Gold Coast Marathon Series 2026: We're Back

[00:00] We are back — In The Beginning's Gold Coast Marathon Series returns for 2026. Bigger and better this time. If you missed last year, if you're a first-time marathon runner, or if you've just signed up to the event and someone's sent this podcast your way — welcome, subscribe, you're going to enjoy this. A bit of history: last year we began this series with the great Benita Willis as our coach. We were both meant to run, and we both made it no more than about three weeks.

[00:30] We began last year's series intending — I was shooting for a sub-three-hour marathon, you were going to race your first ever marathon. Neither of us made the start line. Instead, the series became very much about following first-time marathon runner Bronte Langbroek along her journey from half marathon finisher to full marathon finisher, with a lot of success. An amazing series — Bronte was fantastic. This year we're bringing all that back, and more. We're changing it up.

[01:00] This year the great Benita Willis and Lace Up Running are back on board. They're going to be bringing their expertise. We're bringing back Britt Kayling, the guru of physios, to talk about injury prevention. We're bringing in some first-time marathon runners, we're bringing in some elite athletes — this is an absolute buffet of running. And we heard you: we're really going to make a focus on the half. Don't forget about the half at the Gold Coast Marathon — I won't quote the stats because I can't recall them exactly, but a lot of runners treat it as their event, full stop.

[01:31] This is — I mean, Andy Buchanan, friend of the pod — famously last year, that was maybe one of the highlights of the whole weekend: his performance in the half marathon after being uncertain about how he was going to go. So we've heard you, we've heard the half marathoners. Trust me, you are going to enjoy this. If you've got friends running the half marathon, make sure you get them onto this, because Benita is going to be bringing tips and tricks for the half marathoners too.

[02:02] We're going to be talking to all those experts and first-timers about the experience of the event, and for those with the marathon coming up in the next few weeks, we're going to go back and revisit some of the best of last year, because we've got all that information sitting there from last year's Gold Coast Marathon Series — you can go back and look at it. So instead of drip-feeding it out to you over the next eleven weeks, we're going to serve it up in one brilliant episode coming in about a week and a half's time.

[02:32] That'll be there to help you start your training — instead of being drip-fed over the block, it'll help you start in a week and a half's time. I hope everybody's already into their blocks, I hope you're feeling good, I hope the body's feeling fresh. As you and I both know from last year, the key is actually getting to the start line. That's 100% right, and that's what I plan to do. And Courtney, I'll hand it to you now, because as part of this Gold Coast Marathon series we're doing something new.

[03:04] I'm calling it the experiment. I'd promised Benita was going to coach me, but I can't do that to her, because — as it turns out, I didn't even realise we were twelve weeks out until last week. Life's got busy, there's a lot more travel than I expected coming up, but no excuses. What we're going to do is: I want to get through the marathon cleanly, at a really good pace, but in a way that lets me then build to another marathon, once I've got the time and the expertise — or the understanding — to go to Benita and say, now let's do it, let's go chase a time.

[03:34] So for those who don't know, or who've just found this podcast: I've never raced a marathon before. I've never raced a road marathon for time — I've run a marathon distance inside Ironman triathlons, I've run plenty of trail races over marathon distance, but as far as going out and clocking myself in a certified marathon, never. So this will be history for you.

[04:06] History's a strong word — but either way, it's going to be a PB, Courtney. True. Last year you didn't make the start line; this year you're going after it again, so for that I want to say good on you, because it would be very easy to get gun-shy about it. I understand what you've been through with your body over the last eighteen months — it would be completely understandable if you'd got gun-shy and thought, let's just talk to other people, do other things instead. But I'm all in. There's a bit of a —

[04:36] in full transparency, there was a bit of a hiccup around the T100. The plan Benita rolled out was: keep yourself fresh, start building the mileage, go to the Gold Coast T100, run the 10K, see how quick you can go, then we adjust and move on from there. As it happened, I went out and ran too fast, hurt my calf again, and things didn't work out. However — I haven't stopped running. That's the good news. I'll manage myself.

[05:06] As part of this Gold Coast Marathon series, with all the expertise we're going to bring, all the suggested training sessions, the injury prevention, all the tools we can fit in our kit bag over the next eleven weeks, and the nutrition side too — people are going to get to follow along with what we're calling the experiment. So the team I've got around me helping generally with injuries — more recently we've come up with a bit of a plan.

