Race Information

• What? Great Ocean Road Marathon 2022
• When? 15 May 2022
• How Far? 44kms (44.65kms on watch)
• Where? Lorne, VIC
• Website: https://greatoceanroadrunfest.com.au/
• Strava activity: https://www.strava.com/activities/7143974772
• Finish time: 4:08:42 (Marathon: 3:52:54)

Goals

Splits

Training

My first 11 weeks of training are covered in this post: https://www.benrunsmelbourne.com/2022/04/great-ocean-road-marathon-2022-build/. Here I’ll cover the final 6 weeks leading up to the marathon.

Week 12 Race Prep (6 weeks to go)

• Mon: Rest
• Tue: 13km with 5 x 600m at 5k race pace; jog 50-90% interval time
• Wed: Medium long run
• Thu: Rest
• Fri: 8km with 6 x 100m strides
• Sat: 10km time trial
• Sun: Long run

Tuesday’s session I completed on the track. Targeting around 4:30/km or just under for my 5km pace with a 90ish second jog recovery. My paces were: 4:24/km, 4:29/km, 4:30/km, 4:23/km, 4:26/km. 4km warm up and 5km cool down.

Wednesday an afternoon run from home down Farm Road and around the Mansion grounds. 19km run averaging 5:53/km and 147bpm.

Friday 8km at a recovery effort with 6 strides. Average 6:11/km and 142bpm.

Saturday I had my 10km time trial as a “tune up” race. I ran from home starting with a 2km warm up. My course was a mix of quiet sealed roads, dirt road and bitumen bike path. Weather was overcast and cool but ended up being very windy mostly in the second half. I ran 47:08 (4:43/km and 171bpm) which I was quite happy with for a solo effort in the conditions.

Sunday long run was 27.5km at the You Yangs. Not too hilly on this one given the time trial the day before. Averaged 5:56/km and 144bpm.

Total of 82.8km for the week.

Week 13 Race Prep (5 weeks to go)

• Mon: Rest
• Tue: General aerobic
• Wed: 14km with 5 x 1000m at 5k pace; jog 50-90% of interval time
• Thu: Rest
• Fri: Medium long run
• Sat: Recovery
• Sun: Marathon pace run

Tuesday ran from home. 5:50/km at 142bpm. Received a round of applause from a group of school kids out on a bike ride.

Wednesday V02 max session targeting 4:30/km or slightly under. My 1km splits were 4:30, 4:26, 4:29, 4:25, 4;24 with a 3 min jog recovery completed on bitumen bike path. 3.5km for warm up and cool down.

Friday ran a bit late on this one and came home running in the dark. This was a run where the first few kms felt crap but then I felt great towards the end! 19km at 5:44/km and 142bpm.

Saturday I ran with Peaches on the lead. Felt like I had to slow down a bit on this one to be able to keep the HR low. Might have been a little tired from the later Friday run. 8km at 6:23/km and 141bpm.

Sunday 29km long run with 23km at marathon pace. For the first 6km I ran easy at 5:50/km and 141bpm. For marathon pace I was aiming around 5:30/km. For the next 23km I averaged 5:21/km at 154bpm. Despite also having a head wind over the last 6km. Big confidence boosting run!

Total of 83.1km for the week.

Week 14 Race Prep (4 weeks to go)

• Mon: Rest
• Tue: 13km with 5 x 600m at 5k race pace; jog 50-90% interval time
• Wed: Medium long run
• Thu: Rest
• Fri: Recovery + strides
• Sat: 8-15k tune up race
• Sun: Long run

Tuesday V02 max session completed from home. I’ll just mention here I use the Saucony Endorphin Speed for all of my interval sessions. It’s such a great shoe for that kind of stuff. Perfect combination of light, soft, bouncy, fast that I can run pretty much anything in it and feel good. My paces for the 600s were 4:26/km, 4:33/km, 4:29/km, 4:29/km and 4:27/km with a 100 sec jog recovery.

Wednesday an 18km run from home to the mansion and back. 5:57/km and 144bpm.

Friday short recovery run. 6km including 6 x 100m strides at 6:/15km and 142bpm.

Saturday I made a call to scrap the tune up race. A few factors influenced this, we looked after the nephews and niece Friday and they stayed over night. This meant not being able to get out during the morning Saturday and it was quite a warm day. It would have been a very difficult run and my legs were also feeling a little beat up. At this point in training I felt it was better to be on the safe side. I replaced the run with an hour on the spin bike where I did 20 mins easy, mona fartlek, 20 mins easy (while watching Rick and Morty on the ipad).

Sunday completed my 27km long run at the You Yangs including a lap of Great Circle Drive for hills. Averaged 5:45/km and 151bpm.

Total of 64.3km for the week.

