Sydney 2025, May 18

For the 10 kilometre morning race the elite and sub 40 group was scheduled to started at 7:20am. The start line was close to the hotel, just across the road and a few hundred metres towards Accor Stadium.

There was a bit of rain overnight again so the roads were wet, but only very light rain was still going. I was able to delay leaving the hotel until 6:50 and did a quick warm up for two kilometres. I was a long way from the front when the start line was opened, but I was only expecting to finish around 200th based on last years results.

From the beginning it was very busy, making it hard to even stay inside the cones on the outside line of the course. Due to this amount of people I was having to go much further than the ideal racing line, and there was a very slow point at the first turn when exiting the Accor Stadium loop, although I still recorded a good 3:35 first kilometre.

There was a few slopes heading out towards Wentworth Common, and my times dropped to about 3:39 and it was still very busy on the road. After the turn around was the two small uphill sections on the way back to Accor Stadium, which was the hardest part of each lap.

I managed to maintain consistent times into the second lap and got down to 3:34 per kilometre. The second time going uphill was a bit harder again, but didn't impact my time. I was finally hurting a little for the final section into the athletics stadium, it was a long way around the outside before finally getting to the track entrance.

Finally we got onto the track for a bit of a sprint finish, where I was only slightly faster. My average pace of 3:36 was good and would have been close to 36 minutes, but was actually about 36:30 due to the extra distance from not taking the optimal racing line. My finish position was a bit outside the top 250 due to the big increase in participants.

The race course was quite good overall, I didn't mind doing two laps, but having some many fast people to navigate was a small negative. I'd probably come back and do it again some time, but not desperate to come back next year specifically.

After walking back to the hotel I had to quickly get ready to leave at 9:00, on a bus and then two trains but still got the airport in almost an hour, with about an hour to wait for boarding. The short time between running and hours of sitting really had an impact on my legs, so I was thankful to finally get off the flight in Melbourne.