Beachside Events

One of our favourite Beachside couples recently completed the Gold Coast Airport Marathon 2015 even with every excuse under the sun available. Here’s Bek to tell us all about it-

After having our last baby in March 2014, my husband and I joined the Beachside family and lost the baby weight, gained a new mindset and worked up to our first half marathon six months later. After completing that we set our sights on the full, with a great amount of apprehension! We built a family holiday around our plans to enter the Gold Coast marathon, having heard what a great (and flat!!) course it was.

The training was intense, with lots of runs each week and long runs on the weekends, it was very hard to integrate that into our family of four with two full time working parents. We seemed to be always asking for babysitting favours so we could go running but it was important for us to do our long runs side by side as we knew we would stay together at the GCAM15. Our apprehension grew as life got in the way of our training with a sick baby, then a bout of tonsillitis and a painful piriformis injury for me. Never the less the flights were booked and off we went, with a head cold and blocked ears of course!!

On the day, Robert Decastella gave an inspirational speech just before the gun went off and suddenly we had commenced our first marathon! My run and my husbands were completely different, I focused on each km we put behind us being one less until we reached our goal. We both ran strong past the 25km marker and started to get excited as the crowd cheered us on with some pretty hilarious signs (my fave was “seems like a lot of work for a free banana” and Rob’s favourite “smile: you paid to do this”). The crowds energy really pushed us on, there were many “official high five stations” and people just telling you how great you’re going and to stay strong.

At about the 35km mark, Rob started to feel sick and hit the wall. We stopped and walked for a km or so and the 4:30/km pacer slipped away from us. After a bit he was able to keep going and we dug deep to finish all 42.2 kms in a time of 4hours 43mins. We loved it for the most part and hated it at points too, but mostly found it the most rewarding physical achievement to date.

We have got the bug now and will be looking forward to improving our time at the next event. I never would’ve believed we could do something like this before we joined Beachside, but Kieran’s a bit like that – pushing you further than you thought possible, and then some!

Rebecca McAlister

[soliloquy id=”1832″]