EP 1 - AN INTRODUCATION

[00:01] Here we are. In the beginning. This is it. This is the start, Courtney. This is the start. We're so quick we don't even have a name, but I just know it's the right time. We've got a good feeling. This is day one, this is ep one, this is show one of what I don't just think, I hope, I believe is gonna be something we're doing for a very long time.

[00:32] Well, I've avoided podcasts. Literally DMs about podcasts. Very, very rare will I go on a podcast, but I'm a big believer in moments. Let's start at the beginning. We often go running in the bush together, and we literally do one of your radio shows in the bush. We get onto some pretty good topics out there, and I'm going, why don't we just go to your studio and do this? If you're sitting here listening to this or watching this and thinking, I actually don't know who either of these blokes are — my name's Liam Flanny, and I'm a radio host with

[01:10] Triple M. I call footy as well, and I've been doing that now for probably twelve, fourteen years or so. And you, Courtney Atkinson — if they don't know who you are and they're listening to this, how dare they, disgraceful behaviour really. Well, if they're young, mate, they may not know. I'm getting on a bit, but the quickest explanation — imagine someone's met you for the first time, a young person.

[01:40] How do you, if they ask who are you, what have you done, what do you do, how do you actually introduce yourself? It's difficult. Day to day I sometimes struggle to know what I'm doing myself. But I generally go to: I'm a free surfer of endurance these days. I'm a runner at heart, but I'm a free surfer of anything endurance. That's where I've ended up. But there's been a bit of a journey to get there, right? So day to day, I suppose, I run a lot.

[02:14] Yeah. Day job's probably marketing for a lot of outdoor kind of brands and companies I'm involved with, like Red Bull, Salomon, Subaru — there's been a few around the traps that I get through day to day. But I still get out and have a race, whether it's adventure racing, mountain biking, but my real love always comes from the running. And so yeah, you and I run together up in Nerang, and we've done the border trail once, and I've attempted to run with your crew out of Main Beach once or twice

[02:48] as well. And you're right, we started running together when I moved up to the coast from Sydney, and these chats we have through Nerang are everything and nothing. We'll talk about everything — I think the last run we went on we solved the problem of the Brisbane Olympic Games, which we're gonna get into on another episode, because having been to two Olympics, you had some thoughts I hadn't heard before about the Olympics and how

[03:19] they should be run moving forward, that I'd love to hear from you again and explore deeper when I'm not knackered after 15 Ks. We'll talk about things like that, and we'll also talk about parenting — we've both got young kids. And those conversations, I walk away from every one of our runs going, how good was that? I feel great physically 'cause I've gone for a run, but I've also had a really interesting conversation with an interesting bloke. So we've decided to cut out the running and bring them in-house.

[03:51] In studio. It's never good listening to a podcast when you're panting — there's a lot of deep breathing going on in those runs. Talk about that idea actually. I've trialled it, more for the sound on the feed and that type of thing. It's really hard to cut out the wind noise you get with it, but who knows, technology comes along. For the moment, here we are — this is the beginning. We literally don't have a name, because we've rushed into this. It's literally been a phone call, we had lunch,

[04:21] we had lunch, and now we're here in the studio recording Ep One, The Beginning. Let me ask you this: why now? Why did you want to do this now? Like I said, never a big fan of podcasts — I listen to a fair few, but never been that interested in going on them. But it was our last run, like you said, and I was thinking, what we talk about is too good. And it's a space where I'm trying to find challenges for myself these days.

[04:52] So going back to the beginning, like where we were talking about the Olympics — I was in my twenties and early thirties at the Games, and I'm still competitive. When I get through some training and I'm not injured or fallen off bikes or whatever else is going on, I still love to compete. But what I'm finding challenging with life these days — family, different work, other things — is I really find it hard to find that one thing I want to go after.

[05:22] You've just come off a goal — you broke that ninety-minute mark at the half marathon down in Adelaide on the weekend. That's a real goal you had, you went out and achieved it. That's what I miss now — I kind of keep myself fit, but I don't really have those goals. It's an interest 'cause I've just turned forty, and I know what you mean, though I was never an elite athlete like you were. I was never — well, I did get paid once to play a game of football. I have received a payment in return.

[05:53] I played one game of reserves for North Adelaide — I'm from Adelaide originally — North Adelaide Roosters reserves, played against Central Districts, received fifty dollars for my time and effort, got flogged by a hundred and twenty-odd points that day. But I'm still an incredibly competitive person. I don't want the bumps and bruises that come with footy anymore, and now I love running, and I've learnt to accept

[06:23] and embrace the competitiveness with myself. I love that PBs are still something in my future — very much in my future in the sport of running. And I think at the age of forty I've actually never run better. You mentioned the half marathon I've just come off — I've never run better, and I'm forty years old, and I'm really excited about that, 'cause I've got — we'll get into all this later — I've got a list of things I wrote up when I turned forty the other week, stuff I wanna see if I can do physically.

