Late 2024 Update

This has been a very difficult and frustrating year as I suffered a major Achilles tendon injury at the beginning of March, the detail being Severe mid-portion Achilles tendinopathy & Paratendinitis.

Since then I have not been able to train and for the first few months I found it painful even to walk, with a need to wear a ‘boot’ whenever faced with a walk of anything more than a short distance. Its only in the last few months that I have started any form of running and then only a modest jog on flat ground.

Instead of running, I upped my time in the gym with cardio work (mainly on the bike) and core strength & conditioning work. Recovery from the injury involved quite a few visits to the physio and very slowly building up the rehab exercises from simple heel raises to the more dynamic step based work. its only in the last month or so that I have reached the milestone of being able to hop on the affect leg/ankle without pain or discomfort.

It was only in August that I started with a little running typically 30 minutes of short walk & run reps with running at jog pace, so with mid-foot strike to minimise tendon load & stress. Then came September and …

Sydney Marathon – Age Grade World Champs

I’d booked and paid for the trip in February just before my Achilles injury and while I had insurance it would at best only covered part of what I had paid. So I decided to give it a go and planned to run in reps of 5km @ no more than 6 min/km with 5 min walk. Noting also that there were some significant hills I also planned to walk up hills as trying to run up hills even at a slow pace, risked aggravating the injury. This would have led to a time of 5 hours or a little more.

In the event it went better than I dared to hope : I completed the race in just over 4 1/2 hours of which I ran 4+ hours, while still walking up the hills. And there was 1500ft of uphill too. The last 5km were tough which was to be expected given the complete of running in the preceding 6 months : Indeed I was surprised that I didn’t start struggling earlier in the race.

So far as Sydney itself was concerned, I loved the place. I arrived on the Thursday before the Marathon and stayed in a relatively up-market hotel in the CBD (Central Business District), along with a significant number of other runners : I was with a specialist Marathon Tour for this part of the trip. There was an organised tour of the Sydney area with late evening Harbour Cruise.

Rather than leaving on the Monday after the Race, I had booked 3 days in a AirBNB set back a couple of hundred yards from Bondi Beach and where I had a really relaxing time, taking in the beach life and atmosphere. I jog/walked may way there & back along the Bondi to Coogee trail which stretches along the beaches that line the coast.

Of particular note in Bondi, is the Icebergs Pool & complex : The pool is right on the beach and is fed by seawater where waves frequently crash over the side walls into the pool on top of the swimmers. I was lucky with the weather which sunny & warm during my time in Bondi.