The Gold Coast Marathon: Everything We've Learned

Two years. Two full series. Every guest who actually knows the course.

We've spent two Gold Coast Marathon campaigns asking the people who've won this race, coached it, organised it, and blown up on it. Benita Willis. Michael Shelley. Andy Buchanan. Allie Lyndon. Sports physios, sport scientists, sport psychologists, and the bloke who runs the event. Plus two hosts who did the training, made the mistakes on air, and neither of whom made the start line in 2025.

This page is the whole lot, collapsed into answers. Not a training plan. Not a coaching product. Just what people who actually do this said when we asked them — with their names on it, so you can decide who to believe.

If you want the polished version where everything works and nobody walks, there's plenty of that elsewhere.

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Quick answers

• Is it flat? Yes. Flattest, fastest marathon in Australia. One rise at Australia Fair around 30km, plus Anzac Hill at 31km. That's the lot.
• When is it? Early July. Two days — the shorter distances on the Saturday, the marathon on the Sunday.
• How early do I get up? 4:00–4:30am. Earlier if you're catching the light rail.
• What's the single most repeated bit of advice? The race starts at 30km. Everything before that is holding back.
• What's the most actionable warning? Get to the toilets early. Half an hour later the queue will cost you your start.
• How long is the training block? 12–14 weeks. Not January.

On this page

• The course
• Conditions and timing
• Choosing your distance
• The training build
• The sessions that actually matter
• Strength, niggles and staying in one piece
• Pacing
• Fuelling
• The taper
• Race week and race morning
• Shoes and gear
• The head game
• After the race
• The honest bits
• The twenty best lines from two years of the series
• Who said what
• Every Gold Coast Marathon episode, in one place

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1. The course

Is the Gold Coast Marathon actually flat?

Yes — and it's the reason the race exists in its current form. It's widely regarded as the fastest marathon course in Australia, with more sub-3-hour finishes than any other major Australian marathon according to Events Management Queensland's Ryan McDonald.

Courtney's version: "It's the fastest course in Australia. If you wanna run fast, you gotta go. You wanna run a PB — first time, fifth time, 10th time — come to the Gold Coast Marathon."

Liam frames it as the trade-off: "Sydney's your major, Gold Coast is your fast one."

The useful comparison Liam draws: runners who go sub-3 here often can't do it at Boston. Not because they've trained less — because that course is harder and the conditions are trickier. Flat is a genuine advantage. Bank it.

But is flat the same as easy?

No, and the series says so repeatedly. In 2025 a pile of time-chasers detonated while a well-paced first-timer had the day of her life. Flat removes one variable; it doesn't remove the distance.

A flat course also means no hills to break up your rhythm or force natural pace changes, so the discipline sits entirely with you. Add wind — the biggest variable on an exposed coastal course — and "flat and fast" becomes "flat and honest".

What's the actual route?

One continuous lap with turnarounds. No repeated loops.

Start at The Broadway, Southport. A short leg north up SeaWorld Drive to a turnaround near the northern end of SeaWorld, then south the full length of the coast to Miami. Turn. North all the way to the Labrador/Runaway Bay end. Turn. Back to finish where you started.

Courtney's walkthrough: "Right at the Broadway Southport… then you're gonna turn back up towards SeaWorld… and then you turn around there and you head south. And you basically head south all the way until Miami… And then you head all the way back up north to Labrador."

Two things people get wrong: Broadbeach and Miami ARE on the course, and the marathon's SeaWorld turnaround sits further north than the Gold Coast 30's — you run past the turn you might know and keep going.

Note for the current year: the course direction and which sections run two-way have changed before. Check the official course map before race week.

Is there a hill? Where?

One thing on this course gets called a hill: the rise outside Australia Fair in Southport, at roughly 30km. There's also Anzac Hill around 31km, just past the start/finish precinct.

Michael Shelley — double Commonwealth Games marathon gold medallist, who won on this course — reckons the standard direction is the good version, because the 2018 Comm Games ran it in reverse and you hit that rise at 40km instead of 30km: "In essence, it's probably a better thing doing it the south first… so if you're doing it at 30K, it's a lot easier than at 40."

An Olympian's take on road camber, for anyone who worries about it: "I don't really think about it, to be honest. I usually just follow the blue line."

Where does it get hard?

Three places, in order.

~31km — the psychological one. You cross the Sundial Bridge, hit 30km, approach the start/finish precinct at about 31km, go over Anzac Hill — and then run away from the finish line for another 5km before you turn for home. Ryan McDonald names this as the mentally toughest part of the course, and Liam independently named the same spot as where his 2024 race came apart.

The last 3km — the physical one. Around the back of the Grand on the Broadwater. Long, exposed, legs gone. Courtney: "That's probably the hardest 3K because your legs are gone… you've got a 2K stretch there. It was a headwind. Yeah, you always find a headwind."

~30km — the Australia Fair rise. Manageable, but you'll meet it at exactly the wrong moment.

What should I actually watch out for underfoot?

• Traffic islands coming back north past Cavill Ave. Genuine ankle-roll risk. In a packed field you can't see them until you're on them, and by 25km-plus your foot placement is sloppy. One of the hosts nearly went over twice in a single race running with the 3:20 bus.
• Speed bumps on Hedges Ave. Minor, but the surface changes and it can break your rhythm. Shelley's advice is not to let it get to you.
• Wet paint and tram tracks. If it rains, the white lines and the Surfers tram tracks get slippery, and some race shoes slide badly. Benita used to change shoes for wet city marathons for exactly this reason.
• The blue line. Follow it. It's the certified measured route. Shelley: "I usually just follow the blue line. Quickest way home. That's the way I look at it."

How do I take the turnarounds?

Like a racing line, not a hairpin. Swing wide, carry your speed, cut back in. Cutting it tight means almost stopping and re-accelerating, which costs more than the extra metre.

Shelley: "I generally probably go swing a bit wider and then come in, because if you go too short, like you're then basically stopping. So you want to try and eliminate that sort of slowdown as much as possible."

Where are the crowds, and where should my family stand?

Best atmosphere: Broadbeach. Live music at the Broadbeach Surf Club, and Courtney's description of the 2026 race was simply "Broadbeach was cranking through there."

Most packed single point: the Miami turnaround around 17km — reported up to seven deep.

Also excellent: past Australia Fair along the Broadwater, and Surfers Paradise/Cavill, where the course loops back on itself.

Sparser: the north end past the finish, though pockets near the Grand and the run clubs along the last kilometre make up for it.

For spectators, the smart plan is a spot where the course doubles back so they see you twice, then a move to Anzac Hill (~31km) or near the Grand with about 3km to go. The light rail beats the road closures.

And take this seriously: spotting a runner in a field this size is much harder than anyone expects. Liam's advice — "either have a really defined spot that's easy for you to recognise, or have a big sign" — plus his tip for runners: "Fluoro orange is a great colour. Very identifiable."

Is anyone going to help me if I fall apart?

Yes, and it's a genuinely good feature of this race. Marathon Motivators patrol the last 10km, running alongside people who are struggling, carrying flat Coke and lollies. Community groups and surf clubs staff the aid stations — the Surfers Paradise Brass Band has run one for years and plays while they work it.

Bronte Langbroek, who ran her first marathon here: "It was every moment where you thought there must be a lull, there must be times where there's not going to be people there. There were. There were people everywhere and they were so supportive and everyone, they were just calling out everyone's names."

Why will my watch say 42.5km?

Because the course is measured properly and you don't run the measured line.

An accredited measurer rides it with a Jones counter on a bicycle, taking the tangents about 30cm out from the kerb, with a deliberate 0.1% short-prevention factor built in — so for every 1,000m they measure, they're actually measuring 1,001m.

Then add every time you swing wide around a group, drift across the road, or miss a tangent. Ryan McDonald: "If you're in a group and you're going wide because you can't literally get closer to that corner because the group's so big, you're adding a few metres every time you do that. It all adds up."

Use the painted markers on the road, not your GPS.

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2. Conditions and timing

What's the weather actually like in July?

Cool — and that's the whole selling point. Benita Willis: "The best thing about Gold Coast is that it's going to be cool. So I always think cool marathons are not as tricky with nutrition as hot weather."

But cool isn't automatically benign. Cloud cover holds humidity in, and on the run home north toward Southport you can end up with the sun on your back. The day generally gets harder as it goes, which punishes slower finishers hardest.

Liam, after the 2025 race: "That cloud cover, despite the temperature relief it gave, it adds to the humidity. It does make the conditions trickier on course."

How cold is the start?

Cold enough that you need throwaway layers, and cold enough that standing in the corral is a real consideration — you may be stationary for up to 45 minutes.

Benita: "If it's cold like it is this week on the Gold Coast, just make sure you're wearing enough clothes so you can just throw off before the start."

Discarded clothing gets collected and donated to charity — but throw it over the barrier, not on the road, so it isn't a trip hazard for the people behind you. Save the gear you actually like for the bag drop.

What about the wind?

On a flat coastal course, wind matters more than temperature. Courtney checks boating apps rather than the general forecast: "I literally look at the boating apps for my weather. So I'm looking at wind more than the other conditions."

The pattern to expect is a southerly building through the morning — which is exactly why the early start is a gift for the marathon field. And there's essentially always a headwind on the exposed Broadwater stretch in the last 3km.

If it's blowing, Benita's instruction is simple: "If it's a bit windy, just make sure you're running behind, find some people… if someone's in front of you and they're shielding the wind, it's always good to be in a pack."

What if it rains?

Practise in it, because you don't get to choose. Benita wears a cap or visor so the rain isn't hitting her face, and checks her race shoe's grip on wet road beforehand.

Bronte's version, mid-build: "Even on Saturday night I had an hour and a half run to do. It was pouring with rain here on the Gold Coast." That's the point — the rehearsal is the value.

What time does it start, and when should I get up?

The marathon goes off early — historically around 6:00–6:15am, with the shorter distances on the Saturday. Check the current year's schedule, because start times and which day each distance sits on have both moved.

Practically: be up at 4:00–4:30am, earlier again if you're using the light rail. Benita: "You wanna be up at 4:30, like 4, on race morning. And always earlier if you're travelling by the public transport, by the light rail."

Arrive at the precinct about an hour before your start. Start zones open around 30 minutes before the gun.

What do I wear?

Nothing new. That includes clothes, not just shoes.

Ryan McDonald: "You really don't want to be doing anything new on race day. That's a good idea to do a race-ready preparation run, whether that's a week or two out, in exactly the clothes you're going to wear, the shoes you're going to wear, carry the nutrition you're going to carry. Make sure it doesn't chafe."

The rest of the kit list, learned the hard way on air: wear something loud so your people can find you; sort your shorts in training, not on the day; and take anti-chafe seriously — bleeding nipples were widely reported at the 2025 finish. White singlets, red stripes.

Lay the whole lot out the night before with the bib already attached.

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3. Choosing your distance

Should I do the marathon at all?

Ask honestly, and be prepared for a no. Benita Willis told her own co-host on air that he shouldn't run it — then ruled out the half and the 10k too. That's what a coach with nothing to sell sounds like.

The base question is whether you've got consistent weight-bearing running underneath you. Sports physio Britt Kayling: if you're ticking along at two or three runs a week, you want a good 6–8 months of consistency before you commit. Someone with no running history at all is looking at 12–18 months.

Her blunt version: "I've been doing parkruns successfully just once a week and maybe one other pram run a week or something like that. And it's just — it's not enough."

Is the half the consolation prize?

No. It's a target in its own right, and it's the smarter goal for a lot of people. Andy Buchanan — Australian marathon record holder — defends his Gold Coast Half title here, which tells you what the field looks like.