[06:55] And we've talked about this — there's a few things that scare the hell out of me, to be honest, and not all of them are in running, some are in other things. This is gonna — as we keep going with this podcast, it's gonna keep us accountable to do that as well. But let's start — you mentioned running, when can you remember getting into it, before footy? When's the first time you ran? I always ran reasonably well through school, cross country and stuff, ran reasonably well.

[07:26] Played footy though, AFL. I reckon it was 2016, it was Easter, I was living in Sydney — if anybody out there lives in Sydney, you'll know what the 440 is. There's a run club based out of Bronte called the 440, and it happens every Saturday morning at sparrow's fart. You run about seven Ks, but you do ten laps of the Bronte car park cutting — it's tough. I went down there for the first time because a mutual friend of ours, Andy Reid from Bondi Rescue, had signed me up to City2Surf.

[08:02] And he'd said, mate, the 440 is great run training. So I went down and did it — and this is before it became this behemoth that hundreds of people turn up to. There was a run-club-with-your-shirt-on-mandatory kind of thing — hey, we've got plenty of time to unpack run clubs at a later date. What I will say is, what the 440 was when I first went out to it, I loved. What it is now is not for me. That doesn't mean it's not for other people.

[08:35] It's an enormous thing most Saturday mornings, and it's a credit to Noxie, the bloke who runs it — he gets upwards of two hundred people there on a Saturday morning. A lot of people wanna be a part of it because it's a great spot, you take great photos, you jump in the Bronte ocean pool afterwards, it's an incredible scene and an incredible vibe. There's a lot of positive-affirmation stuff that goes on beforehand as well, and that's totally fine, but that's not what I want out of my run club anymore.

[09:05] So when I started, I went down there on a Saturday morning, Noxie was there and maybe five other people — I think six of us in total. And because it was cold, everyone sat in their cars till about thirty seconds before 5am, or whatever time we started — it's early. We rolled out, and Noxie just went, "righto, let's go." That was it. You ran your ten laps, got to the end, awesome.

[09:35] Good job, jump in the pool, off you go. It's not what it is now, and that's okay, it's not for me anymore, I don't live there anymore. But I remember coming back from it going, that was really cool, I really enjoyed that. I started going regularly, and then I found another run club that Reedy set up, which I'm still technically a part of even though I live out of state — it's called Runners in the Dark. And these guys, that's my sort of run club.

[10:05] There's no bullshit, there's no — everyone cares for each other in a very serious way within the group, but there's no histrionics, no big presentation at the beginning, which some run clubs have, and that's fine, again I'm not being critical of those things, I'm just saying it's not for me. This crew was very much, let's turn up, hey guys, we're gonna smash out 10k, and just chat. So question is, you've turned up to my Tuesday morning run club.

[10:37] Yeah, well, not mine — our group at the Spit here on the Gold Coast — and you've never come back. What's wrong — we call ourselves OPS, I think it's something — what's wrong with your — nothing's wrong with your run club. The only issue is timing and my kids. I've got kids now, I didn't have kids when I joined these other run clubs. I've got kids now who need to get to school, and I'm on school drop-off.

[11:07] To get up to your run club, then back to my house and get my kids — I can't make it work, that's the only problem. We invite a lot of people and they come once and never come back. Is it me? I think we should unpack run clubs another day, because there's so many and I think they're great — I find that's my baseline, run clubs are awesome, you just gotta find the one that suits you. We'll unpack run clubs another day. To try and put a bow on my running journey though — basically once I joined these two respective clubs in Sydney, I found my tribe, to use a wanky term.

[11:40] That is a wanky term, I apologise, it's the last time I'll use it. I found the people I like exercising with, the people I like running with. I found this one group where I joke about myself being the snail of the group, because I'm the slowest, and I loved running with people who were better than me because it made me run harder. And I also had this other running group where some of my mates who I was a better runner than got involved, and I got to bring them along on this — exploring how much I loved

[12:13] running. And since then, since that moment back in 2016 — marathons, ultra marathons, I've done UTA 50K a couple of times, which is incredible. And this is around the time you and I started hanging out too, after Red Bull Defiance, up in Cairns as well. I did that with a mate who's now — he did UTA 100K this year, he's caught the bug. So yeah, Defiance was a two-day adventure.