Week 15 Race Prep (3 weeks to go)

• Mon: Rest
• Tue: Recovery + strides
• Wed: 16km with 4 x 1200m at 5k pace; jog 50-90% interval time
• Thu: Rest
• Fri: Medium long run
• Sat: Recovery
• Sun: Long run

Tuesday 11km at a recovery effort with 6 x 100m strides included. It was a wet run with light drizzle the whole way. Legs were feeling a little tired still from the Sunday long run. Averaged 6:10/km and 136bpm.

Wednesday I ran 5km warm up from home down to the mansion grounds to complete my session there. Completed the 1200m reps in 4:28/km, 4:27/km, 4:26/km and 4:29/km. A generous 4 min jog recovery between each interval meant it didn’t really feel too hard. 4.32km for the cool down.

Friday 18km medium long run from home mid morning. Noted that I felt quite good on this one. Averaged 5:44/km at 149bpm.

Saturday just a light recovery from home. 6km at 6:08/km and 139bpm.

Sunday 32km long run at the You Yangs. Looking back at this one I like that I made the hills progressively harder throughout the run. First loop included “Brenda’s rise”, a gradual up hill. Second loop included back of turntable climb and final loop included the largest hill on great circle drive. Interestingly I felt a little off for the first 8km of this run then felt pretty good after that point and not too tired afterwards. Averaged 5:50/km and 150bpm.

Total of 83.2km for the week.

Week 16 Taper (2 weeks to go)

• Mon: Rest
• Tue: 13km with 5 x 600m at 5k pace; jog 50-90% interval time
• Wed: Recovery
• Thu: Rest
• Fri: Recovery + strides
• Sat: 10km time tiral
• Sun: Long run

Tuesday I completed the 600s at the track. Paces were 4:31/km, 4:24/km, 4:21/km, 4:22/km and 4:27/km with a 100 sec jog recovery. 4km warm up and 5km cool down.

Wednesday 10km at a recovery run from home. Ran down Farm Road and along the river cliffs to the gate, which is pretty much spot on 5km and back. 6:24/km at 136bpm.

Friday another recovery run this time including 6 x 100m strides. 6km at 6:07/km and 144bpm.

Saturday 10km time trial. This wasn’t a great run, for some reason I felt really off this morning. I ran the 10km in 49:10; an average of 4:55/km at 171bpm. Wasn’t too concerned about the time given how I felt and was just happy to get it done.

Sunday I was still feeling not great but did end up getting out for my long run in the afternoon. Ran at 2:30pm from home to get 26km done at 5:48/km and 149bpm.

Total of 69.3km for the week.

Week 17 Taper (1 week to go)

• Mon: Rest
• Tue: Recovery + strides
• Wed: 13km with 4 x 1200m at 5k pace; jog 50-90% interval time
• Thu: Rest
• Fri: Recovery + strides
• Sat: Rest
• Sun: Long run

Tuesday 11km at recovery effort with 8 x 100m strides. Averaged 6:23/km at 139bpm.

Wednesday back to more V02 max intervals. 1200s completed in 4:29/km, 4:29/km, 4:27/km and 4:20/km. Dropped the recovery time slightly from last time to a 3:30 jog recovery. 3km warm up and 3.5km cool down.

Friday 8km recovery effort with 6 x 100m strides. Averaged 6:04/km and 142bpm.

Sunday long run 19km at You Yangs. I included some hills with the back of Turntable climb but nothing too tiring. 5:53/km and 152bpm.

Total of 51km for the week.

Week 18 Race Week

• Mon: Rest
• Tue: Recovery
• Wed: Dress rehearsal
• Thu: Rest
• Fri: Recovery + strides
• Sat: Recovery
• Sun: Race

Tuesday 10km recovery run. I’m starting to get nervous at this point. Elisha was unwell Monday and Tuesday and I was so nervous that I would catch it too. On my run I felt like it was really hard to keep my heart rate low. Averaged 6:28/km and 140bpm.

Wednesday for the dress rehearsal I tried to replicate as much as possible for race day. Got out of bed at 5am as this was the time I would have to wake up to catch the bus on Sunday. Ate and drank what I would for ace morning, and dressed in full race kit including shoes and carrying gels. For the run I completed 5km easy, 3km at marathon pace and 3km easy. It was actually really cold this morning too so I wore a long sleeve for the easy running portions. I ended up completing the marathon pace portion a bit on the fast side.. I averaged 5:18/km which afterwards I felt was too quick to maintain for a full hilly marathon. Otherwise everything else felt good.

Friday 8km recovery effort with 6 x 100m strides. It had rained earlier that morning which seemed to bring all of the birds out. A number of falcons out and lot’s of big crows. I felt pretty crap on my runs this week, I think it’s just something to do with the taper and pre-race nerves. Struggled to keep heart rate low again. 6:19/km at 144bpm.

