365 Days, No Excuses

It was mid-December 2023 and Konrad Marshall was in trouble. The senior writer at Good Weekend magazine, 45 at the time, had just clocked off for the year, and a long summer of parties, hosting duties and social obligations stretched out in front of him. “I felt slovenly, sluggish, tired, bloated, and the summer had barely even begun,” he says.

Konrad had been active once. He’d grown up one of four boys, played football, ran cross country, loved all of it. Then, like a lot of people, somewhere in his twenties he’d lost the thread. He’d moved to the United States for his journalism career, played expat AFL for teams with names like the Cincinnati Kookaburras and picked up running as a way to build community in the cities he lived in. He wrote his way into the New York City Marathon in 2003, and completed the Melbourne Marathon with his brother years later. A self-described slow runner, he needed walking breaks to reach each 42.2km finish line. Even so, each big effort left him so wrecked that he’d swear off running for months afterwards. 

Now, naturally tall but having piled on weight, the Melbourne-based writer knew he needed a drastic reset. At almost exactly the same moment, his book editor reminded him that he ought to write something of his own rather than continuing to ghostwrite for others (he has co-authored Ash Barty’s memoir, for example). The two impulses merged. He would run every single day for a year. If it could also become a book, all the better. If not, the running would be for him alone. 

He needed a rule to keep himself honest, and he landed on the simplest one possible: run for 366 days (2024 was a leap year) without exception, with a two-kilometre minimum on the hard days. Two kilometres at his pace meant about 15 minutes with his heart rate up. Not much, but enough to maintain the streak through exhaustion, illness (he got Covid), travel (a family trip to Tuscany, a work trip to the Paris Olympics where he managed to complete the Marathon Pour Tous) and the days that simply got away from him (there were plenty of 11:30pm jogs). 

The beauty of the rule was its absoluteness. Running three times a week would mean an endless internal debate about which three days. Every day meant no debate at all.

“The moment you make it an every day non-negotiable is the moment it becomes, oddly, easier,” Konrad says. “The rule sets you free because you don’t have to think, you don’t have to debate. You just have to get out there and do it.”

Early on, Konrad recognised that one person’s journey wasn’t quite enough to sustain a full book. His work as a features writer and sports journalist (he’s since been promoted to deputy editor at Good Weekend) gave him a ready-made network, and he began reaching out to athletes he’d previously profiled or spent time with. He wanted a mix of men and women, people from different cities, professionals and amateurs. 

Then the scope cracked open further. “It’s not really all about running,” he says. “So let’s talk to interesting people who run and just see what they get from it.” 

He drew up lists. He wanted to run with a writer, a musician, a scientist, a doctor, an activist. The book presents a fascinating cross-section of Australian running and culture, with thematic chapters structured around interviews with runners Jessica Hull, Gout Gout, Peter Bol and Steve Moneghetti; with novelist Trent Dalton and children’s author Andy Griffiths; with musician Husky Gawenda and politician Andrew Leigh.

Konrad didn’t just interview his subjects. He ran with them, conducting the conversations on the move. It gives the encounters an intimacy and a physicality that a desk-bound interview rarely achieves.

Extreme-endurance runners, and what their projects can teach us, are another focus. So there are chapters on Nedd Brockmann, Dr Donna Urquhart and Tim Franklin, who spent his life’s savings to run around the world over a two-year period in which he averaged 50 kilometres a day. The book includes Indigenous perspectives from Charlie Maher (the first Aboriginal person to complete all seven major marathons) and psychologist Tracy Westerman. Tennis player Jelena Dokic and activist turned ultra champ Grace Tame open up about how running has helped them process the trauma in their lives. 

Resilience expert Hugh van Cuylenburg gives the author a crash course in sprint drills by way of explaining that his return to the sport in his forties has wrought huge emotional and mental gains. “There’s nothing – nothing – like the feeling of running fast,” van Cuylenburg says. “The most present I am in my life is when I’m sprinting … I’m in flow. And by the end of the session all these positive solutions pop up.”

Not everyone came through. Konrad would have loved to go for a jog with Cathy Freeman or Tim Minchin. But the cast he assembled spans the full spectrum of what running can mean: Olympians and weekend joggers, musicians and politicians, people for whom running is a career and people for whom it’s a lifeline.

One of the revelations that kept surfacing across the year’s interviews was how many of Konrad’s subjects shared his own conflicted relationship with the act of running itself. In the book, reflecting on his own profession, he reaches for something often attributed to American author Dorothy Parker: “I hate writing – I love having written.” For Konrad, and he’s far from unique in this respect, this became “I hate running – I love having run.”

A particularly sharp example came from Olympian Pat Tiernan. Konrad interviewed him in Paris just days before he went on to clock 2:10:34 in the Olympic marathon, the fastest time ever recorded by an Australian at the Games. Despite that extraordinary ability, Tiernan told Konrad he wasn’t sure he’d even go for a jog once his career was over.

