also why the two courses stress different pillars. WUU2K's short, steep, repeated grades put real weight on Climbing and especially Descending — the eccentric braking load of coming back down Mt Kaukau or the Tip Track more than once is the kind of muscle-damage stimulus our Descending pillar exists to flag. Taupō's extra 40km, by contrast, shifts the emphasis toward Aerobic capacity and, more than anything, Durability — the ability to hold form and pace as fatigue compounds over a much longer day on your feet. This mirrors a broader pattern in the research on endurance performance: shorter, steeper efforts lean on climbing and descending capacity, while as duration stretches out, accumulated fatigue and pacing discipline start to matter more than raw vertical.
Why "runnable" can be its own trap
Don't mistake Taupō's runnability for "easy," either. A course that lets you run more of it is a course that quietly bills you for every kilometre you spend running rather than hiking — hiking spares your quads in a way that running doesn't, especially on descents. Taupō's rolling, largely runnable profile removes some of that built-in protection over its full 100km, which is exactly the kind of cumulative, late-race durability test that a shorter, hikeable-in-places course like WUU2K doesn't ask for in the same way.
So the honest answer to "which is harder" is: it depends which failure mode you're worried about. WUU2K will find you out if your legs haven't banked eccentric capacity for repeated steep braking. Taupō will find you out if you haven't built the durability to hold together deep into a much longer effort — or if your training has been all volume and no specificity for either.
Training one doesn't automatically prepare you for the other
This is the part that trips people up. A runner who's spent months hammering Wellington's hills for WUU2K can show up at Taupō with excellent Climbing and Descending numbers and still get exposed by the sheer duration if their Durability hasn't been built the same way — through consistent volume and back-to-back long efforts, not just steep reps. Just as easily, a Taupō veteran with huge time-on-feet can arrive at WUU2K aerobically strong and still get punished by the first steep descent off Mt Kaukau if their legs have never absorbed that kind of repeated, race-pace braking load.
Neither gap shows up on a training-log summary. It shows up in the specific pillar the course actually tests — which is the entire premise behind checking a course's real demands before you assume "fit" translates automatically from one race to another.
The takeaway
WUU2K and Taupō's 100km aren't different points on the same difficulty scale — they're different tests entirely. One is a short, brutal audit of your Climbing and Descending. The other is a long audit of your Durability, with Aerobic capacity as the foundation under it. Train for the total distance and vert on paper, and you can still walk into either race under-prepared for the specific way it's going to come after you.