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# GOLD COAST MARATHON SERIES - KICKSTARTING TRAINING WITH BENITA WILLIS
- URL: https://www.inthebeginningpodcast.com/gold-coast-marathon-series-kickstarting-training-with-benita-willis/
- Published: 2025-04-08T06:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-19T05:56:37.000Z
- Description: Courtney Atkinson and Liam Flanagan on Gold Coast Marathon — recorded on the Gold Coast.
- Author: Courtney Atkinson
- Tags: Episodes, Gold Coast Marathon, #Import 2026-07-28 20:58

*Courtney Atkinson and Liam Flanagan on Gold Coast Marathon — recorded on the Gold Coast.*

## Listen

Listen on [Spotify](https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/inthebeginningpodcast/episodes/GOLD-COAST-MARATHON-SERIES---KICKSTARTING-TRAINING-WITH-BENITA-WILLIS-e315ng9?ref=inthebeginningpodcast.com) or [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/REPLACE?ref=inthebeginningpodcast.com).

## Full transcript

Auto-generated transcript. Timestamps approximate. Hosts: Courtney Atkinson & Liam Flanagan.

**Read the full transcript** 

\[00:00\] In The Beginning runs the Gold Coast. These are the special Gold Coast Marathon-focused editions of In The Beginning podcast. We couldn't be more excited to be part of this. We also need to shout out — as we will in every one of these episodes — Lace Up Running, the coaching programme we're jumping into to get us through. And we're joined by the founder, the coach, the guru, as she'll be known: Benita Willis. Benita, thank you for coming back. Thanks, Liam — pumped to be here. We need to say first of all, thank you for being here, and thank you for being

\[00:31\] prepared to take part in this, because this is an experiment of sorts — not just for the podcast, but for me in particular as a runner. I don't know how this is going to go, but thank you for being prepared to take the risk on a 40-year-old with a history of calf problems who's setting himself a pretty ambitious goal for the Gold Coast Marathon. Courtney, can we set up where you're at with all this? Yeah — well, I was meant to be involved in this, that's half the thing. I was so excited to get out and run Gold Coast, and then silly old me, I've actually got a bit of a bone

\[01:04\] reaction at the moment, so that's taking me out of running. But then I think the great opportunity that's come out of that is — most people who listen to us aren't elite runners. I'd say 90, maybe 95 percent of our listeners aren't elite runners. So some of the feedback was, well, if you're aiming for a three-hour marathon, some people were aiming to go a lot quicker, or a bit quicker — but what about everyone else? We've solved that. We've solved that problem — there's a young woman named Bronte Langbroek.

\[01:35\] If you're on the Gold Coast and listen to CFM in the mornings, you'll know Bronte well. She's a star, and she's also a running lover. She's twelve months into her running journey, and she's signed up for the Gold Coast Marathon — she'll be our first-time marathon runner. Benita, you're taking her under your wing for this race as well, so we'll get to give people that first-time-marathon-runner journey to follow. I think we're going to find that will really resonate for me actually.

\[02:05\] That's really interesting. There have been so many questions about what the right pace is, how much you should do — if you haven't run a marathon before, follow along, because we're going to cover it all in this lead-up. And if you're listening with your own marathon plan already mapped out, wherever you're doing it, follow along too, because we're going through the ups and downs of this thirteen-week programme as it happens. It's normally a twelve-week marathon programme, but Benita, today we're essentially thirteen weeks out. Yeah, that's right.

