Started out with the plan to do a 3/2 run/walk pattern for the entire race. I was a bit hard to do this at the start because I felt really good, but I knew that if I didn't stick pretty close to it that I wouldn't make it to the end. So I kept telling myself to slow down and stick to the plan.

After about the first k the course turns into kings park which overlooks the city and the river and houses the state's botanic gardens and the state war memorial. It is a beautiful place to run and the weather was just perfect, a little bit overcast and a light breeze.

All the avenues in the park are lined with trees that have been planted in honour of West Australian that have lost their lives in combat. There are 1,000s of trees - great big old gums so it was really sobering to run the avenues, and somehow the hills didn't seem any where near as bad when I thought about what all of these young men had gone through.

For most of the race there had been a lady a bit ahead of me who was doing the marathon, pushing a pram with a kid who must have been about 2 in it. Anyway going up one of the longer hills in the park I looked up and there is 4 people pushing the pram and the kid was walking. When I got a bit closer there was a big tall young guy sitting in the pram being pushed up the hill. He had his shoes off and the bottoms of his feet were raw and the people were pushing him up the hill to the next volunteer because he could no longer stand let alone walk.

At around the 11k mark the route comes out of the park and merges alongside the 12k run course. I was feeling pretty good at this point even though my 3/2 pattern had me running up most of the hills. Even though I felt pretty good I made myself keep the pace down and stuck to the 3/2 because I knew there were still some pretty massive hills ahead of me.

One of the worst is at about the 16k mark, I managed to run about 1/2 way up this one so I was pretty pleased with that. But the worst hill hits you with 2k to go and there was just no way I could run up it. Once I got to the top I ran all the way into the finish.

I was about 300m from the line and I heard my name and I looked across to the 12k group and there was K&A just at the same spot so it was pretty perfect timing.

It felt fantastic to cross the line and in less time that I had expected. Right up until yesterday I thought that this run was going to be a 3+ hour suffer fest but it felt pretty good right up to about that 2k to go hill.

Um train and not take 6 flights in the 2 weeks prior to the run.

Walked through the HM maze and found K&A, grabbed an apple and some water and we headed to the line for the buses back to the city.

While we were waiting I started to get a migraine and I was beginning to think that I was gonna spend the next hour or so getting home in a bad way. Thankfully A had some panadol and I went and got a bottle of coke. The two together plus Jill's mighty jaw pressure point therapy worked a treat and the vision issues started to subside and the headache didn't end up too bad.

Once we got back to the city we had missed the train by about 2 minutes so we went and had lunch and caught the next train home.


Lack of training


This is a great race and the hills make it challenging without being too hard.

Between the Marathon, HM, 12k and 4k events 40,000+ people take part which makes the atmosphere great.