His description of what half effort actually feels like is worth reading before you decide it's the easy option: "You're kind of at this stage where you're like, you don't know if you're about to throw up or if you're about to shoot yourself… that's what half marathon feels like."

Marathon training, by contrast, he calls "super chill — it's just about logging more and more volume."

Can I do the half on Saturday and the marathon on Sunday?

You can, and people do. Train for it specifically: every three or four weeks, do a solid effort one day and a hard long run the next, so you're rehearsing consecutive hard days. Benita's framing is "you almost want to be training like training for an ultra to do that."

Race the half conservatively — the 2026 version of her advice is the safer default: "I wouldn't suggest going as hard as you can for the half, because you just want to make sure you recover enough for the marathon."

Then the recovery protocol: carbs at every meal for two days before the half, eat immediately at the half finish rather than waiting until you get home, and get horizontal on Saturday afternoon. "Don't spend the rest of Saturday walking around doing stuff. If you're on the Gold Coast you probably will want to, but just try to relax and rest as much and put your legs up."

It's my first marathon. What should my goal be?

Not a time.

Benita: "It's not about 'I want to run sub-4 hours in my first marathon'. It's about the effort and enjoying the process and getting that first one done and having a really good experience. And that's finishing, not walking the last 10K."

Liam's framing, borrowed from her: "This is not necessarily your pinnacle marathon. This is your gateway marathon." And the obvious one people forget — you've never done this before, so whatever you run is a PB.

The evidence that the second one is the fast one: Benita's first marathon was 2:38. Her second was 2:26.

Do I have to run a marathon in training to run a marathon?

No. This is the most common beginner misconception in the whole archive, and Benita kills it flat: "A lot of beginners think 'I've got to do a marathon, so I've got to run a marathon to do a marathon'. You don't need to do that."

Anything at or around 30km is enough. For a first-timer she caps the longest run at 32–34km, and often less.

What if I've entered and I'm not ready?

Downgrading is normal and it's planned for, not a failure. Neither host made the start line of the 2025 marathon — and the show ran the episodes anyway. That's the honest version of this sport.

Liam draws the line that stops "underprepared" becoming an excuse: "There's a difference between being underprepared and not ready."

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4. The training build

How long is a Gold Coast Marathon block?

12–14 weeks — and it's the last stage of the build, not the whole build.

Benita: "I'd say 12 to 14 weeks out, and then focus on Gold Coast Marathon." Allie Lyndon's coach gave her 12–15. Courtney's 2026 build was 12.

So when do I start? People start in January.

That's the classic Gold Coast mistake, and Benita names it as the classic mistake: "The worst thing you can do is be in really good marathon shape in about April or May and train your guts out over summer. You're really ready for the marathon three or four months early. And then you try to hold that fitness and you'll never hold it. You'll probably get injured, or you just might not be enjoying it by the time July rolls around."

If you entered in December, spend the first stretch training for 5k, 10k and half marathon — not the marathon — until roughly the start of April. Then start the block.

"What you do in November, no one will remember."

What should I be doing before the block starts?

Racing short. Benita: "Having some really hard races over 5K or 10K, even a half marathon — that sort of work is so good to do before you get into a marathon prep. And you don't even need to do a lot of marathons to be good at the marathon. It's about having that speed in your legs."

Book actual races so you're not training through no man's land — a 10k in March, a half somewhere in February to April. A half run 12–14 weeks out is also the best predictor you'll get of your marathon pace.

And do your real strength work here, before the block. Once you're in the marathon prep, the gym becomes maintenance only.

How many kilometres a week do I need?

There isn't a number, and anyone who gives you one is guessing about you.

Benita: "I've coached some people that run seven times a week and they get injured — they're running too much and they're trying to break 3 hours. Whereas I've got other people that run four or five times a week and they can break 3 hours."

For calibration only, not as templates:

Runner	Weekly volume
Recreational sub-3 target, mid-block	50–60km
Courtney's 2026 build (ran 2:42:10)	~57km average, 84km biggest week
Allie Lyndon (2:36, single runs only)	Peak week 128km
Michael Shelley as an elite	200–210km
Benita as an elite	~200km

Note that rows two and three — a 57km-a-week build and a 128km-a-week build — finished within six minutes of each other.

What actually causes running injuries — volume, or something else?

Spikes. Not high load.

Sport scientist John Easedown: "It's not so much that high training loads are predictive or make it more probable that you're going to injure yourself. It's spikes in training — sudden spikes in training load." The research sweet spot for week-to-week change is roughly 90–120%.

And the risk is U-shaped, per physio Britt Kayling: undertrained runners and overloaded runners both get hurt. The protected group is the one holding a moderate-to-high load consistently, over a long time.

Never increase volume and intensity in the same week. Alternate them.

Why do I break down when my mate runs 80km a week and doesn't?

Because you're not comparing like with like. Liam read this out on air from running coach Matty Abel, and it's the best answer in the archive:

"Your friend's 80 kilometre week is built on 10 years you don't have. Then your shins start aching, your Achilles, your knee, and you can't understand why you're breaking down while they're cruising. Here's the answer. You're not comparing like with like. They've spent 10 years building a body that can absorb that load. You've spent 3." — Matty Abel, read by Liam Flanagan

Courtney's refinement: the injury risk is mostly bone and muscular load, while aerobic fitness genuinely does compound year on year. So you can borrow their fitness ambition. You can't borrow their tissue.

How many runs a week is enough?

Three or four is a legitimate marathon plan. Four or five if you're chasing a time.

Benita: "Maybe three or four runs a week max, and you can do a marathon off that easy."

Liam pushed back on air — "Three runs a week's like really short changing yourself" — and the series settled it by outcome: Courtney ran 2:42:10 off three to four runs a week. Allie ran 2:36 off 128km weeks. Both got exactly what they trained for.

If you currently run once or twice a week, don't jump to five. Add cross-training and build the aerobic base first.

Should I run on consecutive days?

Not necessarily — and this is one of the genuinely contrarian findings of the two years.

Benita: "It's better for stress fracture prevention, for bone injury, bone health, to be running every second day and not going consecutive days as well."

Courtney built his entire 2026 marathon around that rule, and independently arrived at the same place. Which raises the other point: the seven-day week is an arbitrary container. If you run every second day, some weeks only fit three runs. Courtney's reference is Olympic gold medallist Hamish Carter, whose group worked out they could fit more mileage into a block on a four-days-on, one-day-recovery cycle.

"You listen to podcasts, you listen to us, and everyone falls into this cycle. But you don't have to. There's no reason. It's because we hear it every week and we believe it."

What should a training week look like?

Use this as an audit tool. If your plan doesn't look like this, change your plan.

Courtney's template: one intense session (intervals, reps, fartlek), one tempo or medium build run, one long run — and if there's a fourth run, it's a very easy recovery jog. Nothing else.

Liam: "If your programme doesn't look like what Courtney's just said — an interval session, a tempo run, a long run and maybe a recovery run at most — I would be potentially looking at making changes."

On three or four runs a week, the two non-negotiables are the long run and one other session. Everything else is genuinely easy.

How easy is "easy"?

Slower than you think, and this is where nearly everyone fails.

Benita: "If you're trying to break three hours and that's 4:15 pace, your easy day should be five-minute Ks or slower." For beginners, keep heart rate under 130. On long runs, under 150 — ideally around 140 — plus the talk test.

The diagnostic: "A lot of beginner runners, their graph is just flat because every run's the same pace."

John Easedown calls the same failure "a regression to the middle ground where all of your sessions become kind of difficult, but not that difficult, and not easy." Courtney's version: "There's not enough speed differential between what's easy and what's hard for a lot of runners. They just run."

And the honest reason people can't slow down, from Liam: "Strava is great. But it also carries that inherent pressure of showing people how you're training. There's that little voice that says, but I've run so slowly here, I don't want people to think I'm a slow runner."

For perspective: Courtney ran with world-class mountain and ski-mountaineering athletes on a European trip and the group did 50 minutes at 5:30/km. "Just 'cause you run fast doesn't necessarily mean you always are running fast."

How long should my longest run be?

Around 30km. Not 35km+.

Benita's cleanest answer: "The longest she'll run is not over 35K even — might even be a little bit less. So I think if you can run anything over 30K, around 30K, you'll be fine for the marathon."

Courtney's 2:42:10 build had eight long runs, starting at 20km, maxing at 32km, with only two hitting 30km.

Better still, program them by time, not distance. Andy Buchanan: "Me doing 35K versus you doing 35K versus someone who's hoping to run 4 hours — it is very different and they're very different loads." He caps long runs near two hours, because "you don't want them out there for like 4 hours, because then they run their marathon two or three weeks before they actually step on the start line."

How fast should the long run be?

Slower than marathon pace — and the faster you are, the more that matters.

Benita: "Personally for me, if I ran my long run at my marathon pace, I wouldn't be getting up to do sessions the rest of the week, 'cause I'd just be so shattered."

The test: "With long runs you shouldn't be finishing them just absolutely hammered. You should be able to do it almost again."

For beginners she doesn't prescribe long-run paces at all.

Two more rules that matter: step the long run up every second week, not every week. And leave at least two full easy days between the hard long run and your next session.

When's my last big week?

Peak long run and peak volume land 3–5 weeks out — call it four. Nothing long or hard after that.

Benita: "With people I work with, we generally do our longest and our hardest run about four or five weeks out and then not really tapering from then. But I don't do anything too long and too hard after that point."

Hard deadline: nothing over 30km inside three weeks. Last hard hit-out three to five weeks out, with easy days either side — "almost like a week easy with that in the middle."

I missed a session. Do I make it up?

No. Forget it and move on.

Benita: "I'm not one of those coaches that says you've got to make that session up on another day later in the week. So if you miss something, forget about that day and you just keep going on with your plan. One training session is not gonna make you improve 10 minutes off your time."

Allie Lyndon's lived version, after a long run fell apart: "Old me would have panicked and I would have thought, this is not good, there goes 32K, 35K that I need to get done. Instead I went to bed and I was like, you know what? That felt really good. That was better than nothing. I didn't wake up on Monday thinking I've got to make up these Ks."

And from SCU sport psychologist Dr Melanie Clark: "You should not feel bad about missing one session, especially if it's better for your mental health if you miss it."

Should I train on the actual course?

For the marathon-specific block, yes — get off the trail and onto the road.

Courtney, quoting Shelley's periodisation: all his long runs early on are in the rainforest; as soon as he's into marathon-specific prep, all of them are on the road. "The more specific he can be, the better."

The practical reason it matters: "Generally an hour forty I only get through 16K, but I'm assuming if I was out on the road I'd be knocking out nearly 20."

Benita's counterpoint, kept because it's also true: vary your surfaces through the general phase for injury prevention. Don't spend every run on concrete.

For course recon specifically, her advice is to scout the drink stations, not the terrain: "We know Gold Coast is fairly flat, but it's more about where you're gonna be."

Should I practise running in a pack?

Yes, and almost nobody does.

Benita: "A lot of people I coach don't practise running in packs because they train by themselves — and when they get in a pack it's like, whoa, so many people around."

Group sessions also teach you to run someone else's pace, and they make hard work disappear. Courtney after one: "What was a 30K session this morning, we all agreed that it felt like 10K."

His single biggest regret from the 2026 build was doing it alone: "I've been avoiding people, trying not to injure myself by going too fast. But by doing that, it makes everything so much harder when you're doing it all on your own."

What was the "Courtney Experiment", and did it work?

Three rules, one 40-something body with a calf history, and a marathon at the end of it.

1. Run only every second day. Stationary bike on the off days. "It keeps the load down, stops me overdoing it. And what it allows me to do is recover fully before I go out again."
2. Leave the ego at home. No chasing the young blokes in speed sessions. "It's always in an intense session, and generally it's when I'm chasing runners who are still running sub-30-minute 10Ks."
3. Gym consistency, specifically calf and lower-leg strength.

