Race report - sydney marathon

The road to Sydney......  by Sophie Kennedy

What feels like many months ago I decided to reflect on my running journey and make a choice about my next running challenge. My running career started in Sydney in 2013 at the Sydney Blackmores half marathon and I thought, well why not try the marathon course? It’s meant to be one of the most picturesque!

With the decision made, I started the journey with what has seemed like a thousands of 4am starts, some even 3am, countless runs along the Brisbane river, physio and dietitian appointments and mountains of sweaty washing.

Pre race Saturday was filled with the obligatory pre race park run in North Sydney with the Fortius crew. It was a good hit out pre race, but the post Parkrun breakfast with Pip, Mirjana and Matt was amazing.

Other normal pre marathon activities included carb loading and fueling with friends. Matt embarked on a little marathon himself, hitting the Ale Trail in Sydney’s inner west. He finished the short course on the Ale trial feeling pretty happy with himself and celebrated with another beer!

Race day was perfect conditions with the potential to be hot. I saw Pip at the start. We were both nervous, but looking forward to it.

Lining up at the start line, thinking...... oh wow. This is it. I hope I can get through this!

And then..... people started running! I didn’t hear the start gun!

One of the highlights of the race is running over the Harbour bridge. It’s amazing!! It was a good reminder to take a moment and appreciate what I was doing.

The first 15km of the race takes you out to centennial park in the eastern suburbs. It was starting to get hot, but this part of the course is shady. The elites ran past me when I was at 9km, cool as cucumbers, they had just hit 20km.

I started to come into my own from 15km onwards. The race felt good, I was fuelling well and drinking still. After running out of centennial park you run through the city and out to Pyrmont. The crowd dissipates and this is where you can hit the wall. You are about 30km in by this stage. I could see there were a lot of people struggling.

After Pyrmont, you come back around through darling Harbour. The finish is about 4km away..... so close! This is where I started to feel a bit dehydrated and like I could hit the wall. However, I dug a little deeper and pushed a little harder.

The last 2km you come around from the rocks into circular quay to the opera house. You can see the finish and you then realise how far 2km actually is. My thought process was to just get the race done so I put my foot down and sped up.

Matt was about 600m from the finish line. I hadn’t seen him all race and it gave me the little boost I needed to get it done.

Running over the finish line and pressing STOP on my watch was amazing. As I crossed the line I saw the clock at 3:50 or so. I knew I’d done a PB. offical time was 3:47:11 time in my watch was 3:45:27. A PB of 12-14 mins depending on what time you looked at.

Recovery areas are amazing. All finishers are happy and love to talk to you about the run. It’s my favourite part of the run. Listening and hearing everyone’s race stories.

Recovery of course means having a glass of bubbles to celebrate, while wearing your finishers medal. I made sure I did this. And told everyone that asked that I had run a marathon that day. ​