a Sunday running chronicle · North Head
Events · Beach2Beach
the edition’s first race — three medals, one blown calf, a Friday night that came due, and ninety minutes of misplaced faith.
Newport Beach · Sunday 23 August 2026
Finish line, Newport Beach. Five entered. Three home.
The first event of the 2026–27 edition, and the edition learned something: a start list is a work of fiction until the gun goes.
The field went in optimistic and came out honest. Miles D. took the half marathon; Claire B. and Claude B. took the 6k. All three crossed at Newport. Two did not, for reasons that will be minuted in full below, because that is what a log is for.
Mark Hill blew his calf from the start. Not at the hill, not at the turn — from the start, which takes a certain commitment to the bit. Rickard had the best intentions in the group and the worst Friday night, and the whiskies collected what they were owed at approximately the time the alarm went off.
Neither of them could tell Miles, who was already out on the half marathon course with no phone on him. What he did with that information gap is the last section of this page.
The Beach2Beach Running Festival — Sunday 23 August 2026, its 32nd year, run by the Rotary Club of Warringah, four distances (the half marathon, 14k, 6k and 3k), finishing at Newport Beach, and over $7 million raised for Northern Beaches charities since 1994.
Everything official lives at beach2beach.com.au; entries at raceroster.com; results on their results page. Ours live here, group shot first.
Away at 9:05 from the playing fields, out onto the road while everyone could still hold a conversation, and then the coast did what the coast does — a headland, then another, then a third, each one arriving as a personal insult. Three hundred metres of climbing in six kilometres is not a course, it is an opinion.
0:02
Somewhere behind all this, a calf that had made other plans. The log does not only keep the finishers; it is not that kind of log.
Traced by the watch on the 6k: away at 9:05, home at 9:50, and a profile that reads like a cardiogram. The official course is six kilometres; the watch, which walks the corners wide like everyone else, made it 6.81.
The whole thing from above, thirty seconds of it — watch the Relive flyover. Sent in from the course, filed with the rest.
Times listed without commentary, as the constitution requires. Miles D. brought the half marathon home in 1:37:43 net — 163rd of 1,934 across the field, 18th of 189 in the age group, and a negative split that got faster every checkpoint from the 8:09 first kilometre to a 5:01 last.
Miles crossed the line at 8:16, collected himself, and settled in to wait for the rest of the club. He had come without his phone, which is a fine and healthy thing to do on a Sunday morning and was, on this particular Sunday morning, a catastrophe.
Because the two people he was waiting for had both withdrawn before he had finished his first kilometre — and there was no way on earth for either of them to tell him. So he waited. He waited an hour and a half, on a suburban street corner near the finish, in good spirits throughout, for two men who were at that moment respectively on a couch and in bed.
The 6k came round the corner at a quarter to ten and rescued the morning. The clock on this is not a guess: his finish is stamped 8:15:53 on the results, and the watch has the 6k crew through at 9:47.
0:16
Three distances, one café, two apologies and ninety minutes of misplaced faith.