The build: 12 weeks, ~57km/week average, biggest week 84km, smallest 21km, eight long runs to a 32km max — and only three marathon-pace sessions in the entire block.

The result: 2:42:10, within about 40 seconds of what his training predicted, off a build he describes as "underprepared in the biggest possible way".

He never pretended it was optimal: "I'm not silly. I understand the equation is the more mileage you run, generally the better marathon you run. I accept that. However, in this experiment, what I'm going to do is stick to this rule with the goal of getting to the start line as fresh as possible."

Benita's verdict: "I don't think you're going to make any mistakes. Even if you pulled up sore from that long run, I don't think you're going to make any mistakes, because you've cut back your mileage so much."

The cost was real, and he named it — the wall at 35km was neuromuscular, not fuel. He simply didn't have the long-run volume to hold power that late.

And the opposite approach?

Allie Lyndon, same race, opposite build. Peak week 128km on single runs only — no doubles, because life doesn't allow them. Sunday long runs of two to three hours with big blocks of marathon pace inside them.

Courtney's read on it: "They weren't training to avoid injury, they were training to perform… they all achieved their goal through that structured training and doing the right paces."

She ran 2:36 and finished second in the Queensland Marathon Championships.

Two builds, six minutes apart, opposite philosophies — and both delivered exactly what they were designed to deliver. That's the honest answer to "which plan is right".

Her biggest single lesson is free: "I realised that I was worrying too much about those around me. A learning phase for me was to just go by my watch, just worry about me. Stay in your lane."

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5. The sessions that actually matter

How many hard sessions a week?

One interval session. Maximum. For everyone.

Benita: "I'm not one of those coaches that gives more than one interval session a week. I think it's too much intensity for a marathon prep. And that's regardless of level — even my top elites."

For beginners, every second week, so you don't grow to hate the plan.

How hard are marathon intervals?

Not flat out. This is the misconception she corrects most often.

"A lot of beginners think interval sessions mean absolutely as fast as you can. It's not — because the marathon's not about going as fast as you can."

What they are: faster than marathon pace, around 5k–10k effort, never run to failure. The self-check is the useful bit:

You should be able to finish an interval session and do a few more reps.

There's a genuine tension in her own advice worth knowing about — elsewhere she says intervals should feel like "running a flat-out 1500 or 5K every week" and that you can feel a bit sick at the end of them. The reconciliation: harder than marathon effort, but with reps left in the tank.

Why keep them at all when you're marathon training? "As you get older and start enjoying the longer races, the first thing people cut out is interval sessions. But if you want to improve, the interval sessions really help when you go to run that slower pace."

What's a tempo run, in plain English?

Faster than marathon pace, slower than 10k pace. Roughly half marathon pace. In a marathon block, most of your intensity should be threshold and tempo rather than intervals.

Liam's warning about the jargon is worth keeping: "Threshold means nothing if you don't know what your threshold is."

What's the single most important marathon session?

A long run with a marathon-pace block in the back half. That's the event, rehearsed.

Benita's principle: "The key with running a good marathon is that when you get to 25, 30K, it's how well you can run on tired legs. It's not about how fast you can run over 5K, it's how fast you can run after 30K."

A time-poor hack from the same principle: extend your warm-up to 20–30 minutes so the session starts on tired legs.

And the surging long run, every second week — alternate a faster kilometre with a slower one inside the long run. "It sounds hard, but I reckon it makes the long run go quicker."

Give me actual sessions.

Andy Buchanan's three — Australian marathon record holder, and he programs by time:

1. The confidence session. 2.5 hours, covering roughly 32–33km. "That's the session if you want to know that you can complete the marathon."
2. The specificity session. 2 hour long run, straight into 20 minutes at marathon effort. No stopping, no changing shoes. "I find it's such a good way of preparing your legs for what they're going to feel after 35K." And the aside that saves you a faff: "I see too many people stop and they change shoes. They put their fast shoes on. Whereas these days, the shoes are so good. You can get rolling in your heavy shoes."
3. The patience session. 2 x 3km at half marathon effort with a 3-minute standing recovery, then straight into 12km at marathon effort. Teaches you to settle back to marathon pace when you're already cooked.

Benita's tune-up options, 3–5 weeks out — pick one:

• 4–5 x 4km, first rep slightly slower than marathon pace, the rest at marathon pace, 1km float between.
• A 20km effort or trial half — first 5km at marathon pace, then progress faster.
• An odd distance (15k, 20k, 25k) as a pseudo-race, deliberately not a half or a 10k so it can't become a PB attempt.

Do at least one on the road, in your race shoes. And remember: "Anything you do in training, you're going to be fresher on race day. You're always going to run better in an actual race."

Courtney's blunt gloss on the trial half: "If you pick a pace and then you can't handle it in training for 21K, you've got Buckley's in a marathon to hold it."

Should I do hills if the race is flat?

Yes. Hills are free strength work — but swap a session for them, don't stack them on top.

Benita: "If you're really busy and you're not getting to the gym — if you're doing one or two hill sessions in your prep, then you're getting that strength work just doing the running session."

Liam's practical case: "Gym memberships are something not everybody can justify. So if you're one of those people that doesn't have a dedicated gym or strength programme — hills. It's free. You can find them anywhere."

Form cue from Michael Shelley, and it's counterintuitive: cut your stride going uphill rather than driving harder. "I'm not getting as much lactic because my legs aren't going. If I started putting too much force through it, it just felt as I was getting heavier and heavier." His own honest coda: "It felt easier at the time, but who knows if it was beneficial. It just worked well for me."

What about strides?

They're the key taper session and the thing that keeps your rhythm. 20–30 seconds at roughly 5k pace, six to eight reps, 30–60 seconds jog between.

Benita: "We're dropping the volume a lot, but it's important within a taper to get your legs moving faster than race pace."

The honest trade-off, from Courtney, who skipped them entirely for a whole build to protect his calves: "I know how much strides help me with rhythm, but I purposely can't. Not ideal — I'm not suggesting to do that. But for me, I've been on the ultra-conservative side of everything."

How do I use parkrun in a marathon block?

Three ways that beat racing it blind:

1. Hard-ish 5k Saturday, easy long run Sunday. Not flat out — faster than half marathon pace, ideally as a progression.
2. Progression parkrun. Start at half marathon pace, get faster as it goes.
3. Parkrun inside the long run. Run 15km easy, surge through the 5km of parkrun, then 5km easy home. That's rehearsing running fast on tired legs, which is the whole marathon.

Caveat, from Britt Kayling: parkrun once a week plus one other run is not a marathon base.

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6. Strength, niggles and staying in one piece

Do I really need to do gym work?

Yes, and it matters more every decade you're alive.

Benita: "When you're in your 20s you can get away with most things. But as we get older, strength training just becomes more and more important. Everyone that I work with does some form of strength training."

The dose is smaller than you'd fear: "You can really get a lot of stuff done in 15 to 20 minutes twice a week."

Why the marathon specifically: "The marathon is about strength. You get past 30K and you've got to be strong."

Isn't running my strength training?

No. Liam got told this to his face by his physio and put it on air: "The physio told me, are you doing strength training? And I was like, oh yeah, I'm running. And he's like — that's not strength training."

Won't the gym make me heavy and slow?

Not if it's done right. Britt Kayling: "If you do it the right way, it doesn't give you bigger muscles. And as a distance runner you don't want big muscles, because then you're carrying more mass across the ground."

Inside a marathon block, gym work is maintenance and a different stimulus from straight-line running — not a place to chase PBs. "If you're marathon training, you're not going to push PBs in the gym."

Do the real strength building outside the block. And do your gym on your run days, not your rest days — hard days hard, easy days easy.

What's the one strength test that matters for runners?

Calf endurance. Not calf strength.

Dr Gabe Fernandez (Southern Cross University): "One of the most common things we see in runners that suffer from Achilles tendinopathy is that they have a low calf endurance." The working target is more than 30 single-leg calf raises with a straight knee, metronome-paced.

He's upfront that the normative data behind that number is general population rather than runners, so treat 30 as a working target, not a pass mark.

The free version, relayed on the show from Rob de Castella: "When you wake up in the morning and you go to brush your teeth, do it on one calf. Two minutes to brush your teeth — guarantee you'll be feeling the burn. And then before you go to bed at night you do the other calf. When you can do that without the burn and comfortably get through brushing your teeth, you're in good shape."

Do carbon shoes change my injury risk?

They load your calves and feet more. Both Benita and Courtney flag it independently.

Benita: "It's gotten more and more important, especially as we wear the super shoes. I know that they really can smash your calves a bit." Courtney: "There's a lot more torsion and you're loading up your foot muscles and your calf muscles."

If you're racing in them, build the calf capacity to handle them.

What should I do before a run?

Pick one thing and actually do it, rather than planning a protocol you'll skip.

Britt Kayling's three pillars: calves/Achilles (a bit of self-massage then ~15 calf raises, or bunny hops, or 20 seconds of skipping), hips/pelvis (glute bridges), and light run drills (low knees, high knees, run-throughs).

Her realistic version: "If you just choose one of those three pillars to do one exercise outside the car — you can always just throw a towel down on the grass and quickly do some glute bridges. And it makes such a big difference. I know it does, and I'm still a person who doesn't do it all the time."

Especially if you've driven to your run: "Think about the position you sit in in a car. You're all bent at your hips, bent at your back, bent at your knees. You're not putting really much force through your calves and your feet."

Context for why any of this matters: running puts six to seven times your body weight through a single leg.

Does anyone actually keep the gym going through a build?

Not really, and the show says so. Courtney, six weeks out from a 2:42 marathon: "The one thing that hasn't played out in that experiment how I would have liked is the gym hasn't been as consistent as I would have liked. There's no progression in my gym."

Liam's honest read: "If you've got a choice about running or gym, you're going to take the running."

That's not permission to skip it. It's just what actually happens, said out loud.

I've got a niggle. Do I run through it or stop?

There's a clean decision rule from Dr Gabe Fernandez at SCU, and it's the most useful thing in the archive on this.

Probably fine: pain that shows up mid-run, stays at the same level rather than getting worse, and is gone by the next morning.

Problem: pain that keeps recurring, or that's still there when you're walking to work the next day. "That starts to be more problematic."

What you don't do is train through it and hope. Benita: "Don't train through niggles hoping they're gonna get better. Because if they get worse, then you're even further back than you are now." Get it diagnosed — and note that your coach is not your physio. "I'm not a physio, I'm not a sports doctor. But if you can tell me, I can take their advice and adjust the programme accordingly."

If you're sore but not injured, the adjustment is simple: swap the hard session for an easy jog and push the quality back a week.

And the trap that costs people their race: telling yourself you'll be running again in a couple of weeks and it'll be fine. "Sometimes you just gotta cut your losses."

Liam, who did exactly the wrong thing in 2025: "Don't do what I did last year and think you can train through it. And also understand pulling the pin. As someone who did it 12 months ago — pulling the pin isn't the end of your running career."

Does anyone get through a marathon block without a problem?

No. Liam asked Benita directly whether anyone gets through clean. Her answer: "I don't reckon anyone." And: "I can't think of anyone that I haven't had to adjust some part of their programme."

Plan for disruption. It isn't a sign you're doing it wrong.

What if I get sick?

Take it more seriously than you take an injury, because you can't cross-train through it.

Physio Britt Kayling reckons illness may derail more preps than injury does — and she's upfront that she's recalling a figure rather than citing one.

The rule of thumb: chest = rest. Throat and above = modify — drop the intensity, keep some easy aerobic work. Pushing a hard session through a head cold is how it becomes a chest infection that costs you weeks. On antibiotics, you don't run hard, and you follow the doctor.