Saturday just a 6km recovery jog before the drive down to Apollo Bay. It felt good to get out for a run but at the same time I had no hope of keeping my heart rate low. 6:34/km at 144bpm.

Sunday race day.

Total of 79.7km for the week including the marathon.

Pre-race

We drove down to Apollo Bay on Saturday afternoon. On the way we stopped in at the Great Ocean Road Chocolaterie. Elisha and I both love their chocolate having first discovered the Yarra Valley Chocolaterie last year. It wasn’t just about buying chocolate, we also stopped here for lunch. The food was a pleasant surprise, we had stonebaked pizzas which were delicious and the best food we had on this trip. It also filled me up nicely in preparation for the next day.

Next we continued our trip down Great Ocean road to our accommodation which was a little bit outside of Apollo Bay near Skenes Creek. I had worked out this was roughly about a 15 minute walk to the bus stop where I’d have to catch the bus early the next morning.

I like to have a quiet night before the marathon so the plan was to stay in and we brought a pre-cooked dinner with us so we wouldn’t have to go out and find something to eat. I was actually still quite full from our later lunch so ended up eating dinner late. From memory it was after 8pm. For dinner pre-marathon I just want something fairly plain and high in carbs, we had beef chow mein with noodles.

The other thing I like to do the night before is make sure everything is ready to go for the morning. So I made sure to have my race gear and clothing laid out, bib pinned on, warm clothing bag packed, gels, breakfast and post race food ready to go.

Gear wise I used the following.

• Singlet: Western Athletics Steigen Club singlet
• Shorts: Salomon Sense Aero 5″
• Socks: Hilly Marathon Fresh
• Shoes: New Balance RC Elite V2
• Gels: Maurten Gel 100 x 4
• Watch: Garmin Forerunner 945

All of this was well tested in training, apart from the shorts which were a bit of late purchase. I did get two runs in the shorts beforehand and felt comfortable enough with using them for the marathon. They have great storage to fit 4 gels comfortably.

I went to bed and really struggled to sleep well at all. A lot of tossing and turning and stomach felt very unstable. I’m a little embarrassed to say but I was very gassy during the night. Thankfully Elisha slept through it. It’s all just pre-race nerves which I can get bad sometimes. It gets me for races that are important to me and that I’ve put a lot of time in training towards.

My alarm went off, I didn’t really need it I was awake. I made a quick coffee, a short black using the nescafe machine in our room. For breakfast I toasted my bagel which I have with peanut butter and jam. This has become my go to but I couldn’t manage to eat it. I decided to pack it in hopes that I could eat it later.

I wasn’t bringing my phone with me, just to avoid any potential issues of it getting lost in the warm clothing transport. This made Elisha a bit nervous so she decided to walk with me to the bus to make sure I got on. It was actually a bit of an iffy walk, walking along the great ocean road in the dark. There’s no footpaths there, just walking along the side of the road in the dark, with more cars than I was expecting coming from the Lorne direction. Elisha was happy to see me get on the bus, but later may have regretted that decision a bit as she had to walk back to the apartment on her own and also up a very steep hill!

I can’t say sitting on a bus at 5:45am for close to an hour along a windy road is my preference before a marathon. Some people snacked or chatted. I simply closed my eyes for most of it and tried to relax which wasn’t too bad. The bus arrived in Lorne around 7am which provided plenty of time. I started with trying to eat and managed to eat half my bagel so that was ok, and do a few other things like last drink water, toilet, warm up drills and drop off warm clothing around 7:30am. I was worried about it being freezing but by that time it wasn’t too bad.

Managed to run into some familiar faces with Adrian who was meant to run the marathon but unfortunately had to withdraw with injury. He had everything planned so was still down staying in Lorne for the weekend. And Liam who was also running the marathon today.

Race

At the start line I made sure my watch was ready to go. For this race I decided to use Garmin Pace Pro. This gave me a pace target for each km, depending on the terrain, to average 5:30/km for the full distance. I didn’t always follow it exactly but it was definitely a useful guide and probably made me feel better about my slower pace up hills knowing I was still on track overall.

I wasn’t too concerned about starting position. Liam and I started a fair way back in the pack of the approximately 1000 runners. In hindsight we probably should have pushed up a bit as the first km was pretty tight and slow weaving through the pack. However it didn’t concern me at all to ease into things.

Straight away you climb a small hill out of Lorne and it’s not long until you’re admiring the great ocean road and coastline. I decided not to run with headphones. During training I did a lot of runs from home with headphones, but I never needed them when running at the You Yangs, and I’ve never needed them for races before. I knew it was the right decision listening to the waves crashing and taking in everything along the run.

My nerves had also vanished. Once I started running I was completely fine and feeling relaxed.

