Sydney Marathon 2025: Race Report

The basic story of the Sydney Marathon race report is that I just never got to my target pace with consistency, having in the lack of training sort of forgotten what that rhythm felt like off the top of my head, and then struggling through the start of the race to hit a consistent line through the waves of runners ahead of me aiming for slower times.

This is basically because I was given the opportunity to run Sydney this year, the first year of its Abbott World Major status, because, Dan, my friend, didn’t want to do it. He’d run the Brisbane Half earlier this year and he got to about 16 kilometres, where my friend Sean and I were waiting with signs, and he was hating it. He realised if he’d run the Sydney Marathon, forced himself to get through it, and crossed the finish line, he’d probably have never run again. Instead he opted for these things:

• One, to keep enjoying the sport.
• Two, to keep joining Sean and Corey and I for 6pm beers on a Sunday after our runs at our own paces and distances. 
• Three, to give away the marathon registration (even though this year Sydney banned transfers).

Three days before the Gold Coast marathon, he offered me his Sydney marathon place. I said yes then. He told me to wait until after the Gold Coast to decide. On July 6th I ran the Gold Coast marathon and on July 8th I messaged him to say, yes, I’d take his place. So on Sunday morning, I did.

We (myself, Jess, and Dan’s wife Rychelle) arrived at the Orange start group at about 6.30am. Rychelle runs faster than Dan so she had to meander on over to the Red start group shortly after we got there and she must have stood in the cold for nearly no reason while she and her cousin Ben — who I only met for the first time after the face but had heard a bit about beforehand — warmed up ahead of the main event. Rychelle runs faster than Dan and I run faster than Rychelle. This was what I consider to be the first obstacle. I saw it coming but what I didn’t expect was the needling into tight roads of the marathon’s 35,000 runners. 

When orange start group F finally began to move into the starters’ chute just after 8am, I was behind the pacer for a 5 hours and 30 minute finish. My goal time — as per the Gold Coast — was sub-4. Spoiler: I’d not achieve it. 

For the first 10 kilometres it felt as I basically described it: that I struggled, excepting the breadth of the Harbour Bridge, to find and keep a solid pace. But as much as I say this the truth is likely more something else: that between the Gold Coast and Sydney marathons I was just far less disciplined than in the lead up to the Gold Coast. In the eight weeks before the Gold Coast I ran 310.8 kilometres. In the eight weeks between the Gold Coast and Sydney, I ran 79.90 kilometres. Not the same. 

Sure: I was tending a foot injury, I was careful not to risk it, I was trying not to hurt myself, I was in New Zealand skiing for 9 days in between and then sick for a week and so on. Instead: I just undercut the opportunity. 

And in those 79.90 meagre kilometres in between were two 21 kilometre runs that I pushed myself to do to remind myself of the sheer distance and that’s what I noticed. By 17/18 kilometres on race day I felt tightness in my muscles that simply didn’t exist on the Gold Coast. Looking at Strava, you can see my time collapse at halfway basically as I realised I hadn’t trained for it. As Rychelle put it, she wasn’t, ‘Match fit.’ I might not have been either. I just didn’t tell myself that. 

I’ll confess that the 311 metres of elevation in the course of the Sydney marathon did get to me, especially in the first half. By the time I was heading south down Oxford then Flinders Streets then Anzac Parades, I was away from those hills but my muscles knew them well. What was to come next as far as elevation goes was the climb back from Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair at 39/40 kilometres. That was the only part I walked. Another improvement on the Gold Coast. 

Other improvements on the Gold Coast: 

Gels. I had a Maurten 160 calorie gel at 10 kilometres, 20 kilometres, and 30 kilometres. At 35 kilometres, I had a Maurten 100 calorie gel with caffeine that I had hoped would give me a bit of a second wind with the volume of caffeine that I was promised but, instead, my hopeless caffeine addiction rendered it a bit useless in that respect. But: I’m sure I was better off for having it than not having it. 

Mental. My head was in a much better place for Sydney and maybe that’s to do with pace and it could be too because of the gels. I was just much more prepared from the hard part to keep putting one foot in front of the other, breathe, and endure. My mental was much better from basically 32 kilometres onwards but Jess meeting me at 26 kilometres and again at 35 kilometres with full, blue Powerade bottles — despite the small, also-blue Powerade cups at the aid stations — helped me keep going.

“Who is walking for?” She’d ask.

“Not me,” I’d say.

In truth what we said was something else. But this is fine as reportage.

So I didn’t walk. Slow, sure, breaking down into 7 minutes per kilometre as a pace in places, but continuing to hold basically the line from halfway through to the end. What I’ve so far not included is the toilet stop between seven and eight kilometres because the portaloo I went into before the race had no toilet paper so I couldn’t, you know, fully relieve. It’s a common thing at a marathon to shit yourself a bit because the shitting muscles and the running muscles are the same. But as I said to Dan the night before the race, with one too many beers that maybe contributed to a slower pace if I was to be aggressive about isolating individual causes:

“My shit-myself risk tolerance is 0%.” No thank you. Not happening. I’ll shave a few minutes off for dignity. That probably cost me two-and-a-half, I’d say, maybe three. The only time in probably all of 2025 that I’ve gone to the bathroom without bringing my phone out for a bit of a scroll. 

