Goal Race - Beach to Brother Marathon

It’s taken me a while to decide on a new goal race, I was deciding between Sydney marathon and Beach to Brother marathon and have decided that Beach to Brother is the race I’m going to commit to. Main reason being it is something different to a road marathon in a big city and the second reason is it’s in my home town and I want to support the event.

Beach to Brother is in it’s second year this year and had a successful inaugural event. It has a variety of distances from marathon, half marathon, 10km and 5km which all finish at the the same point on top of North Brother mountain. The marathon starts at Town Beach in Port Macquarie NSW, which is where I live and follows the coastline south where it heads in land slightly before a 2.5km finish up a steep mountain trail. The race is predominantly on beach and trails before heading up a tough finish up the North Brother mountain trail.

I’m looking forward to testing myself with a 3-4 run per week schedule with my three goal runs being hills, intervals and an aerobic long run. If I run a fourth time in any week it will be slow recovery. I’ll be making my training specific with a 14 week preparation with a two week taper at the end. Hills will be important and my long runs will need to be over undulating terrain to prepare for the hills in the race and also incorporate less road and more beach and trail running. The preparation will start on June 19th for this event, leaving me a few weeks of continuing to refresh my mind and body before starting to focus on a race again.

My goal for this race is to break 3:45. I have run this type of time on a similar course at Red Rock to Coffs Jetty and feel that this type of time is achievable. I will need to train well and run my best to achieve this goal.

The other goal for this race is to complete the event in sandals. I am now completely transitioned to running in sandals and have no trouble running distances of this length in them. My training now is 60% Gladsoles trail sandals and 40% Carson Footwear Iguana racers and I aim to continue with this method for the long term. I am very confident that I can run any event just as fast or faster in sandals then closed shoes as I am now conditioned to running in them. The Carson Iguana Racers are the most comfortable pair of shoes I’ve worn let alone run in, I continue to run in these to add variety to my running but mainly because they are so comfortable and fun to run in.

Looking forward to a good result here at Beach to Brother and getting back into focussing on a race.