It’s officially winter this week! Which means it’s marathon season and we kicked it off with the Brisbane marathon in Queensland.  Unfortunately the Victorian lockdown has caused disruption to some races and peoples race plans.  Fingers crossed it ends sooner rather than later and we can avoid a repeat of 2020.  

Winter is a perfect time to train (that’s easy for me to say from Queensland) and we’re seeing the training volumes increase for people as we get closer to some of the bigger events of the year.  Last week over 20 runners cracked the ton with more than 100km for the week.  The benchmark for top 50 was 72.8km and top 100 required 53.5km or more to sneak in.  Elevation saw 689 runners eclipse the 1,000m mark, 23 over 2,000m and you needed almost 3,000m of elevation to make the top 10.  Some big training weeks in there! 

Does anyone remember when someone running 200km for the week seen insane?  I do.  Now I’m struggling to remember when the last time was the Margie Hadley ran less than 200km for the week. It wasn’t last week as Margie has topped the distance leaderboard once again with a total distance of 203.7m at an average pace of 5:13/km and still covered over 1,300m of elevation.  

Second place was Michael Hooker.  Michael cover 173.8km for the week in another big, consistent week of training.  When you look at Michael’s Strava summary there is a super consistent row of the blue ‘towers’.  He just keeps stringing the weeks together, week-in week-out. 

Third place this week was a tie! Two athletes finished o 152.1km.  Jodie Cumner and Nicholas Bamford couldn’t be split right down to the last 100m. 

Elevation this week was dominated by those in South-East Queensland.  Dylan Cole-Jones took out the top spot for the second week in a row with a big week in the hills.  Dylan finished the week with 4,754m for the week adding another 500m onto his winning total from last week.  

Second place went to Gold Coast ultra runner Brad Glover.  Brad had 4,609m for the week and it’s not surprise really given how strong he is on the trails, especially going up hill! 

Third place this week as Sheree Barnes with 3,859m, great to see Sheree back chasing some big vert after her incredible run at UTA100 only a few weeks ago.  

There must be some big, hilly ultras coming up in Queensland soon with at the elevation we’re seeing in training!  We’d love to hear from everyone that might be running BTU, The Guzzler, Kokoda, Coastal High and Blackall.  

Great running this week again.  We continue to see awesome consistent training being put it by you all.  We love getting to see the results of it all coming together on race day too!  You can see the full top 5 Leaderboard on our website:  https://hillbillyendurance.com.au/pages/hillbilly-endurance-run-crew

The Epic Run of the Week this week wasn’t as easy to choose as we thought it might be.  There were a few standout performances over the weekend.  Including some big marathon PB’s at Brisbane and some big distances at the Sydney Track Ultra.  The standout for us though was a show a determination and resilience after early adversity in a race. 

Our winner this week is Sarah Leyden.  Sarah took on the Simpson Desert Ultra 75km event.  Now if running 75k in the middle of the desert isn’t hard enough, the race started at 2am and within the early stages of the race Sarah found herself off course.  An extra 7km later including some sand dune climbing Sarah had to navigate almost back to the start.  Sarah explains in her Strava description that self navigation by the moon and the stars was required due to the limited visibility of the race markings.  Navigating in the day when you have plenty of trees, tracks and hills to reference is hard enough, so doing it at night in the middle of the desert with nothing to reference on the ground would be near impossible.  This didn’t stop Sarah though, she got back on track and finished the race super strong.  Even if a 75km event became an 82km race.  Well done Sarah great determination and resilience to overcome the adversity at the start.  Congratulations on a strong race and for being our Epic Run of the Week winner.  We’ll be in touch to hook you up with a 25% discount voucher. 

Make sure you let us know about your epic runs by tagging @hillbillyendurance in your Facebook and Instagram posts or even send as a message with a link to your Strava if you don’t want to post on socials.  

We will again be picking an Epic Run of the Year and sending out a prize pack.  We will pick the winner from our weekly winners so make sure you let us know about your runs!