This was just about par for the course for the rest of the race. No stopping, running onwards, slower than I’d hoped but buoyed by the gels that did in fact stop me from hitting the wall beyond 30 kilometres. I got out of them no boost but I got a lack of a crash which I suppose is in truth the idea. For next year’s marathon, wherever that is, I’ll follow the same gel strategy.

By 39 kilometres, by the downhill stretch through the eastern side of the Botanic Gardens towards Mrs. Macquarie’s I was feeling okay but tired. By 40 kilometres, back on the uphill, I was feeling okay. It was hard but I walked the uphill stretches more to be realistic than anything. Of the four inclines I recall I ran half of one and it felt not like speed. It felt like the same pace for just more energy. And at the crest, as we turned around the corner at Hyde Park and raced past the New South Welsh Parliament building, it all came home.

I made two playlists for the occasion. One, called harbourer, lowercase, for Sydney specifically and the other called persian, also lowercase, for the Gold Coast as a reference to the belligerents against whom the Battle of Marathon was fought. harbourer was (and remains) 1.5 hours long. persian was (and remains) 2.5 hours long. Between the two was four hours of running and with my AirPods out for 6 kilometres I’d dialled that in just about. But instead of letting the vibe play out just as it would based on whatever I thought would be fun at that time, I got my phone out of the band around my waist and I turned it, eyeing the downhill final stretch with the 4 hours and 40 minute pacer ahead of me in the middle distance as a target, to what I knew would work:

A combination of Tourist’s EST, Guard by Willaris K., and Four Tet’s remix of Bicep’s Opal. The simple bring-it-home combination. And like I always like to do at marathons I brought it home to Opal. 

And see the funny thing is that even now, writing this, my calves are tender and when I go to sleep and wake up my legs will be stiff and sore all over again, but at 40 kilometres I saw something like the blind man that beat me on the Gold Coast in 2023. A trio, running in matching singlets, and one of them had one leg with two crutches.

The Sydney Marathon for me was hard but it was not that hard. And I suspect that ultimately, all the training deficits and the elevation differences and the starting too far back aside, I just wanted it less than on the Gold Coast. I’d built the Gold Coast up to be ‘the’ target, my annual goal, the thing for which to reach to put upon the mantle and Sydney emerged as an opportunity that was historical — the first year it was a World Major Marathon — and I had the chance to put myself into it as a runner.

I’m glad I did.

It was not one leg on crutches hard but it was hard. Weeks off, my legs feeling it from about 19 kilometres, and distracted as I am even as a professional it’s hard to focus on one thing like this for four and a half hours — the Gold Coast marathon the only version of it before and the 2024 homemade Brisbane marathon before that and then, frankly, Black Friday, EOFYS, and the Gold Coast marathon in 2023 to draw the long bow backwards — and so as the road tapered down at an angle towards the Sydney Opera House, it all started to get to me.

Maybe some adrenaline, simple competition, driving me onwards and downhill as fast as I could at that time muster. Maybe the feeling was some kind of relief after the rest of the race, the course’s negative elevation here now really real, but I found myself on the edge of tears as Opal climbed and I descended and the 2025 Sydney Marathon came to a close.

It hurt a lot, true, but it didn’t cost me a lot. 

Rychelle’s rules, defined while she was stretching on a cowskin rug at a hotel in Potts Point on the night before, were, in order: stay safe and have fun. By the time we got to the starting zones, she hadn’t worked out yet if she would persist with only box one ticked. My priority was completion and I knew I’d enjoy it after the fact. And the funny thing is that so far I haven’t felt that elation I felt after the Gold Coast, the two weeks strutting everywhere. We’ll see. I might after all.

That’s not to say I feel bad. I feel good. I’m glad I did it. 

But I knew I’d missed my target early on. And I knew why, far beyond just where I started which is a fun story more than it is an explanation, and so the lessons for my next marathon — next year, not again in 2025 — are pretty simple:

• Train properly.
• The gel nutrition plan is good.
• Don’t be a bitch at 35 kilometres.
• Run something flat if you want a PB.

At 42.190 kilometres I did some finger guns to the camera at the finish line, pushed over the last 5 metres, and turned off my Apple Watch that had recorded the whole thing in its first outing helpfully in miles. I walked it off down the 600m walk off zone away from the Harbour Bridge. Kipchoge had beaten me by two hours and twenty minutes.

“The medal is beautiful,” Dan messaged me the day before after he picked up his (our? my?) race bib. I opted not to look it up beforehand so I could see it for the first time in person afterwards. I’m glad I did. Silver, polished, a circle with the Opera House’s curves bitten out of the bottom and a circle above cut out announcing the seventh Abbott World Major Marathon.

The medal is beautiful. When Jess met me down the walk off zone, before the official reunite zones, she was even more beautiful than she is normally. I was disgusting, caked in salt, bright red, sunburnt and exhausted, and she pulled me in close and told me:

“I’m so proud of you.”

She’d done 19 kilometres herself just to keep up with me around the track. Her hair, dyed red weeks ago before we’d gone to New Zealand, had faded to a mousier brown but I’m colourblind enough to not know really what colour it is with accuracy, and I held a broken plastic runner’s bag out of which slipped a complimentary final bottle of blue — by chance — Powerade, and Darling Harbour had small waves and the sky above was clear and perfect and so was everything except my time.