\[02:35\] So let's start. Have I told you I'm going for a sub-three-hour marathon? Coach Benita — knowing I've sent you all my information, where I'm at, my mileage, PBs, all the rest of it — do you think I can achieve it? Looking at all your information, and from experience with people who've run similar times to you before, I think it's going to be incredibly tough. There's nothing like starting

\[03:05\] with absolute honesty. This is great — this is so good. But it's not unachievable. It's one of those things — a sub-three-hour marathon — I've coached guys and girls before who tried for years to run sub-three with a similar PB to yours. And once they've done it, they seem to always run in the two-fifties after that. It's a mental and emotional barrier as much as anything. But also, you're

\[03:38\] running 3:21 — was that your first marathon? No, I've done — I think that might have been my third. Right, and that's an incredibly good time, 3:21\. So when you go from, I think that was around 4:46 pace, down to 4:15 pace, that's a big jump. From the experience I've had coaching people, that's sometimes quite hard. But one of the things we can do is trial that pace.

\[04:10\] So I always tell people to look at their goal pace, and we do specific marathon sessions — I'll set those for you, and we can look in the first few weeks and see how the pace feels. If you can't hold it in training, in some of the shorter runs at that pace, say eight or six kilometres, you won't be able to hold it for a full marathon in twelve weeks. Okay, this is already where I've got a question — because for people listening, there'll be people like me, delusional people who've set themselves a time goal for the Gold Coast Marathon and structured a twelve-week

\[04:42\] plan. Some of these people, unlike me who has a professional like you to speak to in person, will have jumped onto an online programme, punched in a goal time, and had some AI or app spit out a programme for them. They'll be following it without being able to track it properly, ask questions, or reassess when they're not keeping up with the pacing. So — you've

\[05:15\] told me it's going to be incredibly tough, but we're going to try some things and see if we need to adjust it. What sort of timeframe should people be reassessing their time goals at the start of a marathon block? That's a good question. I really think in the first three or four weeks, because it's really disheartening to go through a marathon block and not be able to hit the paces — even if it's something

\[05:45\] that's AI-generated — not being able to hit those paces means you don't feel like you're accomplishing anything. And when I say incredibly tough, I don't think it's unachievable — it might just take a few marathons, or it might take more training, more speed work, to get faster over the half marathon and 10K before you can hit that sub-three. So — for your background, you've run a 1:28 half.

\[06:15\] In an ideal world, you'd want to be running something like 1:23 to 1:24 for the half, with that sort of speed behind you — because when you get into 4:15 marathon pace, that should feel slow. That's always my analogy. But we're coming into this programme thirteen weeks out, and we're not going to be doing that speed work now because we're straight into the marathon block. You want to be excited about training, excited to get to the race, and have a goal that's achievable. That's one of the things people come to me with all the time.

\[06:45\] I want to run this time — and I'm always realistic with people, because you have to be. But I'm also realistic that a running journey might take two, three or four years to reach a big goal like this. I haven't been fit since 2012, when I ran the Olympics — I've never run a sub-three-hour marathon myself. A sub-three-hour marathon's bloody hard. I know you know that, but it's incredibly tough. So it might take a few years — but it also might not.

\[07:17\] You might do it. You might do it at Gold Coast. I think we try for what you want to do, and then we readjust as we go. I love that. That's amazing. This is equal parts kicking me in the guts as it is exciting, because Benita's literally, in the first five minutes, brought me right back down to earth. Yeah, she sure has — but absolutely wrecked me. I had that same reaction the first time you said it to me. Why didn't you have the courage

\[07:50\] to say something to me? Because I want to encourage you to keep doing these things — that's the whole point. We don't want to tell you too much upfront and discourage you. But I do have a question, because I reckon a lot of people out there — when I say people, I mean people sitting right around that three-hour mark, because that really is the top tier for amateurs trying to break three hours — is there a set distance,

\[08:21\] a kind of weekly kilometre number you'd need to hit to run three hours? Or does it not necessarily come down to the kilometres you're running? Yeah — I don't necessarily think it does. Obviously the more you run, the better it tends to be, to an extent, because we're all busy too. I've coached some people who run seven times a week and get injured — they're running too much trying to break three hours. Then I've got other people who run four or five times a week and can still break three hours. So while you want to run as much as you reasonably can, if you're running too much you're