The cautionary tale is Bronte, who kept training through what turned out to be pneumonia: "Two days after we recorded our podcast I went to the doctor. And she's like — I don't know how you've done it, but you have pneumonia. So please stop running."

And the reassurance is the same story's ending. She lost about ten days, came back, and PB'd a half marathon inside her next long run: "The new plan was a 90-minute to two-hour run, and I did a half marathon and got my PB."

Sport scientist John Easedown: "If you take a week off, you're not going to start losing fitness." Detraining takes weeks to months, not days.

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7. Pacing

What's the one thing everybody says?

The race starts at 30km. Four independent sources, none of them coordinating, all landing in the same place.

Michael Shelley — treat the first 32km as sightseeing. This one reaches us second-hand, via Courtney, who Shelley told it to directly before a London Marathon: "Michael Shelley always used to say to me — for the first 32K just treat it like nearly a sightseeing. I want to be able to take in everything going around me. And that's how he kind of knew I'm going easy enough."

The physical check that goes with it: "As long as I want to, I should be able to identify people on the side of the road cheering for me." That's the standard. Comfortable enough, at 30km into a marathon, to pick faces out of a crowd.

Benita Willis — you're on a bus: "You're just sitting on a bus, and that's like the first 30K. And then when your stop's coming up, you get ready to press the button. And then once you press the button, the red light flashes and that gets you into that last 12K." Plus the line that should be on the wall: "The first 30K should be just cruising along. Shouldn't hurt."

Andy Buchanan — the gloves come off at 30: "I always come up with a goal of what I want to run every five K. I hit lap every 5K… and in my head the race starts at 30K. So every marathon I've done, I've got to 30K, I've hit the split and I've actually said to myself, this is where the race starts — and it's kind of like you're taking your long sleeve off and you're in race gear."

Ryan McDonald, from the organiser's chair: "That first half, 30K should feel really comfortable. It should feel almost like you're holding back a little bit."

For the half, Buchanan's equivalent: be patient to 16km.

I feel amazing at 10km. Is that good?

No. That's everyone.

Michael Shelley: "Probably the most important part is that first 10K, that it's not too hard — because that's when you will feel fantastic. Trust me. Everyone feels fantastic in that first, it's up to 10K."

And from a 2:11 marathoner, about a race he was winning: "I felt great till about 36 kilometres, which is probably what everyone will feel on race day. Felt amazing, but 2K later I didn't feel so great. So it hit me pretty quickly."

Why does going out slightly too hard destroy me at 30km?

Because the damage accrues silently. Benita: "Say if you start at six-minute pace, you could do that for a fair way, but you're just producing a little bit of lactic acid. And it builds up and builds up, and say when you get to 30K, you all of a sudden just feel crap."

Liam's version from the Gold Coast course itself is the best cautionary tale in the archive: "I've been running really comfortably with the 3:20 bus the whole way. And I thought, I feel good, so I'll see what's there for the last 12. And I think we hit the 30K and suddenly the 3:20 bus started running away from me. I'm like — why are they accelerating? Oh. I'm slowing down."

The technical footnote: what feels like accelerating at 30km isn't. It's working much harder to hold the same pace.

How do I know if my goal pace is right?

Three checks.

The three-hour test. Benita: "It should feel like you can run that pace for over 3 hours… you've got to make sure that you're not running at a pace where you're going, oh, I'm going really well, I'm looking at my watch and I'm going really fast. But can you hold that for three hours?" Her follow-up: "You should be feeling like you're going too slow. Almost."

The conversation check. Shelley: "Have a chat to people around you, because that's going to be the guide as to how hard you're actually progressing in that first part of the race." And later in the same episode: "If you can't have a conversation, you find it too difficult to talk — maybe drop back a little bit to the next group." Liam's addendum: "It doesn't count if you run with someone who's doing all the talking."

The training check, done early. Benita tests goal pace in the first three or four weeks of the block: "If you can't do it in training runs that are only 8Ks or 6Ks at that pace, you won't be able to do it for a marathon in 12 weeks." Reassess early, not at the end — otherwise you spend twelve weeks failing to hit numbers.

My training's going better than expected. Should I raise the goal?

Almost certainly not.

Benita: "The biggest mistake I can do as a coach is change your marathon pace to a lot faster. And then you get to 30K, 32K and you've just got nothing."

If the training genuinely has outrun the goal and the day is cool, take five seconds a kilometre — not ten to fifteen. And her reasoning is the whole philosophy in one sentence: "My thinking is always, if you can go faster after 30K, then that's when you go faster — rather than going faster for the first part and risking blowing up a bit."

Will I actually run faster on race day than in training?

A bit. Buchanan's rule of thumb, relayed by Courtney: allow roughly 10 seconds per kilometre faster on race day than the same effort in training, fresh and fuelled.

But don't bank on it, and don't expect miracles. Courtney: "There's no magic pill I can swallow in two weeks that's going to allow me to suddenly pull 10 seconds out of my bum. It just can't happen."

He proved the point. He predicted 2:37 off a session 2.5 weeks out, adjusted down, and finished within about 40 seconds of what the training said. Liam's summary: "You've actually gone out and run the most unsurprising, predictable marathon."

Training doesn't lie. That's the section.

Should I run with a pace group?

Yes, especially for a first marathon — because hardly anyone negative-splits without one. Ryan McDonald: "We know that there's only a small percentage of people that can negatively split in a marathon. Most people do the second half slower than their first." Because the course is flat, the pacers run even splits.

Four rules:

1. Pick the group your training earned — and for a first marathon, pick the slower one. Benita on a first-timer: "I think you're gonna find that really slow. That's gonna feel so easy at the start. But the risk is for us to move up to a pace group."
2. Start at the back of the group, not the front. You can relax there, you're not chasing a surge, and you get better access to drinks.
3. Start with them. Pacers run to net time — they start their watch at the start line. If you start minutes in front, their finish time isn't yours.
4. Don't follow them blindly. They're volunteers, and they're human. Andy Buchanan: "Sometimes they can run a bit too fast because I think they get nervous that they don't want to be 10 seconds over. They'd rather be 10 seconds under."

You'll find them in the start zone — volunteers hold a sign, then the pacer arrives with the balloons.

Check before race day: the pacer list and start zone allocations go up on the official website, and they don't line up intuitively. In 2025 the 4:15/4:30 pacers sat at the back of Zone D and the front of Zone E — so a wrongly-declared time could strand you among 3:40 runners with no group at all.

Does my declared time on the entry form matter?

Yes. It's the entire basis of the start zone system, and inflating it hurts you. Ryan McDonald: "It's not great if you start towards the front but you've just got people passing you all the time, and you might get bumped. It forms part of our race etiquette — filling out the entry form accurately."

One first-timer got caught slightly ahead of her 4:30 balloon, ended up swept into the next wave, and had no pace group with her for the entire first half. She ran ~4:30 and reckoned 4:20 was there from the right spot.

What's the start line actually like?

A crush. Expect to physically insert yourself.

Bronte Langbroek: "It was pretty hard at the beginning. A lot of people that were there will know — we're in a corral and it was just crazy. You kind of just have to shove yourself into everyone. So I shoved myself into an area that was near the 4:30 pacer."

And you may be standing still for up to 45 minutes if you want a good position. Dress accordingly.

Should I panic about a slow first 5km?

No — in a field this size you can't run fast anyway, so use it as your warm-up.

Benita: "When you're in these big races, you can't run very fast anyway at the start, because there's so many people around. So that's something you shouldn't stress about — it's about just warming your body up too."

This is also why the marathon warm-up is minimal on purpose: "I tell everyone that the first few Ks is part of your warm-up into the race. So if you're going to be out there for hours and hours, you don't want to spend 20 minutes warming up for a marathon and wasting glycogen stores. So I would just walk-jog for 5 minutes, maybe do a few strides."

Faster runners need more — up to 10 minutes of jogging plus a few run-throughs.

Being passed for the first 18km is normal. Courtney, en route to 2:42: "Everyone runs off. Of course, the crazy people run off and then down the road start popping. I would say for the first 18K I was more or less getting passed by people."

Should I run to my watch?

Use it as a guardrail, not a boss.

Two elite marathoners in this series raced without one at all. Shelley: "I never really raced in a watch, so I tried to run to feel." Benita: "I never looked at split times. I didn't even race with a watch."

The practical middle ground both offer: put heart rate on your screen instead of pace, as a ceiling check that you're not overcooking it early.

Other rules that came up repeatedly:

• Don't watch every kilometre marker. "The worst thing you can do is watch every K marker."
• Use the painted course markers, not GPS splits. Buchanan: "With a lot of these big city marathons you go through a heap of buildings and the splits can be way off." Packs make it worse.
• Think in 5km blocks, and give yourself a range, not a number. Buchanan: "I want you to run between say 16:10 and 16:30, because that's what your training shows. But if you go out and run 16 minutes, you're going too fast. Don't worry about K splits — K splits are too small."
• Checking it costs energy. Courtney: "To be worried about a bloody pace the whole way, there's a lot of energy involved in just watching."

And the philosophy underneath: "Use the data to second-guess yourself, use the data to check yourself. But in the end it's your body and it's what it's telling you. If you're feeling and breathing and you can tell you're going too hard — you are going too hard."

What is the wall, really?

Two different failures, and most recreational runners get the second one.

Glycogen depletion — the classic bonk. Neuromuscular fatigue — you simply can't hold the pace over that distance any more.

Courtney's 2026 wall at 35km is the clearest worked example on record, because his heart rate went down: "This is where it got interesting, because my heart rate actually decreased. The pace dropped off and I lost a couple of minutes. At no stage was I like, oh, I'm in trouble or I'm breathing heavy. It was just harder. Neuromuscularly."

His conclusion: "Bonking's more like your muscles just run out of glycogen. Mine was more neuromuscular in the sense of — I took on plenty and I just was slow. I just didn't have power any more to keep running."

Not every late-race slowdown is a fuelling problem. Sometimes it's just not enough long runs.

And the best framing for a first-timer, from Shelley's coach Dick Telford: "Just be relaxed, and you'll just get tired. That was the only way he'd put the actual marathon. You'll just get tired towards the end of it."

What about cramp?

Honest answer: there's no in-race fix.

Courtney: "I'm not saying it wouldn't work and it's not worth trying, but a lot of the time the actual reality is your muscles just aren't conditioned to go at that pace over that distance. There's no way around it except slowing down earlier and/or conditioning yourself better and more specifically for the event."

Not what the electrolyte aisle wants you to hear.

Everyone hits a bad patch. What do I do?

Ride it. Andy Buchanan set the Australian record in a race where he thought he was done at halfway: "If you asked me about Valencia, honestly, at halfway I was like, holy shit, I don't think I'm going to finish. And that's where I ran the record."

His sports psych gave him the line: "Just ride the wave. The wave's always going to end. You just got to ride the wave." And the corollary: "You'll feel really good — don't get excited. And then when you feel bad, you just got to be like, hey, I know there's a good patch coming around the corner."

Even Olympians walk. Courtney got a diaphragm stitch around 26–28km in his 2:42, had to stop with his arms over his head while the 2:40 group ran past — then got it under control and ran back into them.

The recovery toolkit, when it's going wrong:

• Stop looking at your watch. Benita: "Sometimes people look at their watch and they might have started at 4:30 pace and they're doing 4:45s, and that's blowing you out mentally. Sometimes if you stop looking at your watch, after 5K you might start running 4:30s again because you're relaxed."
• Shrink the goal. Dr Melanie Clark: "Even if I can't hit that 5-minute K — what do I want to do? Well, I just want to run to the next aid station. And run to the next aid station."
• Never re-litigate the block you just ran. "You can't think back to the last 5K and go, that 5K was terrible, I wish I hadn't done that. You just got to forget about it and move on to the next block."
• Use the landmarks. The Gold Coast is unusually rich in them. Courtney: "Gold Coast is a great course as far as landmarks go — and especially out and back, you can really pick out your landmarks. We've got high rises bloody everywhere."