[12:43] So now I live here on the Gold Coast, which is where my wife's originally from. I host a radio show on Triple M on the Gold Coast, with Liesl Jones — another Olympian, a fellow teammate of yours — which I've got a bit of history with. Yes, we did a Qantas advert together at one stage. So yeah, I now live here and do a radio show, and I've got two young kids, and that's the other part of the running I like — showing them, it's infectious.

[13:22] You teach your kids through a bit of action as much as telling them what to do. They see me come back of a morning having run — they don't care how far, they just see me come back from a run and I'm happy, it makes me feel good. And they see me taking on challenges like the half marathon, and I think, I hope, that as they get older they'll have a bit of that embedded in them. Yeah, running, structure, discipline, all those things — I'm a big believer, that's how I grew up as a kid, right?

[13:55] And that's how I probably — I'll get into how I got into running and the first day I realised I could run decent — but it's all that structure. That's what makes you feel good. In the end we're gonna talk a lot about running, but to me it's fitness — there's a number of different ways you can feel that same thing, whether it's heading out in the surf in the morning, getting on mountain bikes, swimming in the ocean, they all have the same effect. For some reason though, running, I always am drawn back to it, right?

[14:28] And I didn't start as a runner. My history here on the Gold Coast — grew up here, went to school over at Miami — was more of a swimmer, surf lifesaver and all that. I couldn't run at primary school to save myself, never made regionals or anything like that. Then I went to a school up here at Southport called TSS, and literally the first week at TSS you do army cadets. So we were shipped off to a camp.

[14:58] This is going back a while, so times were different — you had a week camp. Each morning we'd get up in the boots, full gear, and run three K. So that actually made you dress as an army — actually doing cadets, mate. If you go through Southport on a Friday you'll still see kids walking into school — my son's up there at the moment — you'll see kids walking into school in full army uniform. So anyway, I'm out at this army cadet camp, grade eight, and we're running three K each morning in the gear.

[15:29] And on the last morning there was a trophy, and they literally said, okay, the winner this morning gets — and it was a boot on a piece of wood. Don't know why, but I won, I ran quick, and from that day it was literally that moment, that boot on a piece of wood. Do you remember? No, okay, I was slopping around in a pair of military boots. Where were you finishing, on like, the first couple of days, doing that every day?

[15:59] God, no, but you'll quickly learn with me, I haven't got a good memory for results or for things, but certain things I remember, and it was the boot. On the — and you want to, I won, and from that day on I was a runner. So talking from the perspective of a running background — some early on, I was running with the school, we'd run up from school to the Spit and back, like 16k, in grade eight, that kind of thing.

[16:29] My first kind of real breakout run was the national 3,000 metres under-15s. There's a guy called Marty Dent, you'll know Marty — went on to run the Beijing Marathon, best marathoner in Beijing for Australia — and I got second to him in the under-15 three thousand. That was kind of — how old, under fourteen? Under fifteen, so I would've been fourteen at the time. But yeah, so you're at an age where all the talent-ID programs then go,

[17:02] "that guy." So I was on a running journey, winning at school, doing all that, and then there was a teacher at school, Gregory Dan, who did the Hawaii Ironman for Australia — he'd grown up swimming all his life, and he was now this runner doing pretty decent, getting into triathlon. That was the catalyst, I suppose, I started getting out. I remember riding up the back here at Springbrook, tracky pants, sand shoes, no idea. My first — people who ride Springbrook on the Gold Coast will know there's this first left-hand corner.

[17:34] Yeah, I just didn't stop, straight through the gravel, straight off — you know, we've just learnt the hard way. So fast forward, I then started travelling, and that was it, I went through the ranks really quick, to the point where in my last year at school I won the national championship in Australia. That gave me the opportunity to go with the senior team. Back then they did great talent-ID — instead of taking six seniors across for the European trip, they took the best junior and the five best seniors.

[18:08] Greg Welch, Greg Bennett, Chris McCormack — I literally lived in an apartment with these guys in Germany when I was seventeen, eighteen. But the Croc's my idol. Is he? He's my idol — I don't have many heroes in sport, but the Croc is the guy I try to emulate, from the beginning. Funny, I'll tell you a story about the Croc. When I first started racing on TV, when I'd just got out of school, the Croc was winning everything — this was back when Uncle Toby's was on TV.

[18:38] Before social media existed and you didn't have a choice, it didn't matter — you were watching, Ironman would come on, and it was just in between cricket season and footy season. But the Croc — they'd do these kind of hero pieces on him, and he came from a place called Mirriwinni. They'd do these pieces on him where he'd be riding through the cane fields, and at the end of it all he'd jump into this waterhole.