\[08:54\] getting tired and injured, and you're not training properly — that's a detriment to the programme. So I don't have a set number I use. I look at everyone individually and decide from there. But generally, increasing mileage helps, as long as you do it over time. So say you're running fifty to sixty kilometres a week right now — ideally you'd want to be running a little more, but there's always that push of not increasing intensity and

\[09:26\] volume in the same week. We'll look at one week and maybe increase mileage a bit; the next week we'll increase intensity instead. By intensity I mean sessions — not really many interval sessions, mostly thresholds and tempos, which I think you need to be doing regularly. So if we're adding that into your programme, I wouldn't be increasing your volume that same week. We'd look at volume the following week, then go back to intensity. I cycle through it, because if you increase everything at once — so, to your question,

\[09:56\] Courtney — if you're increasing volume every single week in a marathon block, that's too much as well. So I look at increasing the long runs every second week, and I call those “specific” — there it is, we found Benita's trigger word: specific. Yeah, and it's the marathon-pace efforts getting longer as we go. In the weeks in between, we'd just make sure we're doing tempo runs focused on half-marathon effort, and an interval session.

\[10:26\] So, yeah — we want to be running more. When I was racing, I was running close to two hundred kilometres a week. But we're looking at people with jobs who are really busy, so it's about how we manage that volume around a really busy schedule. This is the first lesson right here — if you're a peanut like me, whose eyes are bigger than your stomach, and you've set yourself a goal in these first two or three weeks of your training block and you're not hitting your times,

\[10:58\] reassess. Reassess. That's a great opening lesson for anyone out there who's set themselves a specific goal time, like I have. What about somebody like Bronte, who's just starting out — this is her first marathon, though she's run a half before? General words of advice heading into a twelve- or thirteen-week block like this? For first-time marathoners, it's about getting through the programme, enjoying the journey, and just being excited to get to

\[11:28\] the start line and through the race. It's not about running sub-four in your first marathon — it's not about a time at all. I always think it's about the effort, enjoying the process, and getting that first one done with a genuinely good experience — finishing feeling good, not walking the last ten kilometres, and thinking, I want to do another one. That's when you start taking a bit more risk and looking at specific paces. So Bronte's programme, and a first-time

\[11:58\] marathoner's programme generally, would look similar in structure to what I'd set for you, Liam, but without the focus on specific paces — it'd be more time-based on the long runs. It's about practising nutrition and building that training structure, and just enjoying it — not doing too much. It's always about what you're currently doing, and as you get into those thirteen weeks out, gradually increasing training while making sure you don't overdo it. I think a lot of beginners

\[12:28\] think, I've got to do a marathon, so I've got to run a marathon to prepare for a marathon — you don't need to do that. You just need to train, obviously work harder, and build your long-run volume up gradually. We've given you a fairly tough task, only having you and Bronte for twelve weeks — but if you took a step back, what would the ideal preparation phase look like, if we were doing this again next year?

\[12:58\] If I were coaching you long-term, Liam, I'd be looking at increasing your speed — working on 5K, 10K, half-marathon-type training, which feeds into marathon fitness too. If you can get a bit faster — I think your 10K PB was 41 minutes? I've never really had a crack at a 10K properly. That's the thing — having some really hard races over 5K or 10K, even a half marathon, is so valuable to do before you get into marathon prep. You don't even need to run many marathons to be good at

\[13:30\] the marathon — it's about having that speed in your legs. When you get into marathon training and train properly for it, your marathon pace feels slow by comparison. So ideally I'd put you into half marathons, 5Ks and 10Ks — maybe run one marathon, and then really have a crack at that sub-three-hour goal. You mentioned earlier — people who've listened to our previous conversation about your athletic career

\[14:01\] talked about the mental side of things as much as the physical. Just to give you an insight into how my brain works — as soon as you mentioned my 10K PB and put me into those races, my head immediately went, right, I'll go out and run a really fast 10K tomorrow, try and set a new PB to show Benita I can run faster than that. That's just what my brain did. So for context, over these next three months working together, that's how my brain operates. Just so you understand that.

