HERE’S A CONFESSION to start us off. The last line of my Sydney Marathon story last year was a bit of a fib.
Next time, I wrote, maybe I’ll get more notice. Which sounds humble and sensible and exactly what a man who has just run 42.2km on four weeks’ preparation should say. What I actually meant was: I want another go at this, and I want to do it properly.
Because here’s the truth about my 2025 race. People talk about the wall as if it’s a single moment, a switch that flips at 33km. Mine wasn’t. I never stopped running, I’ll give myself that, but I was never once comfortable either. It was a punish from the first kilometre to the last. I crossed the line in 3:37 with nothing left but relief and a medal I couldn’t lift my arm high enough to admire. And somewhere in the Recovery Village, sitting on a foam roller with a smoothie I couldn’t taste, a thought arrived that I couldn’t shake for the next twelve months.
What if I’d actually trained for this?
Not trained as in squeezed a few long runs in around the diary. Trained as in built the whole thing, brick by brick, and found out what was waiting on the other side.
Saying yes to structure
The difference between four weeks and 14 isn’t ten weeks. It’s that one of them is a plan and the other is a hope.
I didn’t hire a coach. I didn’t join a club. I sat down with Claude, the AI, told it my times, my week, my knees and my ambitions, and asked it to build me a 14-week block with City2Surf as the dress rehearsal rather than the show. It did. Then it did the thing no human coach has ever managed with me, which is to sit there, unbothered, waiting for me to actually do it.
And I’ll tell you the thing nobody says out loud about a training plan. It’s not that it makes you fitter. It’s that it makes you stop thinking.
When you run a company, your day is a long queue of decisions, and by five the next morning the last thing you want is another one. The plan had already made it. Tuesday was intervals. Thursday was tempo. Sunday was long. You don’t debate with the sheet. You look at it, you groan a bit, and you go.
Running it solo was the other surprise. No group to drag me along, no pacer to hide behind, nobody to blame. Just me, the plan, and Bondi at an hour when Bondi is mostly dogs and delivery vans. I thought I’d miss the company. Instead I found out I quite like being accountable to nobody but a spreadsheet and myself.
The long runs went past my old 25km ceiling for the first time in my life and then, alarmingly, kept going. The sessions had names, which I found oddly comforting, like being back at school. And there’s the one they don’t warn you about: the easy run. The one you’re supposed to do genuinely, embarrassingly slowly. For a bloke with a competitive streak that’s the hardest session on the sheet. I got overtaken by a man pushing a pram on Campbell Parade and had to actively choose not to respond.
City2Surf came and went as a checkpoint. For the first time in my life I finished a race thinking about the next one rather than the pub.
What the training did to the other 23 hours
Nobody tells you this about a marathon block. The race is a Sunday. The block is your whole life.
The drinking dropped away without anyone having a conversation about it. Not a rule. Just a slowly dawning realisation that Friday night and Saturday’s long run were on a collision course, and the run kept winning. Sleep turned into something I guarded rather than something I caught. Food stopped being whatever was nearest and started being whatever was next Sunday’s fuel.
The calendar bent itself around the long run. My family got used to a version of me who was up before them and completely useless by 8pm. The dog, to her credit, thought the whole thing was a marvellous development.
And here’s the bit I didn’t see coming. It leaked into work. A Monday morning after 30km on Sunday is a clearer Monday morning than any other kind. I was calmer in meetings. I noticed I’d stopped chasing every surge.
We talk about motivation as if it’s weather, something you wait for and hope arrives. Fourteen weeks taught me it’s a by-product. You build the structure, you honour it for long enough, and one morning you realise the motivation has turned up on its own, because you’ve quietly become someone who does what he said he’d do. And that doesn’t stay in your running shoes. It follows you into the office, the kitchen, everywhere.
Race day from the back of the field
Here’s something they don’t put on the poster. When there are 33,000-odd people in front of you and you’ve been put in the last start group, the first few kilometres of the Sydney Marathon aren’t so much a race as a very polite queue that happens to be moving.
Last year I let the adrenaline choose my pace and paid for it from about the second kilometre onwards. This year the plan chose it, and the crowd made sure I stuck to it. Honestly, I loved it. There’s something about being at the back that takes all the pressure off. Nobody back there is chasing anything except the front of the queue.
Sydney is a notoriously hard course and everyone who’s run it will tell you so, usually before you’ve asked. It’s a World Marathon Major with hills that don’t care about your Strava. The bridge is a climb before your legs have woken up. Anyone who runs it like a flat major gets found out, and the finding out tends to happen in public, in front of a lot of people with phones.
So I ran it like Sydney. I respected the climbs. I ran my own numbers through the crowds. I treated Circular Quay and Hyde Park as scenery rather than an invitation.
And somewhere around the halfway mark I noticed something I had no frame of reference for. I felt fine. Not fresh, nobody feels fresh at 21km, but in control. Last year every kilometre was a negotiation with my own legs. This year the legs had already agreed to the terms. That’s what 14 weeks buys you. Not the absence of pain. Nobody sells that. What it buys you is the ability to keep thinking while the pain is happening, and even, occasionally, to enjoy yourself.
The numbers, and what they mean
3:21:02. 3,750th of 33,556. 477th of 2,994 blokes in the 40 to 44 bracket.
I’ll be straight about what that is and isn’t. It isn’t a time I set out to chase, not on this course, from that start group, over those hills. It is 16 minutes faster than last year, run from the back, on legs that were happy to be there rather than begging to be anywhere else.
Sydney was never the race for chasing a number. It was the race for finding out whether 14 weeks, a solo block and a plan written by a machine could build something that holds under pressure. It did. The structure did exactly what it was supposed to do, and the clock is just the receipt.
The number I'm chasing
SO HERE’S WHERE I’ve landed. Somewhere in the last 14 weeks, without ever deciding it, I stopped being someone who runs marathons and became someone who wants to run a fast one.
The number is three hours. I’m not going to dress it up. It’s the line that separates the blokes who run marathons from the blokes who can honestly call themselves marathon runners, and I want to be on the right side of it. There’s no deadline. I’m 40-something with a company to run and I’m not about to blow up my knees or my marriage over a stopwatch. But it’s the direction now, and every session on the sheet points at it.
The next target is Melbourne, where I’m targeting the half-marathon event. Flat, fast, and six weeks after Sydney, which is either the perfect time to have a crack at the shorter distance while the engine is warm or a genuinely stupid idea. Am I mad to line up for another distance event that close? Every runner I’ve asked has given me a different answer, most of them while pulling a face. Time will tell. That’s rather the point of it.
What I do know is this. The marathon was never the goal. It was the deadline that made the discipline non-negotiable. And the discipline, it turns out, is the thing that keeps you moving towards the next one, whether or not there’s a date attached.
Last year I learned I could go the distance. This year I learned I could build for it. Now I get to find out how fast I can go.
And because I’m the one who signs off on what goes in this magazine, I’m putting it in writing. I’ll report back, whichever way the clock falls. You’re welcome to hold me to it. I’d rather you did.
Alex Switzer is the publisher of Men’s Health Australia. He ran the Sydney Marathon as a guest of La Roche-Posay.
