PINNACLE — MARATHON SEASON

The Marathon

Family, ambition, doubt, ego, PBs, and the strange decision to keep going.

GOLD COAST · JULY 2026 · 8 MIN READ

Mark’s daughters had bikes when they were six months old.

It is the kind of detail that says more than it probably means to. Before anyone talks about goals, resilience, finish times, training blocks, or all the big words people attach to running once the pain has worn off, there is that image: two tiny kids, not far removed from learning how to sit upright, already being pulled into the family habit of movement.

For Mark, running came first because it was simple. Shoes on, out the door, a way to keep a baseline. Then the girls got older. Then they started running with him. Then came parkruns, training sessions in Malanda, weekends in Atherton, trips away, cycling, racing, and the quiet rhythm of a family that has found something they can all do together.

Mark travels a fair bit for work, which makes consistent training difficult in the usual way life makes consistent training difficult. But even when he is away, the thread stays intact.

He calls home from wherever he is in the world and asks the same kind of question: are you doing your training? Are you doing parkrun?

Then he tries to do the same thing, on the same day.

It is not complicated. That is part of what makes it good. A father somewhere else in the world. His family at home. Everyone doing the thing. Not perfectly. Not always dramatically. Just together.

The marathon is often described as a lonely event, and in one sense that is true. No one can run it for you. No one can take over at 30km when your legs begin negotiating with your mind. No one can make the decision for you when the pace starts to slip and the easy story you told yourself at the start begins to fall apart.

But nobody really arrives at a marathon alone.

They arrive with their family, their work, their kids, their injuries, their ego, their routines, their old selves, their new selves, their group chats, their bad weeks, their broken sleep, their private reasons, and whatever small promise got them out the door enough times to stand on the start line.

For some runners, the race becomes real before it begins.

For others, it waits.

There is a point in the marathon where the plan stops being theoretical. At 21km, you can still lie to yourself. Halfway is neat. Halfway is mathematical. Halfway still lets you pretend the second half will be an extension of the first.

At 25km, not so much.

By then, the race has started asking better questions. Not just how fit are you? Not just what pace did you write down? But what are you carrying? What do you do when the version of yourself that made the plan is no longer fully in charge?

Lucy is not trying to get back to who she was before kids.

That would be too simple, and probably not true.

She has been properly competitive before. Running through school. Triathlon later. Then pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum, motherhood, and the enormous reordering of a life that happens when there are small people who need you before you have had time to remember what you needed from yourself.

She does not talk about running now as a comeback. Not exactly. It is more like a new relationship.

Running is still competitive for Lucy. Very much so. The part of her that wants to push, chase, measure, and find the edge has not gone anywhere. When the subject of a recent 1:25 half marathon comes up, and the fact that she was not completely thrilled with it, she gives the kind of answer that tells you everything.

“Ouch, ouch, ouch.”

The competitor is still in there.

But running has become something else too. A way to feel like herself in a period of life that can make selfhood feel strangely negotiable. A way to get headspace. A way to be a better mum, a better partner, a better friend, better at work, better in the rest of the day because something has already been claimed before the day starts making claims of its own.

She laughs at herself. She second-guesses the question. She can feel the interview turning serious and meets it with humour, which is probably why the serious parts land.

The version of herself she hopes will show up when the marathon starts asking questions is not an abstract champion. It is not a motivational poster. It is the Lucy who can get up at 5am after being awake multiple times in the night with small children, and still get out the door.

That is the version she wants at 25km.

Not the monkey in her head telling her she could stop and do it another day.

Every runner knows that voice. It rarely sounds dramatic. It sounds reasonable. Domestic, even. You could stop. You could do it another day. Nobody would really know. Nobody would really care.

Except you would know.

Lucy wants her kids to understand why she still chases hard things. Not because running is everything, but because running gives a shape to something they will meet elsewhere. The hard part. The doubt. The urge to step away. The possibility that discomfort is not always a sign you are failing. Sometimes it is just proof you are in it.

“Life does not stop after becoming a mum. You are still yourself.”

Maybe the sharper truth is that you are more than one self now, and running is where those selves learn to move together.

Sam is about to become a dad for the first time, which means he is standing on the other side of a similar doorway.

He is a lawyer, a runner, a partner, soon to be a father, and, by his own assessment, managing the balance of all that “poorly, if you ask my wife.”

It is a good line because it is probably true in the way most honest jokes are true.

Marathon training can give structure to chaos, but it can also become one more thing asking to be protected. One more thing you care about. One more place you can feel like you are either doing enough or not quite.

Sam has run fast marathons. The kind of times most runners would happily take if finish times were transferable. But he still feels like he has more to give. He trains with people who pull that out of him. He has mates he meets every Friday morning, even when work is busy, because there are parts of your life you have to keep in touch with before they quietly become things you used to do.

For Sam, running is performance, but it is also sanity. It is the first thing in the morning, or the thing after work, or the way to detach from the day before the day follows him home.

He knows the suffering at the back end of a marathon. He has done it enough times that it no longer surprises him. In a way, that makes the start line scarier.

“The pain at the end is inevitable.”

There is something oddly comforting about that. Once the pain is inevitable, it becomes less of a threat and more of an appointment. The question is not whether the race will hurt. It will. The question is what you will do when it does.

After Lucy’s complexity and Sam’s negotiation with adult life, Grace makes the whole thing almost annoyingly simple.

Just keep going.

There is a temptation to dress that up, but it does not need much dressing. Grace came back to running after injury. Six months off. A return-to-run program. A new appreciation for what it meant to move well, to push, to set goals, to become hungry for more.

She is chasing PBs across the half marathon, 10K, 5K. She likes the feeling after a run. She likes goals. She likes the moment of discovering there is more in her than she had previously asked for.

When asked how she handles the point in a race where the plan starts to fall apart, she does not give a complicated answer. Listen to music. Look around. Remember that you put yourself through this pain.

Keep going.

That can sound too plain until you remember that, eventually, every marathoner’s strategy reduces to some version of it. The gels, the shoes, the watch, the splits, the training block, the confidence, the fear. All of it matters. Then, at some point, the race strips things back.

“Just keep going.”

Mark’s family seems to understand that in its own way. Not as a grand statement. More as a practice. Show up at training. Give it your all. You are not going to get better if you do not try.

There is a beautiful lack of performance in that. The girls talk about running and cycling as things they like, things they do with Dad, things that are fun in different ways. Mark talks about being a dad in the same breath as running and cycling, as if the memory is not one big heroic moment but a collection of ordinary ones that have started to mean something because they keep repeating.

That may be the truest thing about marathon season.

The race gets the clock, the photos, the finish line, the story. But most of the meaning is built somewhere else. In early alarms. In Friday runs. In parkruns. In calls home. In the decision to train when work is hectic, when the baby has been up, when injury has made you cautious, when the old version of you is still hanging around asking what happened.

The marathon is individual at the point of impact. It asks one body to cover the distance. It asks one mind to handle the questions when they arrive.

But the reasons are rarely individual.

At 25km, you run alone. But you do not arrive alone. Somewhere behind the split times are the people who waited, watched, trained, joked, packed bags, missed sleep, called from somewhere else in the world, and asked if you were still getting out the door.

That is the marathon.