Who am I?

Well, how about we start with who I’m not.

I’m not a born runner. Nor have I ever had any real pretensions to athleticism. Looking back, my post-teenage life seems to have comprised reasonably lengthy spurts of consistent and sustained physical activity, invariably followed by years of relative inactivity bordering on sloth.

The first of these spurts involved cycling around Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra most every morning for a few years while an undergraduate student at the great Australian National University.

After relocating to Sydney in the early 1990’s, I happened upon the annual City-to-Surf 14 kilometre road race from the CBD to Bondi Beach. In 1991, I stood - agog - adjacent to the startline watching the mass of humanity take off down William Street. The next year, I was amongst it, finishing in a quite respectable time of 86:07.

In the years since, I’ve missed competing only twice. The first was in 2000 when I was too sick to risk it, and the second in 2011 when I was in Melbourne having messed up the date of the race. In 21 City-to-Surf appearances, my times - in minutes - have ranged from 75:51 in 2006 to 188:56 in 1999 (when I was walking with a pram).

To put it all in some sort of perspective, the best time for the journey is held by my compatriot - the legendary Steve Moneghetti - who came within a whisker of breaking 40 minutes with his time of 40:03. No-one else has come close.

Aside from the 1999 walk, I’ve always set out to try and record my fastest possible time, no matter how painful and soul-destroying I knew it was going to be. So, in a way, the City-to-Surf has become a barometer of my fitness over the years. And with that yardstick, the grinding 152.01 in 2002 was the undoubted low point.

But as a full-time post-graduate student in 2003/04, I resumed a reasonably healthful life and even managed to complete five marathons between 2005 and 2007. I don’t know about your experiences with marathons you might have run, but I remember large segments of each of mine - the good, the bad and the ugly - as if I’d just run them this morning.

For the record, they were:

Sydney - September 2005 (4:40:43)
Honolulu - December 2005 (4:32:43)
Canberra - April 2006 (4:07:01)
Chicago - October 2006 (4:04:12)
London - April 2007 (4:32:40)

Back then, each of these races was designed as a link in a chain that would inexorably lead me to the holy grail - a BQ. But a disappointing run in an unusually warm London marathon, which coincided with a house move, work pressures blah, blah, blah (all the usual stuff), morphed into another prolonged period of inactivity.

This lasted all the way through to 2013 when I decided to snap out of it and set myself a goal of breaking 1:50 for the 2014 Gold Coast Half Marathon. In 2006, I’d managed 1:50:07 in that wonderful event, despite finishing well in front of the 1:50 pacer who’d been helping me along most of the way.

It was not to be.

Even with a solid training program, and the shedding of a reasonable percentage of surplus body weight, the sub-1:50 goal proved too ambitious, as I guessed it might be after several years out. Instead, I finished in a time of 2:00:21.

But I also finished with a firm belief that I was back. And the feeling that maybe, just maybe, this BQ thing could still be possible.