[19:08] And the big thing was there's crocs in there — that's how he got his nickname, and that was the whole persona. So when I got out of triathlon, like twenty years later, and I started getting into trail running and all this stuff — the highest mountain in Queensland, Mount Bartle Frere, is actually where he used to go swimming, in the town of Mirriwinni. So we started going and running it, racing up there for the record, and we'd come back and have a swim at a place called Babinda Boulders — a tourist attraction, and that's what they were selling him as, being the Croc.

[19:41] God — downriver, of course, down the creek there's heaps of crocs. But I love the way they build up sport, build up heroes, like UFC's doing it now. I grew up in a time like that. What we're gonna try and do with this podcast is talk about our own running, but broader fitness journeys, because you're

[20:11] forty-five, I'm forty. You've been at the pointiest end of competitive sport, and you're now wanting to find that competitiveness again. I feel like my fittest self — to make up a word — is still ahead of me, and I wanna keep exploring that. So we're gonna continue to explore what each of us is doing from a running standpoint, week to week — that's gonna be an update we give everybody.

[20:44] But then there's so many nostalgic things I want to unpack with you, so much that I haven't even started — I wanna hear about it. But then I think there's also all these other people, because as soon as you said Uncle Toby's Saturday morning on television, I guarantee you there are people out there listening going, "my god, was it Robinson? Pete Robinson?" That famous kick in the triathlon — I have the most vivid memories of sitting at home watching those races on television, when Chris McCormack was going

[21:15] through his bleach-hair phase, and it was such an awesome time for that sport. And running now — to circle it back around full circle — running is the trend. It's a different time, and we want to talk about now, social media, and running is booming. And the scope of running — Olympics, professionals, track running, trail running, amateur runners, parkrun — like even just driving here

[21:55] this afternoon, the amount of people still out running, and I love it, 'cause in the end it's as simple as this: running makes you feel good. If you can get out there and do it, it makes you feel bloody good. That's a great way to sum it up. There's a million things running through my head at the moment because there's all these stories and questions, so much to talk about in this space, and I'm really excited to do it. This is our base run.

[22:26] This is our foundation. We still haven't got a name, but that's okay — the important thing is, Courtney, we are starting, and this is it, we've started. Do you know what I'm looking most forward to? What? Shoes. I love the shoe conversations. I obviously run for a shoe brand, so — who do you run for? I'm running with Salomon.

[22:56] That's right. And I just happened to fall into it — I've been running with them for a while now, and everyone's buying them, not even for running, just buying them. I don't know what heel drop means, so you're not gonna get much tech out of me either. Good — I'm literally the field type, I just want to talk about shoes, love shoes, love running shoes, don't really care about the tech difference, and you know, a lot of that's my day job.

[23:28] I'm literally in marketing, and not to say there's no great innovation — here's the thing, I've never run in a proper carbon-plated shoe, I've avoided it, never run in one. You've never run in one? Why? Haven't had the — if I'm gonna do it, I wanna make sure it's at a race, at a time, and get full use out of them. You wouldn't just want to experience the feel? I do, but I've purposely held off. My brother's had a few, and I've walked literally across the yard in them.

[24:00] But I know it's 'cause I'm really only racing trail, right, and a carbon-plated shoe in trail doesn't necessarily make sense — you need ground feel. So there's this happy medium you've got to find on trail shoes, but this is more we've gotta unpack with you as well, because yeah, I love talking about kit generally. Who doesn't — I reckon that's half the reason run clubs, or people, get into running, because they like buying stuff for themselves, like people like buying a new pair of shoes to run in.

[24:32] And people like buying a new kit, LSKD or Puma or Nike, whatever it be — they like wearing it, they like looking good and feeling good when they're running. Not much else you need for running, mate — it's probably the most accessible sport in the world, 'cause you don't even need a pair of shoes if you wanna go run barefoot. The question: fluoro or black? At the moment I'm in a black phase. Glad, 'cause we can keep going now — are you not a fluoro fan? Definitely not a fluoro fan.

[25:03] Why? I've been through a fluoro phase — I've just said goodbye to a pair of ASICs MetaSpeed fluoros, they've done their time. I love that I've run in carbon-plated shoes and you haven't — this is another thing we've got to unpack another day. I'm writing down this list in my head as we go, because I find the fact you've never run a marathon as a straight-up race astounding. You've run a marathon off the back of an Ironman, and obviously longer trail runs, but no, I've never put myself into a straight marathon.

[25:34] Never — for me, knowing what you're capable of is crazy. But it's the same reason you've never run in carbon-plated shoes — it's just gonna happen. As you can see, there's lots of threads we're going to pull at as we continue this podcast. Let's leave it there, let's pull this one to a close, Courts, because next time we're gonna get into what I think will become more of the format as we move forward.

[26:04] What is that? But there it is — in the beginning. The beginning.