My second weekend trip to Gold Coast for the marathon running festival, the previous was in 2015 when I ran with a sore foot (different plantar fasciitis issue) and just managed under 1 hour 30 minutes.
Friday
Drive to the airport for a late afternoon flight. Like usual at Melbourne the flight was delayed by waiting to get allocated a runway for take off. Now you get lots of annoying people on a plane flight as we all know, but the guy in front of me was a whole new category. He had printed out a whole stack of paper to read on the plane...no problem with that. However, every time he finished a page he'd rip it in half twice, such an annoying sound to have to listen to someone tearing paper for two hours.
The plane landed only a bit late and the buses from the airport were still running until 7:00pm, what a service. At least the trams seem to run much later. We stayed in the same hotel as last time at
Surfers Paradise North, walking from the tram stop first impressions were that it seemed incredibly windy, apparently not the usual winter conditions.
Saturday
I didn't get a lot of sleep due to that wind and various other noise, then had an early morning since they start the parkrun in Queensland at 7:00am instead of 8:00am due to the warm weather - although not an issue for winter they have to be consistent.
The
Main Beach parkrun was cancelled due to the Saturday marathon events nearby - 10km and other shorter distances. The next closest parkrun was slightly further away in Bundall, simply named
Surfers Paradise parkrun, about 2.5 kilometres each way from the hotel.
I forgot to mention until this point what my race preparation week had been like. I had a good 21 kilometre run on the previous Sunday, just running slowly and no injuries had developed. Then waking up on Monday my foot was in pain all day and night, and still wasn't better by Wednesday. I got an x-ray which showed nothing, as expected, so went to see a podiatrist next. She didn't think it was the dreaded stress fracture - which can mean two months off running - but something a bit less severe which I can't remember at the moment. I got some taping done and was told I could try some combination walking-running in a few days, but I didn't mention the half marathon I had entered...
My foot had no obvious pain by Saturday, but I still decided to only walk the 5 kilometre parkrun - in 47 minutes - and see how the foot responded to a higher volume of walking after no exercise all week.
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| Just running the last 100 metres. |
Back to the hotel and so far no new foot problems, free breakfast was the standard stuff and a pancake machine!
Went on a bus trip, stopped at a farmers market near
Marina Mirage then back on the bus to the
factory outlets - nothing of interest in size 13 at Nike and didn't find anything else worth buying at the other stores.
Went on a tram trip next, stopped for lunch at Surfers Paradise then continued down to Broadbeach before the
Marathon Expo closed at 5:00pm to get the race pack for tomorrow. My only purchase was some different flavours of Clif bar I hadn't see before.
Had a bit of time left in the afternoon, so got a shuttle bus to Metricon Stadium for the
Gold Coast vs. Richmond AFL game. The bus took forever in traffic, although the stadium has no parking lots so not sure what all the cars were doing. The ticket categories seemed quite expensive for a Gold Coast game, although some categories were already sold out, so got the cheap seats in the upper level for $45 which turned out to be the very last row, but the views weren't too bad and it was undercover.
Richmond was ahead 56 to 13 after the first quarter, and it was really cold sitting in the stands in shorts and a t-shirt. Left a bit early after three quarters to go back to the hotel to rest for tomorrow, didn't miss an amazing comeback, as Richmond won by almost 100.
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| Are you ready for some football ? |
I hadn't decided for sure what I was going to do on Sunday morning for the half marathon yet, but the most likely plan was to try the walk-run combination as the podiatrist suggested for a while and see what happened, and I was prepared to give up if any pain came back. Then while I was walking in the hotel bathroom I smashed my 'good' foot on this metal doorstop and cut open the top of one toe, blood pouring out and quite painful.
Nothing I could do about it now, so just had to wait and see how that was feeling the next morning as well...
Total - 22750 steps, 19.5 kilometres
Sunday
Had to be ready to leave even earlier today at 5:00am since the
half marathon starts at 6:00am. The hotel location wasn't the best - but not much was available at the time - it's a 4 kilometre walk to the start, and far enough down the tram line that it's already full of passengers when it arrives. By the time I had made the short walk across to the tram station I could tell my damaged toe was no good inside my shoe, so I made the unfortunate decision to not risk it and went back to the hotel to get changed out of my running clothes.
Jason got lucky and made it onto a tram to the start line, while I walked all the way up to the race in the dark and made it just before the start too - although in the dark my phone photos came out quite poorly. Both of my feet actually weren't feeling too bad during the long walk, but my knee joint was really stiff for some other reason.
I was watching the elite runners warming up and got to see one of the security staff taking his job way too seriously. First he was abusing the runners for warming up on the 'wrong' side of the road even though it wasn't being used for anything - the marathon didn't start on that side for another 1.5 hours. Then when too many people were ignoring him about that he started picking out anyone who had finished warm up and told them to get off the road if they had finished preparing. This guy was just super angry for no reason at all.
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| The half marathon start line. |
Once the runners had started I walked over to the
finish line to watch the race on the TV screen, again freezing cold standing around in shorts and t-shirt at 6:00am. Just as the race was into the last couple of kilometres and Australian Jack Rayner was surging to the lead the coverage dropped out - possibly the motorbike had to get off the course before the finish. We were left to wait several minutes to see who came around the final corner in the lead, and it was Jack who had managed to stay in front of two Japanese runners. In the women's race - which we got no coverage of at all - it was close all the way to the finish, only a few seconds between the top two Australian women.
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| A poor quality shot of the half marathon winner. |
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| And the women's winner. |
I stayed around to watch some more of the elite runners coming in to the finish, then went up to see the start of the marathon. Had a heavy burst of rain come down right before the
marathon start, which would have been really annoying for the competitors to start soaked. Once they had taken off I took the tram back to the hotel as I had no idea when Jason was finishing - only about 25 minutes afterwards actually.
Did not have many plans for the day as I thought I would be sore and recovering from the half marathon. Went to a much better farmers market near the previous day's parkrun, then a round of mini golf before lunch near the beach - which was still closed due to heavy winds.
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| The farmers market / parkrun at HOTA. |
Even without having running a half marathon, all of the monotonous walking had worn out my legs, so had an easy afternoon as well and finished off watching the
John Wick 3 - really disappointing.
Total - 21500 steps, 18.5 kilometres
Monday
Just another early start to travel home. Melbourne airport did not disappoint, doing loops of the airport waiting to land as usual...
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| Maybe next time. |