\[14:33\] Yeah — but I think, with your enthusiasm and how pumped you are about it, that's exactly what you need going into a programme like this. Running is about the training, but it's also about your mental focus, and how you adapt, because you'll be doing most of this training by yourself. I always think people who are really focused and excited about their goal train better than someone who's

\[15:03\] not that invested in the race and is just going through the motions. That's a really important factor going into any programme. Can I ask a question about this — for Bronte's programme as well — you and Bronte both work early mornings, we both have full-time jobs, and these programmes have to fit around our lives. There'll be people listening who are starting their twelve- or thirteen-week block with a whole life to fit around it —

\[15:33\] they're not full-time athletes, they're not being paid to do this, it comes around their actual lives. Can you talk about the pressure, or the ways to be okay with missed sessions, or the rest of life getting in the way of this goal? That's a really good question, and it's something we deal with every day with the people we coach. My advice is: don't get hung up if you miss a session, miss a day, get sick, or you've got a kid who's been

\[16:04\] up sick through the night and you're exhausted. It's about overall consistency, not any one particular session or day of training. I'm not one of those coaches who says you've got to make that session up later in the week — if you miss something, let it go and keep going with the plan. I do schedule an easy week within the marathon block, which is really important for absorbing the training and making sure you're not slightly overtraining. And when I say slightly overtraining — part of

\[16:35\] training is recovery, and people with busy lives don't always get to rest properly during the day, because they're working or looking after kids. So if you're not getting quite enough recovery week to week, that's when you're not fully absorbing the training. So we always schedule an easy week, usually with some kind of race — a half marathon or similar — at the end of it, though some people just need an easy week to absorb the training on its own. That's worked really well for me. And only increasing long-run volume every second week is

\[17:05\] really good too. So if you miss something, don't worry about it — it's about the overall picture, not any particular day. Even individual training sessions — one session isn't going to make or break ten minutes off your time. It's not about one particular session, it's about just doing the best you can. None of us can do this perfectly — anyone I've coached, they never nail the perfect plan.

\[17:37\] If I wrote a plan twelve weeks ahead of time — which I don't, I only write plans a week ahead, because life happens and things change — that's why I don't programme twelve weeks out. You can't stick rigidly to a structure when six weeks from now might look completely different, the way a static online plan would have you do.

\[18:08\] So don't stress if you miss something — it's totally fine. I love that as a takeaway. This is the beauty of having a coach, or being accountable to someone else, because when you're on your own — and I feel this a lot — you compare kilometres, you look at the numbers. But as soon as you've got someone outside yourself saying, it's okay this week, you don't need to run, it doesn't have to be exactly right every week — you get confidence from that other person. Whether you're running a marathon, a 10K, or doing any sport, that's one of the biggest

\[18:41\] assets you can have — someone else to be accountable to, taking that pressure off yourself. And that's what you'll have for this whole process. I can guarantee there are people listening right now thinking, Benita sounds really nice, I'd love to work with her. Maybe you're getting ahead of yourself here, Liam. No, no — I'm just saying, laceuprunning.com.au — I want to say that again, laceuprunning.com.au — because if you're halfway through this and hearing Benita talk about her coaching mentality and

\[19:13\] her attitude, go and check it out — laceuprunning.com.au. You probably won't be able to get onto it in time for this Gold Coast Marathon, but if it's set off any alarm bells or lit something up for you, go have a look, investigate a bit further, and maybe it's something for down the track. Well, that lit something up for me too — exactly what you said about kilometres, because with Strava especially, everyone's so concerned — like the graph I sent you — everyone's so worried about having this perfect graph of

