Tatiana and Wayne have brought a familiar Colombian tradition into the outdoor life they have built together in New Zealand. Photo supplied.

On Saturday 17 October, riders will leave the Glenorchy Golf Club and head into some of the most spectacular riding country around Whakatipu. The Glenorchy Grind offers three distances - 57, 86 and 160 kilometres - taking cyclists towards Paradise and through the Dart, Rees, Greenstone and Routeburn landscapes. It is a grassroots cycling event and fundraiser for the Glenorchy Trails Trust, built around gravel roads, creek crossings, volunteers and the sort of long day outside that feels entirely at home in this part of New Zealand.

Among all that familiar Southern Lakes scenery will be something with roots much farther away: panela.

For Tatiana and Wayne, seeing it become part of an endurance community in New Zealand is the result of a journey that neither of them really planned. It begins in Colombia, with something Tatiana had known all her life, passes through an ultramarathon in one of the country’s most dramatic canyons, travels down the entire South Island on a bicycle, appears at major marathons overseas and eventually finds another home here in Queenstown.

Queenstown’s outdoor culture gave Tatiana and Wayne a natural place to continue experimenting with something that had been familiar in Colombia for generations. Photo supplied.

Something familiar

For Tatiana, panela never needed much explanation. It was simply part of growing up in Colombia. Panela is produced by cooking and reducing sugarcane juice before allowing it to set into its familiar form, but describing the process does not really explain its place in Colombian life. It turns up in aguapanela, served hot or cold and sometimes with lemon, and sits comfortably alongside foods, family routines and memories that Colombians often carry with them when they leave home.

It also has a long relationship with movement. Colombia has a deep cycling culture, from professional riders climbing mountain roads to ordinary people heading out with familiar foods tucked into a jersey pocket. Panela has long been part of that world too, alongside things such as bocadillo and other foods carried during long rides.

For Tatiana, none of this initially suggested a business. It was simply part of home.

Wayne encountered it very differently.

In Colombia, panela belongs as much to everyday food culture as it does to the country’s long relationship with cycling and endurance.

Chicamocha Canyon

During an 80-kilometre ultramarathon through Colombia’s Chicamocha Canyon, Wayne was dealing with heat, elevation and a stomach that was becoming increasingly unhappy with the gels and bars he had brought with him. At the aid stations he began eating pieces of panela, allowing him to keep taking in carbohydrates while continuing through the effort.

What stayed with him afterwards was not only the experience of the race. It was the simplicity of discovering something that Tatiana and generations of Colombians already regarded as entirely normal.

The experimentation came later.

Back in their everyday life, Wayne and Tatiana began dissolving panela in water and trying it during training. Over the following years they continued experimenting through running, cycling and racing, including the Boston and Sydney Marathons, while also sharing what they were making with friends. Over time those experiments became Panela Power, a Colombian panela-based endurance drink with added sodium, designed around prolonged activity.

But before there was a product, there were simply two people testing something from one person’s home culture inside the life they were building together.

Wayne’s relationship with panela as endurance fuel began during an 80-kilometre ultramarathon through Colombia’s Chicamocha Canyon.

From Picton to Bluff

One of the clearest examples came when Tatiana set off on a bikepacking journey through the entire South Island, from Picton to Bluff.

She took panela with her.

That journey says something important about this story because the relationship between panela and outdoor life did not begin as a marketing exercise. It was already travelling with Tatiana and Wayne before there was anything to sell. Long days on a bicycle simply gave an old food tradition a new landscape.

The scenery could hardly have been more different from Colombia. Instead of tropical cane-growing regions and Andean roads, there were South Island highways, changing weather, long distances between towns and eventually the landscapes of Otago and Southland. Yet the basic idea travelled surprisingly well: you are moving for hours, you need to keep going, and you carry something familiar with you.

Migration often works like that. People do not only bring passports and suitcases. They bring ways of cooking, ingredients, habits and small solutions to everyday problems. Most of those things remain private. Sometimes, though, something from one culture encounters a completely different place and discovers that it makes sense there too.

