A self-described swim junkie with a chlorine allergy, Karim Rostami spent two hours in the pool this morning where he cranked out 6km — 120 lengths — on top of the 24km he’s already swum this week. He’s tired, snuffly — but afire with stories he loves to share with customers at Pt Chev Beach Café, the buzzing hub he’s run for the past six years.

They're great yarns — unbelievable, irresistible, and terrifically tangential. Sticking with Karim’s great passion for swimming, opting for the discipline of the pool, seems an orderly way ahead.

Except Karim only started swimming in 2015. “I randomly decided to challenge myself and learn how to swim,” he says. “My swimming background was zero, nothing. And the challenge is that, technically, I’m a disabled person. I’m a survivor of polio. When I swim, I can’t use my legs at all. I have a band that ties my ankles together: I use my upper body only.”

And this is where the story, in Karim’s own words, gets a little crazy. Because he was not content with merely learning to swim, of finding a way to stay afloat and haul his withered limbs from one end of the pool to the next. Instead, he heads to the open water: he swims from Takapuna to St Heliers, joins a relay from Waiheke to Auckland and then, last year, swims from Great Barrier Island to the city, part of a team that includes ex-All Black Ian Jones and former world triathlon champ, Rick Wells. This epic 100km swim took more than 24 hours.

There’s more. In 2019, Karim completed the Taupō Ironman 70.3. After his swim, he rode 90km on a specially modified bike with hooks that held his feet in, and then, on tiny, flapping legs, he ran 21km. He was last home. Put Karim’s name into YouTube and the footage from Taupō will make you cry.

He raised $46,000 that day for the UN’s Polio Eradication Programme. He’s raised tens of thousands more for Surf Lifesaving New Zealand and the Westpac Rescue Helicopter Trust. The Great Barrier swim raised $400,000 for St John which bought two ambulances.

“I want to give back to this country,” he says. “I was 18 years old when I arrived here. A refugee from Afghanistan running from the Taliban. I couldn’t speak English. I had no family, no friends.

I had no home. I didn't have a dollar to my name. I had nothing. And I had polio.

“If this country didn’t give me a second opportunity to live here; if this country didn't accept me for who I was when I turned up at the airport with nothing 20 years ago, I wouldn’t be standing here in front of you now.

“For me to give back to this country, for this beautiful nation, for the people… I don’t think I'll ever in my lifetime be able to give back what has been done for me.”

The regulars at Pt Chev Beach Café would quibble ferociously with this last point. This café, formed around the effervescence of its owner, has become a local institution (shortest review: Heavenly kai, supreme coffee and seriously addictive Little Lato gelato). Karim, this “proud, second-hand Kiwi”, is an Aotearoa legend.