After a long three months on the sidelines with an injury, I’m finally back on my feet. Being unable to run for that long was a challenge, but I used that time to reset and focus on my recovery and feel more determined than ever. There was no better way to celebrate than taking part in a one time only event with my family yesterday: the WSI Runway Run.

We joined thousands of others at Western Sydney International Airport for this historic day. It was an incredible experience to run on the brand new, perfectly flat tarmac that felt amazing for my first real race back.

This race wasn’t just about the time on the clock, it was a celebration of being back to what I love and sharing a historic moment with my family before the first planes take flight later this year.

To say that is has been a tough couple months has been an understatement, 2025 seemed like a year where nothing could go wrong and achieved so many things. I have not had the best start to 2026, and I won’t go into the injury right now. This post is to celebrate being back running, which should not have been a race and trust me I did not treat it like a race but did not follow my run walk return either.

When I heard about an opportunity to run a race on the Runway of the new airport, I entered the kids and I straight away. I entered us in the 4km race, and there were a number of other racing distances on throughout the morning into the early afternoon. For us the 4km was the first event to be run, and basically was half of the runway compared to the 7km which was the entire runway. The other events were simply laps of the 7km course.

While I have been out injured, Heath has managed to train himself up and truly increase his aerobic capacity where he is wanting to achieve a great result in the upcoming cross-country. What was extra special about today is that he managed to take out first place, and set a course record that wont be broken again.

So, now its up to me and being smart about my return to run, and build slowly. I know its not great when you are running continuous for your first time after not running for 3 months (sorry Tom Hamilton), but this was a one time only run that will never happen again.

The next couple weeks are going to be very conservative running only twice a week which will involve run walks. A typical jogging session will be: run 3 minutes, walk 1 minute and repeat that 5 times. The run will be at about a 6 minute per km pace.