And the acceptance that makes all of it easier, from Dr Melanie Clark: "I don't think a single race has ever gone to plan. Something almost always goes wrong."

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8. Fuelling

How much do I actually need to take on?

The baseline the show cites from Sports Dietitians Australia: 30–60g of carbohydrate per hour for any race half marathon or longer. A trained marathoner chasing a time should plan for 60–70g/hr.

Courtney planned 60–70 and delivered about 80g/hr in his 2:42 — and had no energy failure at all.

But hold the number lightly, because the Australian marathon record holder doesn't count them:

"I get people asking me all the time — how many grams per hour were you taking? I was like, I've got no idea. Like, actually no idea." — Andy Buchanan

He's also openly sceptical of the very-high-carb marketing: "I need to see it before I believe it. I just often wonder — when there's money to be made, if the numbers get a little bit fudged." And he still drinks flat Coke at 40km.

The resolution: a number is a planning tool so you know what to carry. Judge it on whether you finish without fading, not on hitting the target.

What's actually available on the course?

Historically: 16 aid stations, roughly every 2.5km. Every second one is water only; the stations at 5km intervals are bigger "refreshment stations" with water and electrolyte drink. Gels have traditionally been handed out at 30km only — and the handbook carries a big asterisk saying supplies are limited.

Courtney's read of it: "Don't rely on them all being there by the time you get there."

Check the current year's race handbook before you build a plan around any of this. On-course provisions, sponsors and station contents change every year.

So can I just rely on the aid stations?

No, and this is the show's flagship piece of fuelling advice:

"This is an aid station. It's not a save station. This is not gonna save you. It's gonna aid you, but it's not gonna save you." — Courtney Atkinson

Do the maths. A 250ml paper cup of correctly-mixed on-course sports drink gives you roughly 12g of carbohydrate at best. A gel gives you about 30g. So a cup is worth a quarter to a third of a gel — and that's assuming they've mixed it right.

Liam's version: "Don't rely on the drink."

Courtney's plan for the marathon: "I won't rely on on-course nutrition at all, except for water."

One more thing to check: some electrolyte drinks contain zero carbohydrate. "If you're running a whole event thinking I'm chugging down some sugar the whole way — it's zero. You're gonna find out about that later down the track."

Isn't the 30km gel station enough?

No — 30km is far too late to start fuelling.

Benita: "If you wait to 30K, it might help a little bit. But you're getting closer to the finish there. And often it's what you do before 30K that's gonna get into your system and into your body."

Courtney: "30K is way too late to be getting that much energy in."

How many gels, and when?

Carry six to eight for a marathon, and expect to bin a couple part-used. (Bronte bought nine for a 4:30 marathon and ended up using seven.)

Take them every 20–30 minutes, or every 5km. And here's the thing nobody tells beginners: a mouthful counts. You don't have to finish the whole gel at once. Benita: "Even if it's just one or two mouthfuls — and if you can have a sip of water."

Front-load rather than back-load. Michael Shelley took one before the start and his first on-course gel around 10–15km: "I definitely tried to get my fluids and everything earlier, because it's a lot harder to take on that fuel at the back end of a race."

Two practical details that matter more than they should:

• Wash gels down with water, not sports drink. Shelley: "I'd use water to take the gel, because I'm not diluting flavours — then that can upset your stomach."
• Carrying them warms them up, which makes them much easier to get down.

When should I take caffeine?

This one's genuinely contested on the show, and both sides are worth knowing.

The conventional version (Benita): trial caffeine late, around 25km, so it lands when you need it.

Courtney's argument from the pharmacokinetics: peak caffeine takes up to 45 minutes, so a gel at 25km peaks at 32–35km — which might be exactly right, or might be too late. "I can't understand the full purpose of that. I believe you'd want to be getting that caffeine in earlier — at least 30 to 45 minutes before you actually want to be using it."

He then does the thing the polished version of this content never does: "Happy to be challenged on that, and I could be completely wrong."

Dose guide either way: 3–6mg per kg of bodyweight, tested in training first.

And the reason flat Coke works late has as much to do with your mouth as your muscles: "It's a taste change, just to get something different in your mouth. Sugar just tastes so good in that form at that point of the race."

How do I practise fuelling?

In every marathon-specific session, deliberately. Andy Buchanan: "I always train when I'm doing marathon sessions. I always take on fuel, to try and increase the amount that my body can take on."

The gut is trainable. Treat it like any other system.

Liam names the reason people skip it: "It can be really easy to not want to experiment during your training runs, because you feel like you're going to waste it. So make the effort on your longies."

And the single best line on fuelling timing in two years of the show, which Courtney credits to Clint Kimmins:

"You're not fuelling for how you feel now. You're fuelling for how you're going to feel in 20 minutes from now."

His follow-up: "It's too late if you're going, oh shit, I feel crap, I'd better take one now. It's too late."

How do I grab a drink without losing time?

Four rules, all from people who've done it at speed.

1. Run to the far tables, not the first one. Ryan McDonald: "They go to the first table and then stop, and then it's like a domino effect. I just run down towards the end, grab one off the table and keep going smoothly."
2. Grab and go. Shelley: "Grab one and keep going. Don't stop."
3. If you're in a pack, run on the side the drinks are on. You don't want to be missing stations because you're boxed in.
4. If you need to walk to drink, do it after the last table, in the roughly 100m before the bins.

And practise it, because it's harder than it looks. Buchanan: "Running 3-minute K pace while trying to drink — she's bloody hard."

Can my partner hand me a bottle?

Probably not — but the hosts never actually resolved this on air, so check the current race rules.

What's confirmed: the personal drink stations — eight of them, every 5km — are for the seeded (elite) and priority (sub-elite) start groups only. Ryan McDonald's framing is that you take what's at the designated aid stations. In 2026 Courtney and Liam were still unsure whether handing a bottle to a supporter is permitted and said they'd check with the organisers.

Plan to be self-sufficient and it's a non-issue.

What do I eat the night before and on race morning?

Dinner early — 5 or 6pm. Benita's reasoning is unglamorous and correct: "The morning of a race, you wanna make sure your bowels move properly. And if you have a really big meal at 10 or 11 at night before a marathon, I think that's a bit too late."

Carb load for the last 2.5 days, not five. Carbs at every meal — a sandwich instead of the salad, pasta added to the salad. And don't diet because you're running less in taper week: "You will probably put on a bit of weight in glycogen in taper week anyway." That's the point.

You have to eat breakfast, at least 1.5–2 hours before the gun. Crumpet and honey, toast and jam, banana, oats — something.

If you normally train in the afternoon on an empty stomach, you have to rehearse the morning version. This is aimed directly at people whose entire pre-run intake is a black coffee. Practise once a week, ideally on a weekend run at race time. "It's about getting up, having coffee or whatever you've practised, walking around a bit, and then you should be able to go to the toilet. But you need to practise."

A working example from a first-timer who ran 4:29: "I had a peanut butter and jelly toast. One side peanut butter, one side jam. Smacked it together."

Am I eating enough in training?

Probably not, if your training load varies day to day and your eating doesn't.

Britt Kayling: "Your nutrition has to vary the same as your training does. If you have a high training day, you have to fuel yourself to cope with that high training day beforehand." And the consequence: "If you're not putting enough total energy in, but expecting your body to go and use energy — well, where's it coming from? It's going to come from your tissues."

Underfuelling is a leading driver of bone stress injuries. "Clean" eating is not the same as adequate eating.

The confession that makes it land is from Allie Lyndon, a 2:36 marathoner who was underfuelling until a dietitian sorted her out:

"I'm living off carbohydrates, which I'm really feeling the difference — fuelling properly in sessions. It's probably the key factor to improving performance at this point."

She describes the bonk that taught her: "Somehow I drove home, I had a shower. I fell asleep with the kids going crazy around me. I was on the couch in my towel, towel on my head."

And the blind spot most recreational runners share: "Your meals are very different depending on what session you're going to execute — which is something I didn't know."

And the honest counter-example?

Courtney executed a key marathon-pace session on a servo coffee and a Red Bull off the dashboard.

"This morning my total nutrition was a dirty 7-Eleven coffee on the way there. I threw a Red Bull on the front of my dashboard as I ran past, and that's the extent of my nutrition."

Liam's verdict: "You've fuelled like a beginner."

He then went and ran 2:42. Do as they say, not as they do — but it's useful to know that the people telling you this don't get it right either.

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9. The taper

When does the taper start?

About three weeks out if you're travelling domestically. If you're flying in from Europe or the US, taper harder to absorb the travel.

The structure Benita uses:

• Three weeks out: the last long run comes down. Halve the quality volume — a session that was 6 x 3 minutes becomes 3–4 x 3 minutes. Twenty minutes of hard running becomes ten or twelve.
• Two weeks out: similar sessions, similar volume, but the long run is neither as long nor as hard.
• Race week: roughly 20–30% of your normal volume.

Critical detail: keep your session days the same. Don't delete days, reduce what's in them. "A lot of runners don't want you to take out all the runs and just put one run in. So keep running on the same day you normally run on. You just reduce the volume and the intensity."

What are the hard deadlines?

• Longest, hardest long run: 3–5 weeks out. Call it four.
• Nothing over 30km inside three weeks.
• Last hard hit-out: no closer than three weeks, with easy days either side — "almost like a week easy with that in the middle."

Liam's version on air: "We don't want to be having any hard runs in that last three weeks leading into the Gold Coast Marathon."

What do I keep in the taper?

Strides. They're the point of the whole thing. "We're dropping the volume a lot, but it's important within a taper to get your legs moving faster than race pace." Twenty to thirty seconds at roughly 5k pace, six to eight of them.

Race week for a first-timer is one small session on the Tuesday or Wednesday — 8 minutes at marathon pace, 2 minutes jog, some 20-second strides — plus one other easy run. That's it.

And keep your easy cross-training in. Courtney learned this the annoying way in race week: "You know what, I'm actually sorer this week from doing nothing than I am from when I was actually just running." His diagnosis: he'd dropped his easy bike sessions. "When you're in sport, consistency and routine matters. You think a holiday is a holiday, but you actually come back and things are sore."

A holiday is not a taper.

Why do I feel terrible?

Because that's what tapering feels like. It's not a sign anything's wrong.

Benita: "The thing with tapering is that often even at the start of the race you might still feel lethargic, and you might not start feeling good till even halfway into the race."

The reassurance that should be on a poster: a four-time Olympian nearly pulled out of her 2:22 marathon at 10km because she felt so heavy. "I almost felt like I wanted to pull out after 10K… I was ready to go, obviously, but I felt really heavy. And that's fairly common."

I've suddenly got a niggle two weeks out. Is it real?

Almost certainly not.

"Within the last few weeks you always feel stuff that you don't think's there. I reckon it's more phantom than actual." — Benita Willis

Her explanation: "Even for people to think they're injured in the last week — they go for a 15-minute jog when they normally do a two-hour run. And they're like, oh, my leg." Your volume has dropped to 20–30% of normal and everything feels louder.

The antidote is a reframe: "Don't worry about everything being perfect, because you'll be fine. Think of it more like a long training run — there's obviously going to be a lot more people, and more fun."

Courtney's version: scroll back through your training log. The evidence you can do this is already recorded.

Should I squeeze in one more session?

No. When your brain argues with your body, err towards too little.

