The Run Within 4: On day 82 of my run around Australia, I ran 84.8 kms... but only 27 of them counted towards the record

Here’s what happened:

I had been locked in all morning – head down, moving forward, just like I had for the previous 81 days. I was running on the highway A1 with Chloe, just before the Cockburn rest area, when she asked me if I wanted to stop there. I said no, and we kept on running.

What we didn’t realise was that the Cockburn rest area, was also where a sign pointed left onto the A1 toward Broome. I’d been running on the same highway since heading west at Katherine, but here the highway I was running on effectively merged into the Great Northern Highway, toward Wyndham. Staying on the A1 would have meant turning left, and in the middle of a run around Australia, it was an easy thing to miss.

On top of that, because it was a remote part of Australia, Telstra had an outage in the area, and none of us had phone service. No maps. No Google Maps. So after I’d continued straight, my crew couldn’t see it, and I couldn’t see it. I was just moving forward, and they were crewing me at pit stops, like every other day.

Part of our crew strategy was giving one team member the option to sleep in each morning. This would allow them to arrive with our second support vehicle at around 9 to 10am, fresh and recharged. Managing their energy and mental health was just as important as managing my kilometres. This was a team effort to run around Australia, and we needed everyone operating at their best.

But at 12:30pm on day 82, when we still hadn’t seen Benny with the second vehicle, I felt something was wrong. So at my next pit stop, I grabbed our satellite phone and called him.

“Mate, are you okay?”

Benny’s response was

“Mate, I’m fine. But you’re not. I’ve been driving up and down the A1 and I can’t see you. Did you miss the turn off to stay on the A1? Look around for the road signs, I am certain you are running on the wrong road.”

I looked around, and saw a sign that said ‘WY30’, meaning 30km to Wyndham.

WY30 sign. 30km to Wyndham.

That’s when it hit me. I was 51.5km into the day, and 28.9km of it had been in the wrong direction.

In that moment I had two choices. Pause my watch and jump in the crew car, drive back to the correct point on the course, get out, and keep going. Or, run the 28.9km back on foot, knowing every single one of those kilometres also wouldn’t count to the record.

I thought about it for a moment.

I thought, If I was in a race and ran off course, I’d have to run back. So I knew I needed to take ownership of my error, and said to myself and my crew, “I’m going to run back.”

Those kilometres sucked. There is no other way to say it. By the end of the day, I had run 84.8km and only 27 of them counted toward the record. After 82 days of consecutive ultra marathons, that is a brutal number to sit with.

But here is the part that made it survivable and allowed me to stay calm. We had incredible team systems. Sure we made a big mistake that day, but we’re all human, and when we put that day aside and zoomed out, it was clear we were tracking well, because objectively, I was sitting about 4.5 days ahead of record pace.

My friend and mentor Dave Alley (the previous record holder to me for the fastest run around Australia), averaged 79.2km per day on his run around Australia in 2015. So my strategy each day, was to hit 80km minimum per day, no matter how I felt, with no negotiation. Of course when you are doing something so hard day after day, at times my motivation faded, but my standards didn’t. I knew the reasons why I was running, and we had solid team systems, along with a calculated strategy, to keep me in a strong position.

So how was I approximately 4.5 days ahead of record pace on as early as day 82?

Because most of the time when I reached Dave’s distance, I didn’t just add an extra 1km to hit my minimum of 80km for the day. I added a full 5km. A parkrun.

For those who don’t know, a parkrun is a free weekly 5km run held at parks around the world, and I’d done so many of them over the years that I had trained my brain to believe 5km was nothing. From here it’s only a parkrun.

What’s another parkrun? My minimum was 80km a day, but if I wasn’t completely broken to the point I couldn’t take another step, I always pushed myself to average 84.4km, and on some days I ran distances well beyond that. 84.4km is a double marathon. It had a nice ring to it, but more importantly, that extra parkrun every single day compounded into a meaningful lead over time.

This meant the most expensive day of the entire run didn’t cost me the record. The work I had quietly done before the critical error was exactly what protected me when it hit.

This is what pressure reveals.

Not who you are when everything is going to plan. Anyone can perform in calm conditions. Pressure reveals whether the standards you held before the crisis were real. Whether your preparation was deep enough to hold, when everything fell apart.

I didn’t blame my crew. I didn’t look for a shortcut. I took full responsibility for the mistake, and I ran back.

The next morning, day 83, I just took the first step. Then it was back to our process.

This is what I now bring into every leadership conversation through my keynote, The Run Within. Because what I have seen again and again is that most teams don’t fall apart in the crisis itself. They fall apart because of what didn’t happen in the days before it. The standards that quietly slipped. The buffers that were never built. The ownership that was assumed but couldn’t hold in reality.