[05:39] We said: how about we try some rules — stick to some rules and see if that gets me cleanly to the start line of the marathon. The first rule is only running every second day. What's the theory behind this rule? The theory is it's not that I can't cross-train — ride the bike, have a swim — but running only every second day takes the load off.

[06:10] It keeps the load down, keeps the kilometres down, stops me overdoing it, and lets me recover fully before I go out and try again. Now, the first thing anyone's going to say is: it's a marathon, you've got to run mileage. I'm not silly, I understand the equation — generally, the more mileage you run, the better marathon you run. I accept that. But in this experiment, what I'm going to do is stick to

[06:42] this rule, with the goal of getting to the start line as fresh as possible. They say doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity — so to anyone questioning this rule straight off the bat: Courtney's been there, tried it the other way, and broken down. That's why we're pivoting. And I don't think it's always been the mileage that's broken me down — because the second rule —

[07:15] alright, what's the second rule? No trying to run with the young bucks in speed sessions. This is what breaks me, every time. It's not happening out there while I'm jogging around on my two- or three-hour long runs — it's always in an intense session, and generally not one I'm doing on my own, it's when I'm chasing runners who are still running sub-30-minute 10Ks. I already think, in episode one of the Gold Coast Marathon series,

[07:46] we've got a nugget here for people. There's a nugget in Courtney's experiment as he walks us through the rules he's going to abide by, and I already think there's something here for everybody — whether you're doing the half, the 10K, the full marathon, whatever it is — and that's ego. So, second rule: leave the ego at home. When you lace up the shoes, drop the ego. That'll be hard, though, because one of the things I get most enjoyment

[08:16] out of running is going down and testing myself each week. I go down to the Spit on a Tuesday and someone lays out a 20-to-30-minute fartlek or repetition session, and I love hurting myself trying to keep up with some of the fastest runners in the country. So I've now got to work out a way — the easy way is when I'm travelling I can't be there — but I've got to work out a way around it where I can still enjoy that experience and hold myself back. Or do I just —

[08:47] do I just walk away for ten weeks? It's a really interesting exercise in self-awareness for people too, because only this morning, doom-scrolling, I came across one of those classic influencer athletes — I don't mean that in a disparaging way, I think she's actually a really positive runner from an influencer perspective, I can't remember her name — but one of her early reels this year was about running with faster people in 2026. She said her goal in 2026 is to train with

[09:20] people faster than her, because she's on the upward trend of her running journey — she wants to improve, she wants to challenge herself, she wants to hurt in these sessions to see where her ceiling is. That's self-awareness, right — she knows that to improve, you've got to surround yourself with better athletes. You, on the other hand — it's interesting, it's the other side of that self-awareness fence: challenging myself and surrounding myself with athletes faster than me

[09:50] is what takes me into deep water, and keeps getting me in trouble. It's always going to be a combination of things, but there's a common element — it's when I go out and do something hard or over the top, or even like we talked about last week, where I've gone to pace someone at what's considered an easier pace, but it's not me doing my own session — I've already done my sessions for the week. You're running to someone else's plan. I'll come and have a run, sure —

[10:20] and then it overloads me, and problems happen. So that's rule two. Just to be clear for everyone else out there, that's a Courtney-specific rule, but I think the other thing to be careful of — I know this element of the rule won't affect you directly, but for everyone else, we've talked about this before: the Strava effect. Leaving your ego at the door has never been more difficult as a runner because of Strava. When you start seeing numbers, times and speeds of other runners on Strava, near you or people you know,

[10:50] it's human nature to get caught up in those numbers, that pacing, that "well, I've got to keep up" mentality. It's hard — you've got to find your own way around it. I'm not saying get off Strava, I'm not saying stop following people, but you've got to find your own way around leaving that Strava ego at the door. We'll get into some of the structure after, but rule three is: gym, gym, gym — continuing the consistency I've had in the gym. This has been —

[11:22] I've talked about this — it's not only working for my running, it helps me jump off the back tray of a ute, it helps me kickstart my YZ250 motorbike. All these things, since I've been doing the gym, have become easier — even simple push-ups, pull-ups. I did gym religiously when I was in the Olympic programme, then I missed the gym for six years — same with swimming — and now,

[11:54] being back around it, I just feel amazing. Nothing to do with the running or anything else — it's the calf exercises in the gym, the calf raises and all that. That's this rule: consistency in the gym, keep on top of those calf exercises, give myself every opportunity to make sure my lower-leg chain, or full-body chain, is strong enough to get me through this. While we're on it — anyone who's a regular listener, we've

[12:27] been talking about bench press. I still owe a video, I'm aware. Someone wrote in — "I could easily do 40s at ten." I've been doing some dumbbell presses — 40 kilos, handling it well. I'm not going to say exactly what I can lift, but I do believe if it was a barbell I could obviously do more than 40 kilos.