\[19:44\] progression, thinking that alone will make you better. But the reality is, like you said, if you miss one session, you can't keep playing catch-up, or you end up injured. And look, I'm just not one for chasing those perfect graphs or anything like that — it's all about how you feel, and how much you're enjoying it. That's what's actually going to give you a good marathon, rather than having perfect stats on Strava. So what should Liam — or if I was

\[20:16\] doing it — what should I be looking for each week to tick off and think, I'm happy with that, that's progressing? I think if you can nail your long run each week, that's probably the main session in a marathon programme, plus one other — an interval session, or something similar. And the easy days need to actually be easy. I always say people run too hard on their easy days — you've got to hold yourself back. If you're trying to break three hours, which is 4:15 pace, your easy days should be around five-minute-kay pace or

\[20:49\] slower. For a first-timer, though — because we've talked about this before — if it's your first marathon and you're just starting out, how do you know what your easy pace should be? That's genuinely hard. Often I just look at what someone's currently running, and make sure the easy pace we set is slower than that. But I can guarantee most beginner runners, or anyone doing their first marathon, are running too fast every single day.

\[21:19\] So what we want, across your week, is for the hard sessions to be genuinely high effort and the easy sessions to be genuinely low — you want that big variation in intensity across your training. A lot of beginner runners' graphs are just flat, because every run is the same pace. So we'll be telling them to slow down on easy days, and then we'll build in some proper sessions — which is really fun for beginner runners, because a lot of people don't even know what “sessions” are yet. It's really fun to be doing

\[21:50\] that. It'll be more feel-based than about plugging in exact paces early on. We put all our training on TrainingPeaks, so I can see what pace a beginner is actually running their easy runs at and make sure it's slow enough — or you can do it by heart rate, keeping it under 130\. For anyone who doesn't know what TrainingPeaks is — that's the platform you'll have Liam and Bronte on, and it's how we manage everything. It's just an online programme we use for everyone. I've got all our runners onto TrainingPeaks, and

\[22:22\] as the coach, I plug in the training for the week ahead, and it comes straight to your phone through the app — you can see exactly what you've got each day. Some days might be rest, so it's not training every single day. I put in the specific details for each session, then I can see how you went — there's a graph, I can even see where you did the session — but it's really about the feedback. You write little comments in TrainingPeaks, and that's what I look for. You might say, I did five times a kilometre at four-minute pace and felt good, or

\[22:57\] I really struggled today. If the next session you say you struggled again, when I look at those comments I think, he's a bit tired — so I might pull the Tuesday session the following week because you need to recover. So that honest post-session feedback is really important for me to get from you. And when I look at someone like you with your job, and this time of year —

\[23:29\] training when it's been hot on the Gold Coast, not at four in the morning like a lot of people here train. So the first few weeks might be quite hard, until the weather cools down. That's a hard thing over summer too — if you're doing a lot of training through summer, those weeks can wear you down, because training at lunchtime is brutal in the heat and humidity. Does any of that actually help me? I'm trying to find some positives for myself here.

\[23:59\] There is something to heat adaptation, yeah — heat is a stress, altitude's a stress, that's why people go on training camps. One year before the Athens Olympics, we went to Madrid to train because we were living in London and it was too cold. So there's something to training in heat — but I think our Queensland summer, the heat and humidity, is too much over a prolonged four or five months of training. It can get quite hard towards the end of summer. I'm so excited.

\[24:31\] I've been knocked down to the lowest rung this week — Benita's told me it's going to be tough — but the excitement's slowly ramping back up now. Can I ask some frivolous questions, because there'll be people listening who are about to start their own journey — can we talk shoes? As people who listen to this podcast will know, I've got a brand-new, yet-to-be-used pair of Nike Alphaflys sitting in my wardrobe that I haven't felt worthy of yet. I intend to run the Gold Coast Marathon in those. What should I be training in?