Courtney: "If you're thinking I'm losing fitness because I'm not doing enough — the worst thing you can do is still do too much. You're always better to err on the other side and do too little."

Benita, five weeks out: "You can still get a bit fitter. But the biggest thing you can do is overtrain a bit and just be worse on the start line." And from her own career: "I trained too hard, did probably my best marathon three weeks to go — and in the actual marathon I was rubbish, because I just hadn't quite recovered from that training session."

If you're sore, skip it. Courtney, race week: "Tuesday morning I would have normally done intervals, but I consciously was like — I was sore on the weekend. Let's just go and jog."

And here's the single most reusable line in two years of this show:

"If you're sore when you get to the start line, you're not going to run well. But you'll run well if you feel good and you've missed a few of these sessions." — Benita Willis

Should I get a massage in race week?

Only if you normally do — and only three to four days out, and never deep tissue.

Better: get the remedial massage the week before race week, and only from someone who already knows your body. "Someone that you're familiar with, that's not gonna surprise you."

Race week is also not the week to start Pilates, add PT sessions, or try dry needling for the first time.

How much should I be on my feet the day before?

Less than you want to be, but not zero.

Benita: "The day before the race, it's about resting. Don't walk around too much. Watching some trashy TV and stuff like that, chilling out."

But don't overcorrect: "A big problem is people just, two days before, doing absolutely nothing. And lying in a hotel room all day. You just need to be relaxed."

On the Gold Coast this is genuinely hard, because the Expo will eat hours of standing and walking, and it's a nice place to be on a Saturday. Go, go with a list, don't make a day of it.

The other Expo consideration is illness. Britt Kayling: "In that week or two before you go into the marathon, don't put yourself in environments where there's thousands of other people around, because someone's gonna have something."

How do I stop my head eating itself in taper week?

Three things that came up repeatedly:

Don't isolate yourself. "That's a mistake a lot of people make as well."

Stop rehearsing the race in your head. Benita, quoting Grant Hackett: "The more times you think about a race over and over in your head, it just makes you tired. So if you think about the marathon constantly, it'll just make you tired."

Kill every open question before Saturday night. "If you've got a coach and you're in two minds about anything, email them, call them, text them. It just drains you when you're constantly thinking in two minds about something."

And don't stress about sleep the night before. "It doesn't really matter. It's always two nights before, and the week before. I've had so many races where I've had terrible sleep the night before and ran really well."

Is there any argument for not tapering?

One, and it's narrow. Courtney's retrospective on his 2:42:10:

"I wouldn't have done the taper. I would have kept mileage up. I just don't think I did enough training volume to justify a taper. I wouldn't have gone out and done as hard a session, but I needed every little bit of fitness up to it I could get."

Read the fine print: that's off a ~57km/week, three-runs-a-week build. If you've been running conventional marathon volume, you've accumulated fatigue and you need the taper. This is the exception, and he's clear about which build it applies to.

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10. Race week and race morning

What do I do in the week before?

• Collect your bib during the check-in days, not on the morning.
• Buy everything you need before Saturday. Benita: "Some mistakes people make — they don't have everything ready to go. So then on the Saturday afternoon they're going, oh, I need to go and get this. You want to just be having fun on Saturday."
• Lay the whole kit out on Saturday night with the bib already attached.
• Do a full race-ready rehearsal run a week or two out — exact clothes, exact shoes, exact nutrition. Check for chafe.

What time do I get up, and how do I get there?

Up at 4:00–4:30am for a marathon start around 6:00–6:15. Earlier again if you're on the light rail. Arrive at the precinct about an hour before your start.

For locals, the race-morning logistics here are as good as they get in Australia. Courtney: "I literally drove in to Australia Fair, walked 100 metres across to the start line. Where else, unless you're staying in a hotel, can you drive in, there's ample parking, park, walk to the start line 100 metres?"

If you're staying near the start, you can jog there as your warm-up — a genuine luxury compared to bussed point-to-point races.

The caveat: the field is now big enough that accommodation is pushing people further out. Plan your transport, don't wing it.

What's the single most useful piece of race-morning advice?

Go to the toilet early. Not "reasonably early". Early.

"I got there early enough that I got a nice easy toilet up at Australia Fair. I came back half an hour later after I warmed up — and that line-up at Australia Fair, you weren't making the start line in time if you were relying on a public toilet around the race." — Courtney Atkinson

And his blunt structural point: "There's a point where you just can't provide enough toilets."

Also: know where they are before you settle into the start area. Benita: "There's so many people that they get to the start area and they're like, I need to go to the toilet, and then they stressfully run away and then they've got to get back in."

This is not a joke topic. "A number of my runners have talked about toilet issues, whether or not they should go on the start line — and then it plays on their mind if they didn't go."

The levers you actually control: dinner at 5–6pm the night before, and rehearsing the whole morning sequence in training.

How much should I warm up?

Less than you think, and it depends on your pace.

Mid to back of field: five minutes of walk/jog and a few strides is plenty. The first few kilometres of a marathon are your warm-up, and you can't run fast in a crowd anyway. Benita: "You don't want to spend 20 minutes warming up for a marathon and wasting glycogen stores."

Front of field: 5–10 minutes of jogging plus a few run-throughs. "If your first K is 3:30 or something, you know you're warmed up enough."

Either way, do it before you're locked in the corral. Start zones open about 30 minutes before the gun, and once you're in a good position you may not be able to move for 45 minutes.

What do I wear at the start if it's cold?

An old jacket you're happy to lose. Discarded clothing is collected and donated to charity — but throw it over the barrier, not on the road, so it isn't a trip hazard for the people behind you.

Save the gear you actually like for the bag drop.

How do I read the weather?

Check wind, not just temperature. Courtney uses boating apps. Expect a southerly to build through the morning, which is exactly why the early start is a gift for the marathon field.

And accept that you don't control it. "The less stressed you can be before you start a marathon, the better you're going to run. So if you're stressing about the weather or this or that — things you can't control."

Should I run with music?

Personal, but two useful data points from the show.

Bronte built her playlist during training and then salted it with tracks she'd never heard: "Things that I had not listened to at all — so that kept it really fresh." She also popped an earbud out for the crowd sections.

And Courtney, who is famously anti-headphones, chose to race with music specifically because he needed help staying patient for the first 30km. Your rules are renegotiable for the job on the day.

Anything else?

Remember to stop your watch. Bronte didn't.

And the best framing for race day came from a listener, Naomi, who runs event security for a living:

"Flexible and fluid. We adjust to the conditions and circumstances as things pop up. It might not be perfect or pretty, but we get our desired outcome one way or another."

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11. Shoes and gear

Do carbon plate shoes actually matter?

Yes — but probably not in the way the marketing suggests.

Michael Shelley: "It doesn't matter which pace you're going, it's still gonna provide the same benefit. It might be different levels of benefit, but it's still going to have benefit."

The bigger real-world gain may be recovery between hard sessions, not race day. Benita: "I remember doing some of those longer marathon-type sessions in the little tiny paper-thin shoes, and you could hardly walk for the rest of the day. It took a few days to recover before you could train hard again. Whereas with the super shoes, you can sort of just take one day and you're feeling really good."

Asked what's changed most in fifteen years of road running, Courtney doesn't hesitate: "The single biggest thing that's changed is the shoes."

So should I buy a pair for my first marathon?

Here's the answer the shoe brands aren't giving you, from a four-time Olympian and former Australian record holder:

"If you're someone that's doing a marathon for the first time and you want every advantage you can get — I'd be looking at not making sure you train too hard, and pacing and all that stuff, before looking at super shoes." — Benita Willis

She has never bought a pair. She still races in racing flats she stockpiled in the 2000s: "I don't think I'm worthy of super shoes — but I think everyone's worthy of them."

Worth remembering: Michael Shelley's 2:11 and both his Commonwealth Games golds were run before super shoes existed.

And SCU's Dr Gabe Fernandez, asked what the right shoe is for a recreational runner: "Whatever's comfortable and doesn't hurt your foot." For the average runner, he says, there's no such thing as the right shoe beyond comfort.

What's the honest case against them?

Courtney holds a doubt and — unusually — labels it as unevidenced:

"Obviously shoes are faster with the tech where it's going. But I'm also a little bit hamstrung on the fact that does that have implications on the function of your running, which impacts injuries… if you're just throwing rubber under you for the sake of throwing rubber under you, it's maybe not the best thing. But there's no backing to that."

Even Andy Buchanan, who races in them: "There's this bit of a theory — I don't think it's backed scientifically — but there's this theory where you want to wear the plate in a little bit."

That's what an honest take sounds like. Note nobody's selling you anything.

When do I need to have my race shoes sorted?

About four weeks out, with these rules:

• Same model you've worn before? A week and a few runs is enough.
• Model you've never worn? You need several long runs in them.
• Absolute floor: at least one long run in your race shoes. Which means buying two to three weeks out at the very latest.
• Andy Buchanan's version: 5–10km in the race pair before race day.

Don't debut super shoes on race day. But don't train in them daily either — Benita suggests one long run or one session in them every week or two, and nothing else.

And two and a half weeks out, the decision is closed. Courtney: "At this stage you've got a marathon. You've got to stick with what you know."

How do I choose one?

Go in-store and try them. Don't buy off a review.

Shelley: "What works for you. Everyone's going to need something slightly different." Too soft creates instability and wears out fast; too firm and you stop enjoying running.

Two more things people get wrong:

• Lighter isn't automatically better. Buchanan: "If a shoe is light, it can be quite unstable, or doesn't give you the support it needs." Over 42km that matters.
• Stay in a platform you know. Courtney picked his first super shoe from the brand he already ran in daily, so the geometry wasn't a total unknown.

Also: don't wait for an unreleased model that lands after the race, and be wary of the brand-new version of a shoe you love. Sizing and geometry change between versions. Liam: "Not all change is good change."

What does the first run in carbon shoes feel like?

Weird. Give it a kilometre.

Courtney: "I put the Alphaflys on for the first time, ran the first K up along the Spit and I felt like Donald Duck." Then: "After a K, from then on I didn't even realise I was wearing a different pair of shoes."

They also reward a firmer ground strike, not a tip-toe bouncy stride: "The shoe comes to you. You don't have to be over-the-top bouncy. You can take the ground, hit a little bit harder, and they come back to you."

Test them on a long session, not a 5km — and test for the thing that actually ruins races. Benita: "Blisters is a big thing. You need to practise at race pace, as well as making sure it feels good jogging too."

Should I rotate shoes?

Yes. It was Benita's lifelong injury-prevention habit: "I always wore different shoes to cycle the different stresses around. Mixing it up always helped with injury prevention."

Two or three pairs if you can afford it. Keep a plain everyday jogger in there — Shelley did most of his training in one specifically because it reduced injuries.

Allie Lyndon's elite version: carbon race shoes touched only on race day, everything else split between two daily trainers.

And vary your surfaces as well as your shoes.

What about $100 carbon shoes?

The hosts' read is that the disruption coming from the cheaper brands is on price, not technology — and that credibility in Western markets is the only thing holding them back.

Both still chose the $200 established-brand shoe over a near-identical $100 one, while conceding that calculation changes as the newer brands buy credibility. Meanwhile, the same shoe can be $280 in one shop and $360 in another. Shop around.

Socks, shorts, chafe?

• Practise in the socks you'll race in. They're part of the shoe test.
• Sort your shorts in training. Trail shorts are the wrong tool for a road marathon.
• Chafe is the unglamorous killer. Bleeding nipples were widely reported at the 2025 finish. Nothing new on race day applies to clothing, not just shoes.

And the reality check for anyone kitting out completely: Liam watched a bloke in the full top-end technical outfit plus a nose strip sitting in the 2:35 group, and then walking. "Let's not blame the singlet on that. I think that's probably the training."