[12:57] More than 40 kilos — very encouraging. So we've got three rules at the moment: no back-to-back runs, leave the ego at the door, gym, gym, gym. Those are the rules of the experiment — let's try not to break them. Looking at those three rules, what's going to be the hardest to stick to? The gym one is common sense, I think that'll be pretty simple — it's just a matter of, if I'm travelling, like next week in

[13:30] Europe, I'm in a town and I've just got to find a gym. That's the biggest challenge, but I want to do it. The other two will each have their own challenges, because I love running with people and I still want to run with people. It's not just the run group I run with up at the Spit — the guy who helps me out with strength and conditioning, Tim Rigby, I'm going to want to race him again, and I'm sure I'll do some runs with him — if he's moving quicker and I'm not, how do you manage yourself through all that?

[14:00] That will be a challenge, maybe the main one. The second one is around every second day — when you look at the structure, if you want to fall into line on, say, a Tuesday, it actually means you only get three runs in the following week, unless you cycle to a different day to get four days of running in, which makes mileage a challenge. Just to pick up on

[14:30] something — and this is what I'll try to do throughout the series — Courtney, as you walk through the experiment, and me being the average runner that I am, I'm going to try to pick up things I think people can use for themselves — non-elites. The simple calendar management is something people don't realise once they get into a marathon block. They think, I've got to do four runs a week but avoid the fatigue, and

[15:00] suddenly you go, hold on, four runs in seven days, and if I go long on Sunday, I can't do my next run till Tuesday, and then Tuesday gets pushed — and suddenly that notion of fitting four runs into seven days while still giving yourself time to recover becomes overwhelming. And if for some reason you miss a session — a sick kid, travel, whatever gets in the way — then do I overdo it at the end of the week to make up for it? These are the questions we've asked Benita in the past.

[15:31] How does that affect me? There's all those questions — it'd be a lot easier if it was an even week. I've got a good story on different approaches to training, though. When I was at the peak of my Olympic career, Australian triathletes in general had a very — it's similar to the Australian running structure. The running structure in Australia generally is you do

[16:02] some type of session on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and a long run on Sunday. But why? That's the question — always why. In triathlon, we had a very strict, similar structure, where generally everyone would do a really long ride — four, five, six hours — on a Wednesday, some type of race simulation on Saturday, Tuesday and Thursday were probably run days, and then a long run on Sunday. In Australia we had this notion of always taking Friday

[16:33] completely off, which for running is a bit foreign — but I've known a few people who changed that up. Olympic gold medallist Hamish Carter from New Zealand, who won gold in Athens — his New Zealand group worked out they could fit more mileage into a block by doing four days on, one day of recovery, rather than following the seven-day cycle. Four days on, one day

[17:04] recovery. If I recall how they structured it: when they were fresh, on the first day they'd do their fastest key running session, then the next day their long ride with some running on top, the next day their long run off the back of that long ride — you can see how it stacks up for triathlon — and then the fourth day

[17:35] they'd do their hard intervals on the bike — they'd still run and swim every day too — and then come off that hard interval session into their rest day. That cycle used to load you up — if you actually add it up over weeks, it worked a lot better than doing six days on, one day off. You'd load up more mileage, but at the same time get more rest. He won an Olympic gold medal, and that group of New Zealanders changed it up. Michellie Jones, the Aussie great —

[18:07] she won silver at the 2000 Sydney Olympics in triathlon — she and her husband Pete, who I believe was coaching, did something similar, from my understanding, but a three-day-on, one-day-off structure. So you sit here, you listen to podcasts, you listen to us, and everyone falls into the Australian cycle — but you don't have to. There's no reason you have to, other than that we hear it every week and believe it.

[18:37] So when you ask how do I un-structure my running, you can think about it in a lot of different ways. For most people, the idea of a regular week is: my week is seven days, five of those I'm working, five of those the kids are at school, so five of those days I'm doing school drop-off and pick-up — but the running groups run on their own days. That's really interesting. Can I throw something at you that you've forgotten about?