\[25:02\] Trainers are good day to day, but you should wear the Alphaflys in some of these specific marathon sessions, just to get used to running in them — and I think you also recover quicker in them. In a marathon prep block we might only do six of these sessions, roughly every second weekend, sometimes less. So yes, run in those shoes for those sessions — maybe not all of them, but it's good, because your body actually recovers better. I think they absorb a bit of the pounding, so your body recovers a bit

\[25:33\] better. Marathon training isn't just about getting used to the pace and doing the work — you've got to recover between sessions to actually get the benefit. If you're not recovering properly, you're not really overtraining in the technical sense, but you're just getting worse and worse. You want that cycle: training stress, fatigue, then a new level of fitness, more training stress, another new level — that's how you get fitter and fitter. And I think the shoes help with that.

\[26:03\] So we use whatever tools we can. Is that the same advice for a first-timer? For sure, no matter what pace you're running — same advice. Though with a first-timer, I wouldn't be too focused on shoes at all. It's really about building a structured programme, maybe running a bit more. First-timers might need some cross-training if they haven't run much before taking on a marathon. If you'd only been running once or twice a week and I started coaching you, my first week wouldn't have you doing five runs a week.

\[26:33\] I'd give you one or two runs a week plus more cross-training, to build your aerobic base first, then increase the running from there. So the shoes are good, great technology — but for Liam going for sub-three, which hardly anyone can do, the faster we get, the more we lean on things like shoes to help us. For a first-time marathoner it's about getting to the finish and enjoying it — the shoes are great technology, but that wouldn't be one of the

\[27:04\] first things I'd go to as a coach. Let's reiterate that for everyone listening — shoes shouldn't be the first thing on your priority list. If your aim is to finish the marathon, the shoes are the least of your worries. Everybody wants to look good, Courtney, but the shoes are genuinely the least of it — there's a lot else to prioritise first. What's your takeaway on cross-training for first-timers who haven't run much? That's a great point, as someone who's very much been in the position of not

\[27:36\] having many kays or much time on feet during the week and then jumping straight into a twelve-week block. If you're one of those people, don't — I've made that mistake myself. All that happens is you get injured, get angry, get frustrated, and then you're standing on the start line thinking, I'm not ready for this. So — that cross-training idea — can you give us some examples of things that count as cross-training that aren't running? With cross-training, you've got to do what you actually enjoy.

\[28:08\] I'm not going to tell you to go swimming if you hate swimming. So I don't have to go swimming — that's awesome. Things like the elliptical are good, bikes are good, even long hikes if you've got the time, because it's still time on your feet. A lot of people I coach love the elliptical, because it's still somewhat weight-bearing. I don't think something like the rowing machine correlates as well — it's good cardio, but

\[28:41\] riding, especially hilly rides, is good for you too. I coach quite a few people older than us — over sixty — doing marathons, who might only run one proper session a week, with their other hard session being cross-training instead, because they can't handle two running sessions a week. Then we fill in with a few easy runs. You can structure it like

\[29:12\] that too — it's about getting to the start line healthy. And they incorporate strength training, which I think is really good for any runner, especially as we get older and start losing bone density. The marathon is about strength — once you get past 30K, you've got to be strong, the same as cross-country. If you don't have that strength, you're not going to get through that last part. So I think strength training is important. What are you sitting there

\[29:43\] smiling about? Not surprised, honestly — I keep coming back to this idea I never really understood as a beginner: what's the minimum you can actually run and still get there? You just said some of your over-sixties runners do once a week plus cross-training. I think so many of us, myself included, get caught up over the years in thinking, if I'm only running, I have to run more — you convince yourself you need to do so much more than you really

\[30:15\] do. But the takeaway is you can only control what you can actually do yourself. You'll see all these different programmes from elites, all the sessions Liam sees his mates doing on Instagram — you've just got to come back to the idea that you're always better off being slightly underdone than overdone on the start line. I'm a case in point right now — that's exactly me. I love hearing this. And when we're all so busy, I always think it's worth holding that frame of mind