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12. The head game

What's the biggest mental mistake?

Ego, and it doesn't go away with experience. Courtney, mid-session, in a build that produced a 2:42:

"Here's the learning. This doesn't get any easier for us, no matter what level. Ego's ego and you want to push harder."

And the internal monologue, verbatim: "Then I'm thinking about 3K later — you idiot. Really. You idiot. Because when you set the session out, it's meant to be conservative and easy. But here I am going, well, maybe I should be at 2:45, and then I can go to 2:40s, and then I can go to 2:30s. The mind races very quickly ahead."

An Olympian. Twenty-five years of racing. Same problem you have.

All three of the 2026 series guests name ego independently: Andy Buchanan's "ride the wave", Allie Lyndon's "stay in your lane", and Courtney's own version — "the marathon is all about how aerobic you can be, how efficient you can be, how you can hold a pace. Everything that speed and keeping up with other people is actually the opposite of."

How do I break the race up mentally?

Pick a system and rehearse it in training. Options that came up:

• 5km blocks. Buchanan hits lap every 5km and thinks only about the block he's in.
• A person per 5km. Benita: "Every 5K, think of a new person that's inspired you in your life and then go on to the next person. Five Ks are good segments, because often that's where the water stops are."
• Landmarks. One listener mapped the whole course to his own life — SeaWorld for trips with his kids, Main Beach for the Gold Coast 600, Cavill for where his wife would be standing, the northern end for growing up in Labrador. "He's locked into something to think about every 5 to 8 Ks."
• Familiar sessions. Shelley: "Think of a training session that you've done, thinking, oh, I've just got one of those reps to go."
• Or don't visualise at all. Bronte ran mentally ahead of herself instead: "I'm always a couple of Ks ahead in my mind, and that's what works for me."

Whatever you use, the rule is the same: never re-litigate the block you just ran.

What if I feel terrible at halfway?

Everybody does, at some point. Andy Buchanan thought he wasn't going to finish the race in which he broke the Australian record.

The tool his sports psych gave him: "Just ride the wave. The wave's always going to end." And the discipline that goes with it: "You'll feel really good — don't get excited. And then when you feel bad, you just got to be like, hey, I know there's a good patch coming around the corner."

Dr Melanie Clark's framing of the same thing: "I acknowledge the fact that I feel bad and it's OK. So affirming that feeling, but also knowing that it doesn't define me — and it's how I respond to that that defines me."

And the useful piece of realism: "I don't think a single race has ever gone to plan. Something almost always goes wrong."

Should I set a goal time at all?

Depends what kind of goal it is.

Dr Melanie Clark's research position: hard outcome goals are brittle. "Having those really specific, outcome-based goals can sort of be detrimental." One injury or one 30-degree day and your motivation collapses. Open goals ("see how fast I can run this") and process goals (fuelling, hydration, staying relaxed) survive a bad day.

Courtney's version is blunter: "I do have a bit of an issue with this whole fascination around a time. I just don't think you should be dictating what you can do on race day." His replacement: "Find your race within the race." Race the bloke in front. Race your mate off a handicap. Race something that's actually there on the day.

The counterpoint is kept because it's honest — Liam: "My brain wants to be able to quantify it objectively." Fair enough. Both are true.

Liam adopted one rule from Melanie Clark live on air and it's worth stealing: he stopped asking people what time they ran unless they volunteered it.

Should I pull out if my prep falls apart?

Sometimes, yes — and this show has more standing to say that than most, because both hosts pulled out of the 2025 race.

The coach told her own client, on air, on the podcast built around the race: "Personally, I don't think you should run the marathon." Then she ruled out the half and the 10k too: "Personally, I don't think you should run anything. I think you just need a few weeks where you don't worry about running. Go for some rides for fun. Don't stress about a race at the start of July."

The bargaining that follows is universal, and Liam put it on tape: "If I go and get my bib, maybe I'll just jump in with my mates for a bit and run like 10Ks and then pull out… I don't sound like an addict. Yeah, I know, right. Maybe I am a little bit."

What actually happened when he decided not to run: "The weight off my shoulders of thinking about — what am I running this week, how am I going to run this week, how's the calf going to go?"

The lines worth keeping:

• "Not every race and not every prep."
• "Pulling the pin isn't the end of your running career."
• "It's never a wasted base."
• Benita: "There's so many other races. So don't think that the Gold Coast Marathon is your race. And don't think, oh, I'm not going to be running next year. You're probably going to be better next year."

And if you're wobbling: find one person to talk it through with. Don't crowd-source it. Benita's observation is that people fall apart on these decisions because "they've got no one behind them really helping them with their mindset."

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13. After the race

What do I do in the two weeks after?

The show read out a full protocol from running coach Luis Harenko of 1609 Coaching, and it's the most concrete recovery guidance in the archive.

Days 1–7: no running. Days 1–3 walking only, 20–30 minutes. Days 4–7 easy swim or spin, 20–40 minutes. Eight-plus hours sleep all week. Protein every three to four hours.

Days 8–14: one 20-minute test run around day 8–10. If it felt normal, easy runs every second day.

Week 3: strides. Week 4: first workout.

The reasoning is the bit that matters:

"Right now your body is more broken down than at any point in your training. Muscle damage markers stay elevated for up to 14 days after a marathon."

"Soreness gone in three to four days. Muscle repair takes one to two weeks. Tendon and bone damage longer still. Soreness fades days before repair is complete. It is a poor measure of damage."

— Luis Harenko / 1609 Coaching, read on air

And for the fitness anxiety: "Detraining takes 2 to 4 weeks to begin. Two easy weeks cost you almost nothing."

First 24 hours: eat within the hour, a ten-minute walk beats the couch, sip fluids until your urine runs pale.

What does the coach say?

Independently, almost exactly the same shape. Benita: "I think you need at least the first week just of some cross training, walking, letting your body recover and not being on a structured plan. A lot of the thing with the marathon is not only have you done the marathon physically, but emotionally it's a really tiring race."

Then: "The next week I would just be doing a few jogs if you don't pull up sore. Maybe two or three. The week after that, maybe increase to four or five if that's what you normally do. And then probably not anything hard until the week after that."

And the mistake she flags: "It's a mistake — and often this happens if the marathon doesn't go well — it's a mistake to get straight back into training straight away."

And the honest counter-take?

Worth putting right beside the protocol, because they contradict each other and both are defensible.

Courtney, relaying Michael Shelley: "If that is the pinnacle of your whole year and what you want to do — go and take a holiday. Just forget about it for a while. Forget about all this science shit."

Shelley's own first-hand version: "After every marathon I had three weeks off. I did not touch my running shoes. It was done. It was like I went on holidays. So that was part of my enjoyment with marathons — I'd pick a destination, I'd go race there and then I'd have a look around after."

Benita agrees with the spirit even while prescribing the protocol: book the non-running reward now, before the race. Liam: "Book it in now, people."

Is "rest" the same as recovery?

No, and Liam's the cautionary tale. A month after his 100-miler he'd done nothing at all — and doing nothing was the problem. His physio's verdict: "You still got fluid there. You need to be treating this like an injury." Which he hadn't been.

Passive rest treats fatigue. It doesn't treat injury. If something specific hurts, it needs actively managing from day one.

Why do I already want to enter another one?

Because everyone does, within minutes. This is the most consistent finding in the whole archive:

• Liam: "I remember crossing the line and thinking never again. Five minutes later I was like, oh OK, I've got to find another one."
• Benita, after her first (New York): "When I crossed the line I was like, oh, I just want to go home… And then five minutes later I was like, I just wanna do another one."
• Bronte: "I finished Sunday. By Sunday evening I was thinking about the next one."
• Liam again, after his 2024 Gold Coast run: "Five minutes after finishing, my mind went to — I reckon I can go sub 3:10."

Know it's coming. Don't act on it that day.

What does the finish line actually feel like?

Not always what the highlight reel says.

Courtney, after running 2:42:10 at his first marathon in decades: "How did you feel at the finish line? Honestly — nothing. Nothing." And: "Didn't go bad, didn't go good. It just went how it was meant to go."

That's the price of a perfectly-predicted race, and it's a real feeling that almost nobody publishes.

The other side, from Bronte after a well-paced 4:29: "I got a massage a couple of days afterwards and my masseuse was like — did you run a marathon? There's no blisters, there's no bad toenails. Like, what happened?"

Both are good outcomes. They just feel completely different.

When do I start training for the next one?

Not now. And when you do — don't start in January. See section 4.

"You've only got a certain number of months a year where you can be really focused on your big goal of the year."

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14. The honest bits

The stuff that doesn't make the highlight reel.

AI told an Olympian he was cooked

Courtney fed fourteen years of Strava history into an AI and asked it to predict his marathon. It came back with 3:14–3:16, and said a well-managed race might get him 3:08–3:12.

He ran 2:42:10.

"If I was just trusting this, I would be in my head going — what the hell? If I had no knowledge of what the running was, this was crazy."

What it did get right was impressive: it correctly identified that his heart rate drifts at 3:35–3:40/km, and traced every major training disruption across three years back to one recurring right calf and ankle injury. His conclusion: "It can identify data so well. As far as giving a strategy, we're so far away."

Dr Luke Delvecchio's version from the exercise physiology lab: "It can spit out a programme, but it absolutely lacks the human factor. The athlete wakes up and says, I'm feeling a bit off today. That conversation with a coach means the coach will make subtle adjustments on the run."

Andy Buchanan, asked about it: "I've never used ChatGPT. Never." And his reason for keeping a human dietitian: "Who's holding me accountable with AI? Like, no one."

Your Strava file means nothing

"I ran 28K. But if you actually just looked at it, you've got no bloody idea what it means. Nothing. It means nothing. And this is one of the traps we all fall into." — Courtney Atkinson

And the reason your easy runs aren't easy, from Liam: "Strava carries that inherent pressure of showing people how you're training. There's that little voice that says — but I've run so slowly here, I don't want people to think I'm a slow runner."

His resolution is the most useful thing in the section: "I'm OK with it now, because I've accepted I'm never gonna be a professional athlete."

Physios can't prevent injuries, and this one says so

"We don't actually know that much about preventing injuries, right? If I could give you a magic little pill that prevented injuries, I'd be — well, rich. Which I'm not." — Britt Kayling, sports physio

And: "There is nothing I can really do to you or say to you — do this one or two things and that's gonna prevent you getting injured."

Her actual job description: "The biggest thing I do is education and advice."

Recovery gadgets are one-percenters

Benita: "Sleep's the biggest thing. There's so many recovery things out there, and I call them gimmicks." And: "I'm not huge on the Normatec boots or the recovery centres. I think if you've got time to go to a recovery centre, you should just be having a daytime sleep."

Britt Kayling agrees, and explains the actual mechanism: "The Normatec boots make you stop and rest for 10, 20, 30 minutes. If it makes you feel better, use it. But I also have a lot of athletes that feel worse off the back of an ice bath. And it's like — well, don't use it then."

On nasal strips, after listeners kept writing in about them: "The challenge with nasal strips is that the part of your nose that opens is often not the limiting area in your whole airway passage." Courtney bought a packet and made Liam wear them anyway. "I feel like such an idiot wearing them, and the runs haven't gone well."

The coach who talked her own client down

Benita's opening assessment of a sub-3 goal, with zero cheerleading:

"I haven't been fit since 2012 when I ran the Olympics, and I haven't done anywhere near a sub-three. I haven't even done a marathon. Like — a sub three hour marathon's bloody hard."

And the specific version: "You've done a 1:28 half. In an ideal world you'd want to be running 1:23, 1:24 for a half and have that sort of speed behind you, so when you get into 4:15 pace it feels slow."