[19:08] You've forgotten more about running than I'll ever know, forgotten more about looking after your body than I'll ever know. Can I make a suggestion around one of your rules? Knowing you as I do, I think the biggest challenge for you is going to be the ego thing — letting the young pups run without resisting the urge to chase. Easy to say now, easy to say at the start of the process, but you train with Gold Coast Run Co, you run with other groups, and I can see you six weeks from now feeling great,

[19:42] feeling everything — especially if you're sticking to rule one, no back-to-back runs — your body's going to feel great. If you're sticking to rules one and three, gym, gym, gym and no back-to-back runs, you're going to be feeling great, and that's where the challenge is going to come for you — not pacing these things at a hundred percent. So what's your suggestion, what do I do? Have you told the coaches? They'll know now — but not just casually hearing this.

[20:12] I think you need to directly communicate to the people running your sessions — if you see me up with Tom, Dick and Harry, yell at me. Well, it's guys like Doctor Ben who are the ones who call it out — they call it out, but I don't listen. So maybe, as I said earlier, the only solution is to actually, for a little bit, just remove yourself. That's the thing.

[20:42] I just think — we look at professional sport these days, there's a big conversation happening in the NBA around minutes restrictions when players are returning from injury. Part of that's around tanking, teams wanting to lose, putting their best players on minutes restrictions — but for some players returning from injury, they're placed on what's called a minutes restriction to basically ensure they don't re-injure

[21:12] themselves. You need to put yourself on a pace restriction — and it's one thing for you to say I'm on a pace restriction, but it's another for the people around you to actually be aware of it too. That would help. Also, when we have Benita in — like I said, what I didn't want to do with Benita was give her another half-assed horse, no more lemons — but she's well and truly there to help. We're going to get

[21:43] some suggestions on long runs for the marathon, and where we should get ourselves to. The goal is to stick to that structure. Now, anyone listening who's more versed in marathoning, who understands training properly, is probably thinking he's kidding himself — I hear you, a hundred percent. But what I'll say upfront and transparently, there is a structure to this — I'm not just running three

[22:15] times a week thinking that'll get me through a marathon. Part of the structure is that every other day I've got the Swift bike, so I'll be riding — which I'm finding gives some really good aerobic benefit — and I'm back swimming too. What were you laughing at? I just had a thought — because for anybody who followed along with last year's Gold Coast Marathon series, you might remember this — as you started talking about substituting runs for rides on

[22:45] the stationary bike, Benita told us she has certain older runners who do most of their sessions on a bike and very little running in preparation for a marathon, and still run a good marathon. Welcome to that group, Courtney. Go figure — for twenty years I did triathlon and ran. Full circle, yeah. So definitely, running isn't the only aerobic work I'm going

[23:15] to be doing. And the second thing is — I was down at Burleigh having a swim today, and it's starting to get a bit nippy. Southerners will laugh at that — but I'm going to get a wetsuit and at least keep in the water a bit, so the structure can incorporate some of my Noosa Triathlon training into this. Okay, so we've got the rules of the experiment, now into some run structure — one kind of more intense

[23:48] session a week, let's say repetitions or a fartlek, one tempo-style longer medium run a week, and one long, proper long run that'll become more marathon-focused. If there's another run in that week, it's simply a very easy recovery run. Let's hit that again — intervals, tempo, long run, plus recovery.

[24:18] Plus recovery — that's what your weeks are going to look like. It's going to be as simple a template as that. How that looks each week will change depending on what's going on, but the goal is some type of structured session, some type of medium tempo-style thing that could also be broken up into longer reps. What's generally worked well for me in the past is build runs — going out and slowly building into it, finding

[24:49] that rhythm and then holding it. Just because I think people will be interested — I'd actually say to people, if you've got a plan in front of you, wherever you got it from — if you got it from a coach, we've talked about the importance of coaches, great, follow what they're saying. But if you've gone and got an automated, ChatGPT-style programme, and it doesn't look like what Courtney's just described, I think it's worth asking why. If the why is really clear, and there's an answer that's

[25:22] personal to you, fine, stick with it, don't change just because we're talking about it. But if this is your first marathon, you're approaching it, or you've never really worked to a plan before and you've just jumped online and grabbed one — if your programme doesn't look like what Courtney's just described, with an interval session, a tempo run, a long run and maybe a recovery run at most — I'd be looking at making changes. It's probably too much if you're only running four times a week, that's probably too much for most people, given that three-run structure

[25:52] we've talked about. So I'd nearly be inclined to say if you're only running three to four times a week: one session, one tempo — one hard session max — jog the rest, and then some type of focused long run.