“I was genuinely surprised that a lot of them shared my feeling about running, in that I hate it,” Konrad says. “They like what it gives them in terms of measuring performance and a sense of accomplishment, and it being the method by which they can compete with and beat other people. But some of them downright hate it.”

“That gave me the inspiration to keep on going,” he says. “I’m like, ‘Well, I’m not on the wrong track.’ Just because I hate it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it.”

If there’s a single lesson that sits at the centre of Run For Your Life, it echoes something ultrarunner Nedd Brockmann has tried to instil through his Uncomfortable Challenge: the idea that you can step outside your normal limits, push through and come out better on the other side. “If you come up with the right conditions, you can do the thing that you don’t want to do, and you can reap the benefits from having done it,” Konrad says. “That understanding is not just something I’ve learned cerebrally. It’s something that I’m now able to rely on deep in my core.” 

One person who truly understands being uncomfortable, though “outright suffering” would be more accurate, is Dr Donna Urquhart. An associate professor in pain and musculoskeletal research at Monash University, she set the world record for the longest ultramarathon in a polar region, running more than 1,400 kilometres on a 10km loop over 28 days near Union Glacier Camp in Antarctica. Temperatures down to -24ºC, wind gusts up to 100km an hour, all while collecting data on what the human body could endure. 

To simulate just some of what she went through in Antarctica, Konrad joined her in a shipping container chilled to -15ºC for a treadmill run undertaken while wearing a bulky assortment of protective clothing. Some of the insights coming out of Dr Urquhart’s research help to redefine what pain means. Rather than purely understanding it as the body’s message signalling danger and to stop whatever we’re doing that’s causing it, we can process it in almost social terms:

“Now we know that pain is so much more complex than a simple warning,” Dr Urquhart says in the book. “Our brain receives that message, and it asks a whole lot of different things to interpret that information. Have I experienced this before? What are the people around me doing? How am I actually feeling? … Pain doesn’t necessarily mean ‘Stop!’ ”

Konrad sums this up for me by saying, “We try to make everything in life comfortable, so when something is uncomfortable, it connects us with reality, and maybe there's an exhilaration in that.”

The question of why we run gets further consideration in Moneghetti’s chapter, pages I like to think of as “The Wisdom of Mona”. Considering Konrad standing in front of him, the former half marathon world record holder and Berlin Marathon winner says our running goals aren’t always the point; it’s the understanding about our mind and body we gain along the way. “Running,” Moneghetti says, “is just taking off.” But he also says there is no secret: “It’s just bloody hard work.” 

One of the book’s strongest chapters places the reader inside Jessica Hull’s 1500-metre Olympic final in Paris. Hull won silver behind Kenyan great Faith Kipyegon, who claimed an unprecedented third consecutive Olympic title in the event. It was the first Olympic track medal for an Australian woman at a distance beyond 800 metres and the country’s first track medal of any kind since Sally Pearson’s London Games triumph 12 years earlier.

Hull structured her race around a four-word mantra: position, relax, commit, compete. Months later, back home in Sydney, she vividly took Marshall through the race and how each of those words related to her strategy and what she needed to do as the laps unfolded. 

There’s a kinship between running and writing that Konrad kept returning to throughout the year, and it’s one that any writer who runs will recognise. He found that running strips away everything extraneous and leaves only the essential thought. For a feature writer who agonises over opening sentences, this was transformative.

“All of the extraneous information just sort of drifts away, and you end up finding the central thesis or central thought,” he says. “Sometimes you’d even come up with the exact words that you want to write. I remember having runs where I wanted to sprint home because I had it in my head and I couldn’t lose it. I had to write it down immediately. And those were often the best stories, the best intros.” 

So what has the year left him with? Konrad no longer runs every day. He decided his body needed rest days and variety. But Monday through Friday, he’s up at six, out the front door before anyone in the house is awake and back by 6:50am after a three-kilometre loop with 200 sit-ups broken up along the way. He still hates stepping outside into the cold. But the return is worth it every single time.

“I feel like I go into my daily work with a whole lot more purpose and clarity,” he says. “I feel huge stores of energy. That’s that paradox of exercise: it takes energy away from you, but it gives it back in kind.” 

He’s coaching his son’s basketball team on Monday nights. He’s doing weights at the office gym twice a week. He’s even considering going back to where it all began, having discovered a local over-40s footy team called the Dinosaurs. And there’s one more goal sitting out there on the horizon, waiting for its moment. “I would really like to just run a marathon all the way through and finish in under four hours,” Konrad says. “That would be a massive achievement for me.” 

For a slow runner who’s never managed to cover 42.2 kilometres without walking, that feels like exactly the right kind of uncomfortable.

Run For Your Life by Konrad Marshall is published by Hardie Grant Books.