Pacing 4hr at the Toowoomba Marathon

Stu Pocknee

06 May 2025

running , health

The Toowoomba Marathon is not the easiest long run. It's a hilly course with 770m¹ of ascent.

My assignment was 4 hours. It's a tricky course to pace (due to the terrain). Holding a steady speed is not realistic for most runners.

Below is the plan I started with.

Here's some things I need to remember before I pace again.

1. Using Garmin's Distance and Pace training target feature is really helpful for staying on time.
2. Having "Auto pause" turned on is a bad idea. I stopped a few times along the way and the watch going into pause meant that I no longer had a true track of how long I had been running. This is bad.
3. It would have been smart to record exactly when I went over the start line. Without this I couldn't use time of day to judge my finishing time properly (chip time). Next time I think I'll take a separate stopwatch for this purpose.
4. I should have been carrying some extra basics (gels, crampeze/salt) to help runners who were struggling. Thankfully, my fellow 4hr pacer Andy V had both (although that didn't help when he himself started to suffer from knee problems and dropped off the pace).
5. Helping people beat their time ideally needs to start at the beginning of the run. I caught a few runners with only a few km to go who were aiming to go under 4 hours, but had clearly gone too hard, too early. There is not much you can do when they are already cooked, and there is so little time remaining. Some advice and more conservative running earlier in the run may have produced a better result. 🤷

I was a bit disappointed by the few I could not get across the line. On the other hand it was very rewarding to help those I could. 👏

In the end I ran a time of 4:00:04. I wanted to be just under 4hr. Going over is a bit of a pacing faux pas. I slowed up in the last 200m in an effort to help one more runner home under 4hrs. Unfortunately, that only meant both of us were a fraction over. 😔

Given my rookie timing method errors, it is probably fortunate that I was not further overtime.

So, some wins, and some losses in the pacing effort. The run itself was excellent. The home crowd, my fellow pacers, all my club mates, the support staff, and the organizers. A really first rate experience 🎉.

🏃‍➡️🏃‍♀️‍➡️🏃‍♂️‍➡️