[26:23] So, back to that — you're talking a fartlek-style run, but with something a bit more, let's call it structured — I think this is where the key difference will be. I need, at least in the early stages, to be more long-marathon focused, to bring that pace down. We don't want to go too bullish. Tempo — you build up to the pace you want to hold for a period, then drop off, and then your long run — initially, the long run, like on the weekend I ran an hour forty in the forest, just jogging around on the single tracks. But like Michael Shelley's told us so often in the past, if you're going to run the marathon, you have to get off the trail and come back onto the road.

[26:53] There's a reason for that — one, it's going to be tricky for your body to adjust. When was the last time you stretched out without trail running? Not to say we won't do a trail run each week — maybe the easy jog can still be through the trails — but I'm looking forward to structuring the run properly. The good long run, like down your way, you've got that great stretch going down towards Snapper —

[27:24] all that pathway. But from where we are, more the central Mermaid Beach, Broadbeach type area, we can go north to the Spit — you can go a long way up, out and back, and get your long run done all along the beach. Great spot to be running. Okay, so we've got the rules of the experiment, we've got a rough structure — tell me, as we wrap up this first episode of the Gold Coast Marathon series, tell me what you're —

[27:55] I don't want to make you sound like a young girl's dream journal — I asked this about the T100 too, and trust me, plenty of people have said keep pressing him — do you have a time in mind? Your mic's — you've been playing funny buggers with your mic, I think you knocked it. There you go, you're back on now. Having a shock with the technical stuff. Do you have — even if it's something —

[28:27] even if it's something you want to keep quiet? No, I do. In my head I see guys my age I used to race against — we've talked about the Hyrox crowd, guys at least in their twenties now — and they're down around the 2:30s. There are triathletes at the moment running 2:30 off the bike, literally, on the weekend. Not saying I can keep up with the best triathletes in the world anymore, but they're running 2:30 now.

[28:59] So maybe we need to retitle this series — the 2:30 experiment. What you asked, what my goal is — I had a good call with Benita talking about running and the series and things, and the initial goal, like we talked about with Bronte, is we want to get through the marathon conservatively, in a way where you finish and think,

[29:31] now we've done it — let's go and actually train properly, and let's go and pick, whether it's Tokyo or a good Japanese marathon. That's as transparent as it can be — there is a goal, and I'm all in on trying to improve and get out there and do some marathoning. Well, I'm still waiting for London to get back to us about the 2027 race, after they stole our idea. Okay — the experiment: establish the rules, set the structure, rough goal in place.

[30:03] We're eleven weeks out now. It's come around quick. But to bring it back to the regular runners — we're eleven weeks out, how are you feeling? Because of what I'm doing, I'm actually feeling quite comfortable. I'm getting through an hour forty, pretty cruisy in the bush, running each week. The thing is, I'm going to show everything, I'm not going to hide it — we're going to show it all on Strava.

[30:35] When I say — a lot of what I do is on the trail, so take this with a grain of salt — generally in an hour forty I only cover about 16K, but if I was out on the road I'd be knocking out closer to

[31:05] 20K. Of course you would, but I'm doing about 40K a week over the last few weeks. So we're not talking big mileage yet. No — but with the history you've got, plenty more coming. Besides me, we've got the half marathon focus episode, Benita's back in, we've got a few guests including Britt for the injury stuff, nutrition — I'm working on getting someone in to talk

[31:35] nutrition. So don't worry about your nutrition right now if you're sitting there — you don't need to know about it yet, but when it gets closer to when it's relevant, we'll have someone on to talk it through. We're going to have Britt come in and talk injury prevention, giving you the inside track on how to train, half marathon specialty sessions — that's all coming up on this series.

[32:05] I didn't actually say it at the top — I'm not racing. You did say it, but easy to slip past — I said it on the first take, before you pressed record. For those playing along: I will not be running this year's Gold Coast Marathon. Not because I did too good a job on the mic — I've been blacklisted, EMQ have banned me from ever running the marathon. Instead I'll be on the start-finish line again with my good mate Pete Murray.

[32:35] So what I'd say to everybody: if you're entered in this year's race — half, 10K, whatever it is — hit us up on Instagram, send us a DM, tell us what race you're doing, tell us your name, tell us your story. I'd love to have as many of those stories as possible to share on the pod, and to be ready on the day — because if I meet you on the day, I met so many people on the finish line last year, and I'd love to be there with a microphone in hand to tell your story. If you've got a cool story for us to share, I'd love to shout it out on the day as you cross the line. So, lots to come — we're excited about this series, it's back. Tell your friends, subscribe. Gold Coast Marathon Series is back.