To reflect on it in the usual manner of a blog recap, stepping through my training for the week and other activities I think would involve a lot of unnecessary faff and effort for what most people who read this blog want. One of the main reasons I write the blog is so that in a month or years time I can reflect on what I was doing a month or a year ago. So, from that perspective, I’m going to throw out what I usually do on the blog, stepping through each day of the week, and instead focus on the play-by-play of the weekend that was the Australian Athletics Championships because frankly, the rest of my week paled in signficance.
I started off my adventure at Nationals by visiting the track on Thursday afternoon. I checked my name off at the gate, received my free Media pass (and free access all weekend long) and walked into the dead quiet Media room at the SA Athletics Centre. Tapping away at keyboards and fiddling with camera’s were 15-20 very serious looking folk. I was following the instructions I had been sent in an email to check in but after that, I had no idea what I was doing. I technically didn’t need to be there on Thursday but just wanted to get familiar with it before the real action started on Friday. I made a few introductions and then made my way out to the track to watch the 1500m heats. I’ve long dreamt of having a role in sports media and my work with The Blue Line (as part of For The Kudos) has been great so far but the opportunity to stand for free, trackside, while the best ever 1500m runners in Australia did their business was the next step up in the scheme of things. It was fricken sick. I stepped outside my comfort zone, spoke to a few athletes and grabbed a few quotes for the release of The Blue Line the following morning (as above). Again, it was fricken sick.
Day 2 though was when the real work started. I ran in the morning at RunAsOne training and got to jog with fellow World Champs representative Nathan Pearce who I hadn’t seen since 2023 and photographer extraordinaire Riley Wolff who does most of the shots for FTK. Plus I met Sam Hopper who’s an Asics rep. The running world is even smaller than Adelaide. Beware, there’s a lot of name dropping to come too. I compiled some more research for the day’s events and then headed to the track to start interviewing athletes as the finished their races. The main aim was to provide 90 seconds worth of video footage to upload to Instagram for winners of the 800’s,1500’s, 3000m steeplechase and 5000m’s. The 100’s and any other track events were just bonuses and to help practice our interviewing process. The more people that watch the content on Insta, the better it is long term for FTK as it helps to acquire more advertising dollars and fund some of my work but mainly the other employees. That’s how it works in the ‘media’ business. Long term for me this weekend was also a great way to introduce myself to a lot of the top athletes so when I contact them for a story on The Blue Line they are hopefully more receptive.
The athletes we spoke to on Day 1 were the winners or personalities of the 100m heats (Naa Anang), the winners of the 800m heats (Peyton Craig, Abbey Caldwell, Claudia Hollingsworth), the winner of the women’s 3000m Steeplechase (Amy Cashin) and also Jess Stenson.
My head was spinning on the drive home from the track. It was great to get the ball rolling and start actually working. The athletes were all very easy to talk to and I felt bad I couldn’t: (a) talk to them for longer (b) talk to more of them, and (c) fucking hear the audio better! The worst part of the weekend was continually testing the microphones and trying to find a solution to getting better audio quality. The mics were new and this was the first real test of them. I felt bad for them not working well as we would do a test, they would work, then with all the background noise in the stadium, the mics just didn’t seem to handle it. We tested it with only one mic, with different phones, with different settings, in different filming locations everything. No luck though, we could only do our best. The video’s could’ve been uploaded with subtitles but that wasn’t part of our job in ‘post-production’ so up they went with poor sound. Obviously a few people I ran with over the weekend mentioned it but never in a teasing way of ‘yeah, your mics suck though mate’, more just a question of ‘what’s the go, they sound really quiet?’ which was nice of them. Putting myself (and my colleague Elise Beacom) out to the world of Instagram was kind of daunting at first so to be doing it with not 100% audio quality was frustrating but as I say, no-one teased us about it, instead were only trying to help get a better solution for us. Which we never really did find. It was just too loud in the stadium for the equipment we had been given.
The highlight to day 2 though for me wasn’t the interviews with the current athletes, and it wasn’t the Bombers beating the Bulldogs, but instead, it was introducing myself to Ben St.Lawrence who already knew who I was from reading TBL and also from my Australian Mountain Champs win last year. That was pretty fricken sick.
Day 3. The 1500m final day. Again, it started with a RunAsOne training run at Belair. I went out too hard on some tempo loops and enjoyed blowing up towards the end. My injury was kind of there too giving me some pain but it didn’t restrict my running. That’s all there is to say about that though. The big events today were the most fiercely contested 1500m finals ever in Australia arguably. I could go into a full run-down of how it all happened rah rah, but if I did I’d be trying to do every event like that justice and to be honest, I don’t even know where to start. Go watch 7plus if you’re interested in watching (some of) the best ever running races that have been held in Adelaide.
