Sydney Marathon

What a beautiful city. After arriving in Sydney a couple of days ago and attempting to come to terms with the jet lag I decided to go for a run on the Saturday to over come my initial fear – heights!

The race starts by taking you over Harbour Bridge which, as you can see from the photo, is quite a height. Therefore, on Saturday, I took a short run from my hotel to a near by bridge for a test run! After the initial shakey legs and nervous laughter I made it across the bridge on the 3 meter wide footpath. My shear relief coupled with being in Sydney meant I then got a bit carried away and went off running for a couple of hours. Not really the best idea the day before an event - but great fun.

Due to jet lag I found myself still awake at 1:30 with endless cups of camomile tea not really helping. The early morning start to help reduce traffic congestion in the city (with road closures) and avoid entrants running in the mid-day sun meant a shock to many of the runners who where taken back by the extremely cold winds before the sun had risen fully.

The event start area below the harbour Bridge was well supported and organised for the 25,000 entrants in the different races making up the Sydney running festival. The start area comprised of refreshment tents and the normal bag drop off and free goodies like running vests and caps which a lot of people who had forgot there own caps where very grateful for.

From the start area you can see the Sydney Opera house in the distance where all runners would hopefully finish in the 5½hr cut off. This was possibly part of the reason why so many of the entrants had chosen the half marathon over the full marathon. Photo attached of me attempting to not look to cold at 6:30 in the morning.

I had planned to meet someone from the UK who I had run with in a previous event. Due to the number of people and my relatively late arrival, due to the jet lag and need to take some photo’s, I started at the back of the field with the aim of catching him up. What seemed like a good plan did not work out as well as we had hoped. As we had both probably worked on the same basis of running that little bit faster than normal at the start and trying to concentrate on finding one another which was extremely difficult to do with the number of runners and the wonderful course.

While the course did have sections run on main motorways – mainly when crossing the two main bridges these still meant lots of great views of key land marks in Sydney. Similarly the remainder of the course took you through some wonderful parks including the Botanical gardens and Centinnal Park. As well as taking you through the city (which was good for me in that my previous days running meant I was relatively familiar with these parts of the course). However the one thing many runners did mention after the event was the number of inclines and declines which did make it hard going later on in the event.

While the sun was particularly hot leaving a few runners who had not used enough sun lotion with rather red complexions, the days weather was perfect and the event was a fabulous way to see Sydney.

Due to the lower number of participants than a big event like London there where much fewer spectators, however due to the layout of the course the spectators where evenly spread out along the whole course meaning great support for all the runners. The finish is perfect with the last 2kms run along the harbour where you can see the Sydney Opera House, the finish for the event.

Great support at the end with crowds all around the last few hundred yards, plenty more refreshments and massage in the finishing village, set in the Botanical gardens made for a great end to a great event.

As well as being a memorable event for its location – it is also the event that means I go through the 600 mile target with a total of 619 miles to date and means I now get to a fourth continent.