\[30:45\] that we should always be a little bit underdone, because it's not just the training that gets people — it's life that gets them. If I gave you the absolute perfect plan, the one an elite athlete would live for the next thirteen weeks, that would be too much for you, because you've got things to do — kids, a job. So we slightly under-train everyone, so they get to the start line ready to go. And I've made that mistake as a coach — I've coached so many people, and

\[31:15\] you kick yourself thinking, I probably gave that person a bit too much training — and you feel like it's on you as the coach, so you take some of that responsibility too. You're always better off on the start line ready and excited than carrying an injury. Or the other hard thing — standing on the start line just wishing you'd already done the race, because you're so sick of the build-up. You don't want to be like that either. We'll get into recovery in more depth in some episodes down the track, but

\[31:45\] just at a starting level, is there anything recovery-wise you'd suggest day to day? Sleep's the biggest thing. There are so many recovery gadgets out there — I call a lot of them gimmicks — you can go to all these places, but when I was racing, and now coaching people, sleep is huge. And being a mum to two little kids, I've realised how much I took it for granted — I'd always been one of those people who could just sleep

\[32:16\] properly. Then I had my daughter, and now with a little baby you're up all the time and feel tired all day. Some people just live like that permanently, never sleeping properly through the night. So sleep is number one — get as much as you can. Contrast showers are good, ice baths are good. I'm not huge on Normatec boots or recovery centres as such — if you've got time to go to a recovery centre, honestly you should just be having a

\[32:47\] daytime sleep instead. That's my view. I'm here for the daytime sleeps. Alright, so that's it — this is In The Beginning Runs Gold Coast, the start of the twelve-week block we're heading into. I've been told, unequivocally, that my sub-three goal is going to be tough. Bronte's setting out to complete her first-ever marathon. We'll be following these programmes courtesy of Benita Willis and Lace Up Running — you can go check them out,

\[33:19\] laceuprunning.com.au. If you've signed up for the Gold Coast Marathon this year, follow along and keep in touch with the programme — we'll be covering nutrition, fuelling during the race, pre-race and post-race, all of it. We'll touch on everything we think matters in a Gold Coast Marathon training block over the next twelve weeks as we build towards this. How are you feeling, Mr Atkinson, having to sit on the sidelines for all this? Envy — a hundred percent envy. I had my head into doing this

\[33:50\] marathon myself, and that's half of where this idea came from — now you, Bronte and Benita get to have all this excitement, and I'm on the sidelines. But I'll be here for the whole journey, learning along the way — there are so many questions we've asked, and now we're finally getting answers from someone with real expertise in this space. Final words, Benita — anything you'd say to your athletes, your clients, the people you're coaching at the

\[34:20\] start of a twelve-week block like this? Honestly — don't overthink it. If you've got a coach you believe in and trust, you should be enjoying it. My job is often to hold people back — I'm more often saying don't do that session, have a rest, than being hard on people. Enjoy the journey, and the more you can relax into it, the better — running is about being relaxed. When we think back on our best races, or our best moments in running,

\[34:51\] it's when we're relaxed and feeling happy. That's my whole take on the programme — enjoy it, but also trust the person looking after it, so you're not second-guessing everything, and you can just go and have fun. And remember, the race is a celebration of all the work you've done — it's not a doom-and-gloom thing, it's something to be genuinely pumped for. We love celebrating what we've done, because it's a journey too. And it won't be smooth.

\[35:23\] It'll be a rollercoaster, so be prepared for that too. Well, Benita — I believe, I trust, I'm happy, Courtney's envious — but we're here now, and I cannot wait to go through the next twelve weeks of this. As you say, the race itself is a victory lap. So for everybody listening along and following, remember the race itself will be a victory lap for all of us — it's about getting to the start line injury-free, nailing it, and enjoying every step of it. Benita, Lace Up Running — thank you again.

\[35:53\] Thank you — now I'm pumped.