Jess Hull won the Women’s and Adam Spencer won the men’s. We got to interview both. IWPFS (It was pretty fricken sick). At the time of writing, adding both the view counts of Jess Hull and the Adam Spencer video below together received over 40k views.
The final event of Day 3 was the Men’s 3000m Steeplechase and local runner Matthew Clarke won the race in front of a raucous crowd. Clarkey had been having a terrible season to be honest and so when the favourite injured himself mid-race it provided Clarkey the luck he needed to finally get a result deserving of the training he’s put together. Sometimes you’re the one falling over (like Clarkey did in a race in Sydney a few weeks ago) and sometimes it’s other people (like Ed Trippas did this time). I interviewed Clarkey as well but like a few others this weekend, it didn’t make the cut.
Day 4, the final day. Once again, it started with a RunAsOne event. A long run at the cafe they own, the Runhouse, followed by a Q&A with Cam Myers. I didn’t do the Q&A but I did get to chat to Cam afterwards who was pretty friendly and knew what TBL is so that was cool too. I went straight from the long run/cafe, to the track to watch the C and B finals in the 5000m. I wanted to watch these races as motivation for next year where I hope to not watch them, but be racing in one of them. I have to drop 15 seconds form my 5k PB and considering I dropped 30 seconds off 8-10 weeks of focused training on 5k’s I reckon I’ve still got room to move.
After watching the C and B finals there was a fair bit of downtime for me in the media room chatting with a few other media personalities. I got my research ready and then when Elise arrived just before 3pm we made our way trackside to watch the 800m finals. The 1500m finals were PFS but the 800m finals surpassed them as the best races of the championships in my opinion. Afterwards, we interviewed an emotional Claudia Hollingsworth and speechless Luke Boyes. I developed a soft spot for Luke Boyes whom I interviewed earlier in the event on the Friday and had liked him as a person so was glad to see him win on Sunday.
That was the 800’s done. The 5000m races followed and being someone who’s raced a few 5k’s this was probably the race I had been most looking forward to. The winner in the end was a slight surprise, Matt Ramsden, but he still gave a great interview. As you can see from the Luke Boyes interview above and this one with Matt below, we went with the up close and personal footage to minimise the noise losses. Watching the Luke Boyes interview though you get an appreciation of how loud the stadium got when a race was on and what we had to deal with!
I finished the above interview with a banger of a line that got left on the cutting room floor which was a bit disappointing but I was still stoked to be done with my job for the weekend. I could just enjoy watching the Women’s 5000m final (which Elise and I watched with Jess Stenson as well) and hold the camera for Elise’s interview with Rose Davies below.
Then that was it. It was pretty good just mingling with all the women from the 5000m race as they didn’t have to rush off the track too quick. I had a brief chat with Lauren Ryan, Australia’s new 10,000m record holder, who was also very lovely before Elise and I handed back the gear to Riley. It was a bit sad to be done but hopefully it’s not the only time I do that. If it is, oh well, IWPFS, and now I’ve got a sweet blog that recaps the whole weekend. All the other major track and field events across the summer are one day events so will never be quiet like this again, and next year’s Nationals won’t carry the weight of Olympic selection with it too so I did my best to soak in what I believe may have been the best three day sporting event I’ve ever been to. Anzac day footy is pretty special, Essendon winning at Marvel Stadium is pretty intimate, the tennis is always good, and the cricket, and of course other one day running events, but… the four days of competition I watched not only had some of the best racing ever but the intimacy of the action makes it feel like a very local event. Even without my media pass there would’ve been countless opportunities for me to ask elite athletes q’s as they were often just floating around the stands before and after their events. That doesn’t happen in any other major sport I watch I don’t think.
With that all said and done, I think I’ll leave it there. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, know what I could do better next time (up close interviews are better quality, try and memorise winning times, PB’s, records more as they are easy to forget in the heat of the moment or have them written down on paper and not just on my phone, could probably announciate my questions with a bit more pizzaz and enthusiasm) but it’s all a work in progress right, just like how I always view my running. I run a PB and then I instantly think how I can improve another few seconds. Just because I’ve done my first few days of post event interviewing doesn’t mean I won’t continue to improve in that area too, just like my running.
Speaking of my running, the short snapshot of what I got done this week is I managed to run 71km’s with one session of intensity and one long run. The Suunto progress chart below shows I’ve built some level of fitness since the worst of my injury and have now been maintaining it while I manage to get myself back to full strength (which I’m hopeful is very soon, if not by the end of this week!). Thanks for reading!
Fraser Darcy 
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