The first big hill of the run presented itself at around the 7km mark. The climb was about 1km long with 45m of elevation, followed by 400m of relief down hill, into another 1km climb with 20m of elevation. Before and a long while after this it was all rolling hills, rarely flat you were either going up or down!

I had my first gel around the 10km mark. My rough plan was to have my first one around an hour in then every 45 minutes after that, but also to try and time them with water stations which were roughly every 5km along the course.

Between 10km and 21km was enjoyable running. Not too much to report just rolling hills and enjoying the coastline. I felt comfortable and my pace was tracking well. It’s pretty awesome having the full road closed to just us runners. I was always around people and often passing people.

At the half marathon mark we came through Kennett River. Most of the run is pretty quiet in terms of spectators but there was some great atmosphere here, it’s also the start line for the half marathon. I enjoyed giving some kids high fives and coming up the hill out of Kennett River there was a DJ playing Livin’ On A Prayer by Bon Jovi.. “Woahh, we’re halfway there!”. Speaking of the hill this was the second big hill of the course. About a 50m climb between 22 and 24km. This was followed by a big downhill for 1km then into the 3rd and largest climb, around 65m of climbing between the 25 and 27km marks. I was quite thankful to see another big downhill to cruise down after that climb.

It was around this point I ran into a runner from WynFit. A great local running club from our area. It was interesting as I seemed to pass him on the inclines but he’d pass me on the declines so we were interchanging places for a while. One thing I was definitely wary of was to be reasonably gentle on the downhills as I knew there was potential that the downhills could take a lot of the legs if I ran them too hard. Later I would see my WynFit friend take the turn off for the ultra marathon which I was very impressed with. It would be very hard mentally to have to turn off the marathon course and essentially go off the sealed road on to trails what looked like straight up a hill! And there were two separate turn offs where they had to do this.

I think it was somewhere around the 30km mark that I ran into Liam. I honestly didn’t think I’d see him again after the start but he had a toilet stop and some issues with his shoe which I think may have cost him a toenail. For Liam this was just a training run and I was grateful that he ran along with me for a fair while. I’d say maybe for 5km.

I’d felt good past the 30km but getting to around 34-35km I was definitely feeling tired and starting to slow. The terrain overt the last 10km is flatter, definitely not flat, there’s still rolling hills but nothing bad. But it also seems to be more open and at this point we copped a pretty decent headwind. The headwind combined with fatigue definitely had me moving slower and my walks through aid stations to drink water were getting a little longer. But looking back I’m pretty happy.. I did slow but didn’t crash and burn!

I crossed the marathon timing mat in around 3:52 which I was super happy with. It didn’t really matter what happened after this I was happy. It was very hard to keep going after crossing the marathon line, I had a little walk then started jogging. It was definitely one of the longest 2kms or so (2.5km according to my watch) that I’ve felt in a long while. But soon I was into the home stretch, random people started encouraging me, and soon the crowd was lining the street. It was a great atmosphere coming into the main area of Apollo Bay. Soon it would switch from random people to Elisha cheering me on through the finish. I somehow found some energy to run that last 700m in a more respectable 5:25/km pace and was very happy to cross the finish line!

Post-race

Elisha greeted me crossing the line and then we ran into Liam and Mark. Liam finished off strong running the last 4km progressively faster finishing off in around 4:50/kms and about 7 minutes ahead of me. Mark from WynFit had a fantastic run finishing the course in sub 4 hours! I didn’t stand and chat for too long I really just needed to get off my feet and sit down for a bit. I’m not sure how long I sat on the ground for but probably a good 10-15 minutes. We walked to pick up my bag, some food for lunch and back to the car. At this stage I don’t know how I just ran that far as walking feels rather difficult.

If you’re staying in Skenes Creek I’d recommend just hanging around in Apollo Bay until the road fully reopens. We knew it was possible to drive back with the road controlled but did have to wait a long time which would have been better spent just hanging out at a cafe. But I was very happy to get back, have a shower, throw on some compression pants and have some food. I had to walk down a slight decline into the apartment which was rather difficult.

I essentially did not move much for the rest of the afternoon. We went out for dinner to the Great Ocean Road Brewhouse where we enjoyed a good feed and of course a well earned beer.

The next morning we caught up with Liam and his wife Debbie for breakfast, where I’m sure Liam and I spoke about running more than Elisha and Debbie would have preferred. Following that we thought we’d make the most of our trip and drive a bit further down to look at the twelve apostles. We had absolutely awful weather; raining, windy and cold; but hey at least I didn’t get that weather during the marathon!

Overall I was really pleased with the run and I’d rate my 3:52 for the marathon split here pretty much on par with my 3:46 at Melbourne Marathon. I’m excited to spend the next few weeks recovering and then working into the cross country and road racing season. I’m undecided on exactly what yet but keen to tackle the marathon distance again next year!