With 30-degree temperatures forecast for Sunday, the advice of Sydney Marathon race director Wayne Larden was simple.
“The first piece of advice I have for runners is forget about your PBs,” Larden said. “It’s not a PB (personal best) day … so you need to hydrate and slow down a bit.”
Larden’s tip was for the everyday runners who will make up most of the 17,000-strong Sydney Marathon field, but it suited leading Australian marathoner Sinead Diver just fine, too.
After breaking the Australian women’s marathon record last year, Diver is the fastest local contender in the women’s Sydney Marathon race, and in most years that would give the Melburnian a good shot at victory.
But with Sydney bidding to join cities like London, New York and Berlin as host of a seventh World Major marathon, organisers have assembled the strongest men’s, women’s and wheelchair fields ever.
For Diver, that means stiff competition from world-class Kenyan runners, Judith Jeptum Korir and Angela Tanui.
Sinead Diver is Australia’s fastest ever female marathoner.Credit: Brook Mitchell
“The biggest thing about breaking the [national] record is the confidence it has given me, and I like to think I can go faster,” Diver said.
“Realistically the girls I am up against are three and a half minutes faster than me with their PBs.
“But this race is not really about that. It is not going to be about times. It’s going to be about racing, with the heat, and all the hills on this course. It really opens up the race a lot.”
Defying expectations has been Diver’s specialty for well over a decade. The 46-year-old is now a record-breaking Olympian but, amazingly, only took up competitive running 13 years ago.
Australia’s Sinead Diver leads the women’s marathon in the 2022 Commonwealth Games.Credit: Getty
After emigrating from Ireland at the age of 25, Diver had two boys before agreeing to fill in a vacant spot in her sister’s team in a corporate running race at the age of 33. She was so good she began training soon after and in her first marathon in 2014, Diver qualified to represent Australia at the 2015 world championships.
Diver has since gone from strength to strength. She was Australia’s best finisher (10th) in the Tokyo Olympic marathon in 2021, and last year in Valencia became Australia’s fastest female marathoner with a time of 2:21:34.
“I look back and I would have loved to have started in my 20s to have a really long career, but I started later and I still have a long career and I am enjoying it now, and racing well,” Diver said.
Top-ranked Australian stars Sinead Diver, Brett Robinson and Madison de Rozario will all race in the Sydney Marathon.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
“So I don’t have any real ‘what ifs’. If I was a sprinter, I may have lost some valuable years but as an endurance runner, as you get to my age, you don’t lose endurance or aerobic capacity.”
Diver is already qualified for the Olympics in Paris next year and hopes to push for a medal. But before that, she’d love nothing more than winning her first marathon in Sydney.
She has battled injury throughout the year but Diver says she’s ready to lay down a challenge.
“If I won, I would be ecstatic. To win the Sydney Marathon, in the year before it hopes to become a major, that would be so special,” she said.
Meanwhile, RFS commissioner Rob Rogers said he expected the smoke haze from hazard reduction burns to continue to dissipate and give clearer air for the 42,000 runners.
Asked if the RFS could have scheduled the burns to ensure the no smoke haze this week, Rogers said: “Not really because we had a limited window of opportunity to burn, and what we have demonstrated is that can be agile. We have stopped putting smoke into the Sydney basin, it is only residual smoke now. So I think it has worked quite well. We have the burns done and we are expecting it to be clear by Sunday.”