Tatiana carried panela with her while bikepacking the length of the South Island, from Picton to Bluff. Photo supplied.

An outdoor town

Queenstown is particularly good at creating these kinds of encounters. People arrive here from all over the world and find themselves living in a place where being outdoors can quickly become part of ordinary life. Running beside Whakatipu, cycling after work, heading into the mountains for a weekend, hiking, skiing or spending hours on gravel roads can become less like a special activity and more like part of the rhythm of living here.

Tatiana and Wayne fit naturally into that world. The story of Panela Power therefore feels less like a Colombian product being imported into Queenstown and more like two parts of their lives gradually meeting each other: the Colombia Tatiana came from and the endurance culture they now share in New Zealand.

That is also why Glenorchy feels like such a natural next chapter.

The Glenorchy Grind is not an arena separated from the place around it. Riders travel through working landscapes and remote roads towards Paradise and the Dart and Rees valleys. The longest course covers 160 kilometres, around 1,900 metres of vertical gain and more than 20 creek crossings, while the shorter courses still ask riders to spend hours moving through gravel, wind and whatever spring conditions arrive on the day.

It is precisely the kind of environment in which years of experimenting suddenly become very practical.

Glenorchy’s roads and mountain landscape provide the latest setting in a story that began thousands of kilometres away in Colombia. Photo supplied.

More than performance

There would be an easy way to tell this story only through sport: carbohydrates, sodium, race times, training and performance. Those things matter to athletes, and Panela Power exists in that world, but they are not the part of the story that interests me most.

What is more interesting is how an ingredient can change meaning without losing where it came from.

For somebody encountering panela for the first time at a cycling event in Glenorchy, it may simply become part of their day on the bike. They may know nothing about Colombian kitchens, aguapanela, cane-growing regions or generations of cyclists carrying familiar foods into the mountains.

For Tatiana, all of that is still there.

That is also why maintaining the Colombian connection matters. As Panela Power developed, Tatiana and Wayne built a relationship with Colombian producer Doña Panela, keeping the panela itself connected to the country where the tradition comes from rather than simply recreating the concept somewhere else.

What arrives in New Zealand therefore carries something with it.

A little history.

A little home.

For Tatiana and Wayne, Panela Power grew from years of experimenting with something that had already travelled with them through training, races and everyday life. Photo supplied.

Two mountain cultures meeting

Colombia and Queenstown are not obvious twins. The landscapes are different, the climates are different and their histories could hardly be more distant. Yet both places understand mountains, physical effort and the strange attraction of voluntarily making life harder by running or riding up them.

Perhaps that is part of why this particular cultural exchange feels so natural.

Wayne first encountered panela during an ultramarathon in a Colombian canyon. Tatiana carried it while travelling the length of New Zealand’s South Island. They continued experimenting with it through training and races around the world, then began sharing it with friends. Now it has reached another mountain community where people regularly spend their weekends asking their bodies to do unreasonable things for fun.

On 17 October, cyclists will head out from Glenorchy towards Paradise, the Dart and Rees valleys and the surrounding gravel roads. Some will return a few hours later. Others will spend most of the day out there.

Among the bikes, volunteers, food and conversations around the event will be a small Colombian contribution to the day.

For some riders it may simply be their first encounter with panela. For Tatiana, it carries much more: family kitchens, aguapanela, Colombia, and those familiar things you rarely think about until you move somewhere else. For Wayne, it carries a different sequence of memories - Chicamocha Canyon, those first pieces at an aid station, the experiments that followed, Boston, Sydney and years of endurance sport together.

Now another landscape joins the story.

Glenorchy.

The mountains are different. The roads are different. The language around the event has changed.

But the panela made the journey.

Panela Power is an event partner for the 2026 Glenorchy Grind, taking place on Saturday 17 October, bringing its Colombian panela-based endurance drink to the event.