Liam's live reaction: "This is equal parts kicking the guts as much as it is exciting, because Benita has literally in the first five minutes brought me back to earth."

That's what advice from someone with nothing to sell sounds like.

Elite athletes get it wrong too

• Andy Buchanan wanted to quit at halfway in the race where he broke the Australian record.
• Michael Shelley bonked on a 30km training run and walked two hours home. "It happens. Move on to the next one."
• Benita Willis on her fastest marathon: "I was always too aggressive for marathons. My best marathon, I positive split by over two minutes, which is a lot. So look — I wasn't good at it."
• Benita Willis on her career regret: "At the time I didn't respect it. But when you look back in your career, I definitely didn't give it the respect that it needed." Liam turned that straight onto influencer culture: "It's a bit like how some run influencers treat the marathon. 'Yeah, get you ready for a marathon in four weeks, no worries.'"
• Benita Willis today: "I ran 60 Ks last week and I used to run 200 easy each week when I was an elite athlete. But 60 Ks last week was probably too much for me."
• Dr Luke Delvecchio quit personal training because his own couch-to-10k clients kept beating him in the City to Surf. "This can't continue. My ego can't take it."

Progress isn't a line

"In my head, and most average runners also kind of think — all these guys, it's a linear progression up. Every race they get better and faster and improve. That's not what it is once you get to this end of racing." — Liam Flanagan

Courtney's training version: "It's not a linear progression. What happens quite often is you can sometimes actually feel like you are slightly going backwards — and then suddenly one week it's like, bang, you're at the next level."

And Dr Melanie Clark's numbers for what normal training actually feels like: roughly a third good, a third average, a third rough. "That's fine. And that's the reality of training."

Run culture isn't telling you to be kind to yourself

"The dominant message isn't be kind to yourself. It's keep pushing, keep pushing, keep pushing." — Liam Flanagan, on run club and influencer culture

And the one that should sit at the bottom of the page

"The marathon, despite the boom in popularity, should not be diminished or underappreciated. If it was your first, your 10th, your 100th, whatever — it is still a marathon. The human body is not designed to be able to run that easy." — Liam Flanagan

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The twenty best lines from two years of the series

1. "A sub three hour marathon's bloody hard." — Benita Willis
2. "At halfway I was like, holy shit, I don't think I'm going to finish. And that's where I ran the record." — Andy Buchanan
3. "Just be relaxed and you'll just get tired." — Dick Telford, via Michael Shelley
4. "Everyone feels fantastic in that first ten K. Trust me." — Michael Shelley
5. "Personally, I don't think you should run the marathon." — Benita Willis, to her own client, on the podcast built around the race
6. "Your friend's 80 kilometre week is built on 10 years you don't have." — Matty Abel, read by Liam Flanagan
7. "Soreness fades days before repair is complete. It is a poor measure of damage." — Luis Harenko, 1609 Coaching
8. "In my head the race starts at 30K." — Andy Buchanan
9. "Training doesn't lie. You can't just go on race day and expect to run 10 minutes quicker. It ain't going to happen." — Courtney Atkinson
10. "The hardest bit about running is actually when it goes wrong." — Liam Flanagan
11. "If I could give you a magic little pill that prevented injuries, I'd be — well, rich. Which I'm not." — Britt Kayling
12. "The dominant message isn't be kind to yourself. It's keep pushing, keep pushing, keep pushing." — Liam Flanagan
13. "Just ride the wave. The wave's always going to end." — Andy Buchanan
14. "Stay in your lane, do what you need to do. Don't worry about anybody else." — Allie Lyndon
15. "This doesn't get any easier for us, no matter what level. Ego's ego and you want to push harder." — Courtney Atkinson
16. "Why haven't I been running at six-twenties this whole time?" — Bronte Langbroek, on running 4:29:03 in her first marathon
17. "It's not just the training that's gonna get us. It's just life that gets us." — Benita Willis
18. "I've actually never even bought a pair of super shoes." — Benita Willis
19. "How did you feel at the finish line? Honestly — nothing. Nothing." — Courtney Atkinson, after a 2:42 marathon
20. "The human body is not designed to be able to run that easy." — Liam Flanagan

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Who said what

Name	Who they are
Benita Willis	4x Olympian, World Cross Country champion, former Australian marathon record holder. Founder and coach, Lace Up Running. The coach behind both series.
Michael Shelley	Two-time Commonwealth Games marathon gold medallist. 2:11 marathoner. Gold Coast local who has won on this course.
Andy Buchanan	Australian marathon record holder. Gold Coast Half Marathon champion.
Allie Lyndon	Surf life saving athlete turned 2:36 marathoner. Second, Queensland Marathon Championships.
Ryan McDonald	Events Management Queensland — the people who run the Gold Coast Marathon.
Britt Kayling	Sports physiotherapist.
Dr Gabe Fernandez	Southern Cross University — physiotherapy and tendon research.
Dr Melanie Clark	Southern Cross University — sport psychology.
Dr Luke Delvecchio	Southern Cross University — exercise physiology.
John Easedown	Sport scientist (heart rate and training load).
Bronte Langbroek	The 2025 series first-timer. Ran 4:29:03 off a 4:30 target.
Courtney Atkinson	Co-host. Olympian, former professional triathlete, 3x Noosa Triathlon winner. Ran 2:42:10 at the 2026 Gold Coast Marathon.
Liam Flanagan	Co-host. Recreational runner, UTA 100-miler finisher, and the show's most reliable source of things that went wrong.

Also quoted, and credited to them rather than to the show: Matty Abel (running coach), Luis Harenko / 1609 Coaching, Dick Telford (Michael Shelley's coach), Rob de Castella, Clint Kimmins.

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Every Gold Coast Marathon episode, in one place

Two full series, plus the main-feed episodes that carried the marathon build. This is the complete listening list.

2026 Gold Coast Marathon Series

#	Episode	Guest / focus	What it's good for
1	GOLD COAST MARATHON SERIES 2026: WE'RE BACK	Hosts	The Courtney Experiment rules; the four-run weekly template; why the seven-day week is arbitrary
2	YOU'VE ENTERED THE GOLD COAST MARATHON… NOW WHAT? — 30-WEEK GAME PLAN	Benita Willis	The macro calendar; why January is too early; beginner walk/jog progression; long runs by time
3	BENITA WILLIS — HALF MARATHON FOCUS	Benita Willis	Half-specific sessions; parkrun integration; race-morning fuelling rehearsal; super shoe timing
4	ANDY BUCHANAN — THE AUSSIE MARATHON RECORD HOLDER RETURNS	Andy Buchanan	Three named marathon sessions; 5km-block pacing; "ride the wave"; the grams-per-hour heresy
5	ALLIE LYNDON — FROM SLSC QUEEN TO MARATHONS	Allie Lyndon	The high-volume counter-build; underfuelling and the dietitian fix; "stay in your lane"
6	THE 'COURTNEY EXPERIMENT' UPDATE	Hosts	Aerobic threshold vs tempo; hills as a swap not an addition; fuelling for 20 minutes from now
7	IN THE SCIENCE LAB AT SOUTHERN CROSS UNIVERSITY	Dr Luke Delvecchio	Why wrist heart rate lies; small doses of weights and endurance; what AI coaching can't do
8	COURTNEY'S 'EXPERIMENT' HITS CRUNCH TIME	Hosts	Finding real marathon pace from heart rate drift; the ego mid-session; locking in the race shoe
9	BENITA'S FINAL MARATHON REALITY CHECK	Benita Willis	Tune-up session options; the taper doctrine; pack running; the conservative pace call
10	COURTNEY'S RACE DIARY MONOLOGUE	Courtney solo	The full race-week fuelling plan; caffeine timing; self-sufficiency on course
11	THE MARATHON EXPERIMENT: 2:42:10, THE LESSONS & THE NEXT ONE	Hosts	The full build in numbers; the neuromuscular wall at 35km; toilets, parking, start zones

2025 Gold Coast Marathon Series

#	Episode	Guest / focus	What it's good for
1	BENITA WILLIS INTERVIEW — IN THE BEGINNING RUNS THE GOLD COAST MARATHON	Benita Willis	Her career, her coaching philosophy, why she never raced with a watch
2	KICKSTARTING TRAINING WITH BENITA WILLIS	Benita Willis	"A sub three hour marathon's bloody hard"; volume myths; easy days must be easy
3	START OF A 12-WEEK 42.2KM MAKEOVER	Benita Willis	The marathon-pace long run; gel practice; what a tempo actually is
4	MICHAEL SHELLEY	Michael Shelley	Course intel from a man who won on it; sightsee to 32km; turnarounds; the blue line
5	EXPERT PHYSIO ADVICE, SLEEP MONSTERS & INJURY PREVENTION TRUTHS	Britt Kayling	Load spikes vs volume; the pre-run routine; illness; "no magic pill"
6	MINDSET, MISTAKES & MOTIVATION	Benita Willis	Interval intensity; strength work; the easy week; going out too hard in a tune-up
7	THE TRUTH ABOUT HEART RATE TRAINING	John Easedown (Polar)	Zones, drift, durability; the regression to the middle ground; sensor accuracy
8	MIND, BODY, MARATHON — SOUTHERN CROSS UNIVERSITY EXPERTS	Dr Melanie Clark, Dr Gabe Fernandez	Open vs outcome goals; the traffic-light pain rule; the 30-rep calf benchmark
9	7 WEEKS TO GO!	Benita Willis	The bus analogy; race-morning breakfast; toilets; the tune-up effort
10	5 WEEKS TO GO: BRONTE'S BREAKTHROUGH, LIAM'S CALL & ALL THINGS GELS	Benita Willis	"An aid station, not a save station"; the carb maths; and the DNS conversation
11	IT'S ALL ABOUT THE TAPER	Benita Willis	The full taper structure; carb loading; massage rules; the Saturday/Sunday double
12	THE TAPER, THE NERVES & THE FINAL COUNTDOWN	Benita Willis	Phantom niggles; pace groups and start zones; taper head-noise; sleep
13	THE INNER WORKINGS & RACE DAY STRATEGIES	Ryan McDonald (EMQ)	Aid stations; pacers and corrals; course measurement; crowd points; spectator planning
14	42.195 REASONS TO SMILE	Bronte Langbroek	The first-timer debrief — 4:29:03, even splits, and how she did it
15	EP 084 — GOLD COAST MARATHON 2025 SERIES HIGHLIGHTS	Compilation	The best of the whole 2025 series in one episode

Main-feed episodes with major Gold Coast Marathon content

Ep	Episode	What it's good for
085	LIAM'S 100 MILER IS HERE & THE BEGINNER RUNNER TOOLBOX	The "welcome to running" starter kit; landmark fartlek; elites run slow
087	GOLD COAST MARATHON 'EXPERIMENT' UPDATE: SIX WEEKS OUT & THE MARATHON PANIC BEGINS	Progress isn't linear; the GC30 as a dress rehearsal; race shoe deadlines
090	CLAUDE AI x STRAVA THINKS COURTNEY IS COOKED	The AI prediction that was 30 minutes wrong; first run in carbon shoes
091	WORLD MAJORS, MARATHON MIND GAMES & THE FINAL COUNTDOWN	The gym admission; rest vs rehab; racing with music as a patience aid
092	THE FINAL WEEK BEFORE GOLD COAST MARATHON	"Your friend's 80km week"; the two failure modes; a holiday is not a taper
093	GC MARATHON WEEKEND, $100 CARBON & RUN CLUB CAPTURE THE FLAG	The wind read; the final conservative pace call; cramp reality; cheap carbon
094	THE MARATHON IS DONE. NOW WHAT?	The 14-day recovery protocol; the holiday counter-take; "Gold Coast is your fast one"

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