Brisbane 2024, June 02

I only had to set my watch alarm for 8:00am today since the race start wasn't until 9:00am and was only five minutes away from the hotel. Strangely I wasn't feeling very thirsty in the morning so just had some biscuits before leaving for the race.

There were no trains going through the city for the entire weekend, so there was lots of traffic due to that plus the marathon road closures. A lot of people were already lining up at the start but I had a priority entry so didn't have to deal with the huge crowd, instead I found a small street nearby to do a short warmup.

From the beginning the first two kilometres of the race had a lot of hills, and steeper than I expected, although I hadn't seen a course elevation map. My watch was saying only 3:50/km but I wasn't sure how accurate it was with all the tall buildings around. I was feeling quite good as we got onto the bridge section and overtook a few people up the next hill that followed.

From about the four kilometres onwards I was on my own, except for overtaking lots of the four hour plus marathon runners who started much earlier at 6:00am. I finally caught a couple of people in the 10km race on the flatter river walk section heading back to the finish, before hitting one more steep hill.

I don't think I ever pushed right to the limit since I wasn't familiar with the course or conditions. I ended up finishing in the top 20 and first for age category in around 36:30, but it probably helped having other bigger ten kilometre races in Launceston and Melbourne on the same day. Overall I was a bit disappointed with the time, about three races in a row now finishing around 36:30 when I was hoping for close to 36 minutes. They had free clif bars at the finish which was nice.

I walked back to the hotel soon after finishing and put on my old running shoes for a short jog, taking their total up to 997 kilometres. Afterwards I had another trip to the city centre to bring back some lunch. I thought I'd be able to watch a live stream of the Launceston running festival but they didn't have one this year, so just had to watch other TV shows.

After lunch I went to both the pool and sauna to recover, my legs were still quite tired so I didn't go for an afternoon run before dinner. After dinner it was already time to pack up to leave in the morning.