12/01/2026
HI everyone,
Happy New Year to you all and hope you all had a fun and deserved festive break.
I alluded to it at the back end of 2025, but now it is official. For reasons I am about to outline, there will be no planned Compass Club Series events in 2026, as I am taking a year off all of my events from May. The Endo-End event in March 2026 will also be the last for the foreseeable future, as will be May's Logan Running Festival and the gRUNt Beach Run.
I started organising marathons in 2016, but have been organising non-sporting events since 2009. As most of you would know, training for a run in a running event takes a fair chunk of time and money. Organising a running event has many similarities, especially organising an event that in many of my cases, thousands of kilometers away from home.
To date, I have organised 48 marathon's/half marathons in QLD, NSW, TAS, NT and WA, all from my Gold Coast home. I have organised this while still working a full-time job as well, plus having a young family. In the 20 interstate events, I have had to take at least a week of my annual leave to stage the interstate events, which is almost half a year of annual leave that I have not spent with my family. On top of that, my full-time role has grown considerable in the past year or so, with greater responsibilities, clients and staff to organise.
That is not a sob story by any means - I thoroughly love staging these events, the locations and meeting new people and familiar faces. It is purely my way of saying that I am burnt out mentally and physically. After almost ten years of working f/t and staging these events basically solo, I need a break. I also have to tend to a few personal affairs as well.
Will I be back - you bethcha!! The other reason for taking a break is I know I can do these events better! I can honestly say that I am not happy with the standard of a few of my events, and being a Virgo, I take that personally. I can use this time to meet with sponsors, apply for grants, plan remote vacation packages for runners for the remote events and most of all, get some dollars back into the bank account.
So it isn't goodbye in any shape or form, it is merely a time out, a gap year if you will.
Before I sign off, I want to thank each and every one of you that have entered these events over the past nine years, especially the same faces that come back every year. I am proud to have met so many fantastic people and also 'run-cationed' with a fair few of you too.
A massive thank you to the sponsors that support these events, the volunteer groups who have assisted on event day, and those special band of friends who have volunteered at ALL the events, but especially the remote Compass Club events. Those events literally could not have happened without you, so thank you. And lastly, the biggest thank you is to my wife and daughter who have put up my mood swings, late nights, early mornings and weeks away from home, while I chase the dream of staging events!
