Editor’s note: Shokz is the Official Headphones Partner of the TCS Sydney Marathon presented by ASICS, and Andy Buchanan is one of the brand’s global athletes, alongside Eliud Kipchoge, Hellen Obiri, Conner Mantz and Eilish McColgan. With thanks to Shokz, Tempo Journal was able to sit down with Andy for an in-depth chat in the final week before his biggest race of a carefully staged comeback. Our conversation took in a year of injury, the loss of his Australian record and his goal to be the first Australian home at Sydney.

Nearly three weeks ago, on Sunday 9 August, Andy Buchanan won the Voltaren City2Surf in 40:27 – 38 seconds clear of 24-year-old Luke Hince (with Ed Goddard taking the third spot) – in front of a huge field for “the world’s largest fun run”, with around 90,000 runners, walkers and wheelers stretched out between Hyde Park and the sea at Bondi Beach. Not bad for what was effectively a training run.

Andy had gone up with two plans and a firm instruction from his coach not to empty the tank and pull up sore. “If it’s a good pace at the start, run with the group and then look to make some moves on the hill at Heartbreak, which is about 6km in,” he says of the first option. He remembers looking around on that infamous 2km incline and being well clear. “But the other plan was, if it’s slow, don’t hold yourself back. Just run normally. That’s when I run my best, when I’m just thinking about myself and I’m not getting controlled by anyone else.” 

This weekend he lines up for the TCS Sydney Marathon presented by ASICS with a single competitive ambition: to be the first Australian home. But the reason he was at City2Surf had less to do with a strategic build than with morale.

“I needed to feel like myself and have a positive experience with running again,” he says. He means after a year derailed by injury, in which he’s also had to come to terms with losing his Australian marathon record.

A Normal Monday in Bendigo

Three weeks out from a marathon, Andy would normally be in Teddington, on the western fringe of London, in the company of other people doing the same thing. “It’s like you’re in this little cocoon of the marathon, because you’re over there to race. You’re often staying with people who are doing the race and you’re just trapped in this world where that’s all that’s happening,” he says. “Whereas this morning, I did my normal Monday loop that I do every week of the year.” 

This time he flew to Sydney on Wednesday, out of Bendigo airport, in the same time zone, in his own life. He is enjoying it and faintly suspicious of how much. “I’ve been feeling too relaxed the last week,” he admits.

Most of that running he does alone, which is where the Shokz come in. “A lot of my running I do by myself and I love being able to have podcasts or music,” he says. “If I’m running by myself, the Shokz are on my head every single run.”

The OpenRun Pro 2 is Shokz’s flagship open-ear headphone: 30.3g, up to 12 hours of playback, IP55 sweat and water resistance, and a DualPitch system that pairs a bone-conduction driver for mids and highs with an air-conduction driver doing the low end. Nothing sits inside the ear, which is the entire point.

For Andy that starts as a safety argument but comes to tie into his deep appreciation of the Bendigo forest trails. “You just really need to be aware of what’s coming behind you. I’m lucky; I don’t run on roads very much at all, but it’s really nice if you’re approaching a road to hear a car coming. I don’t think you realise how much we rely on our hearing,” he says. “I run on a few different bike paths, so it’s really handy to know when bikes are coming in behind me.” 

“I really like hearing the different noises of the bush, and I like being able to hear my shoes on the dirt and the crunch. All those little things make a big difference to my running experience.” Those little things are data, feedback on how he’s landing. “It’s part of the run for me. It’s a really important part.” 

He came to the open-ear format braced for a compromise that never arrived. “I used to wear a different pair of [closed-ear] headphones and I can’t tell the difference. Initially I thought there was going to be a bit of a trade-off, having been able to hear everything — I didn’t think you’d be able to hear the music as well, or hear the podcast. But I can’t notice a difference. So it’s really high quality.”

As he prepares for Sydney, his first look at the course came from the custom packaging his headphones arrived in. The OpenRun Pro 2 TCS Sydney Marathon presented by ASICS Co-Branded Edition comes in deep blue and gold, stamped with the marathon’s Opera House silhouette logo, with the course map printed on the box and case.

“I opened them last week and I didn’t really know what the course map looked like. So that was actually my first little bit of studying the course,” Andy says. “I looked at it and I thought, geez, this course goes everywhere, because it’s quite a squiggly line. Those little features are really cool.” 

He likes them for less practical, more emotional reasons too. “It’s a bit of a personal touch. I love that they’re not just the generic ones, and the fact that I’m actually competing in that race – I think they’re going to be a really special memento for me now and going forward.” 

The Year That Wasn’t

Another reason his Bendigo training block counts as a win is that this time last year Andy was learning how much a body can refuse to cooperate. 

In 2025 he picked up a stress reaction in his femur. He took time off, tried to build back in time for the World Championships in Tokyo, and missed them. He took more time off, rushed the return to make Valencia in December, and got two or three good weeks in before it flared again. Then he was down for Boston in April 2026 and missed that too.

His diagnosis of his own situation is unsentimental. “When you’re injured, you’re injured because you’ve done too much. Too much stress, too much running, not enough fuel, not enough sleep — your body’s saying, ‘I need a rest,’ “ he says. He’s wary of cross training as a substitute. “There’s definitely a time and place for cross training, but when you’re recovering from a bone stress injury, the best thing you can do is give your body time and rest.” 

Ten consistent years sit behind that patience, and he has decided to read the enforced stop as an investment. “I know that I’m going to be in better shape over the next 12 months after having that down period.” 

There was a planning lesson in it too. He had mapped out 2025 in January — London, Gold Coast, World Champs, Valencia — told people his plans, and then felt honour-bound to chase a calendar that his femur had already vetoed. “In my head I was doing Valencia. I had to do everything I could to make it there, because I felt like I’d committed to it. And then, obviously, I made some poor decisions around returning to running too soon.” 

Gold Coast Blues

The comeback proper was meant to be the Gold Coast Half Marathon on Saturday 4 July. He came 18th. From the outside it could have looked like a man still finding his legs after injury. It wasn’t that.

“We knew there was a pacemaker, that he was going to go through fast, and we knew the winner was going to come from the second group,” Andy says of the plan his coach, Scott Westcott, gave him to hold back. “I just didn’t have the confidence to sit in that second group and see that lead pack get away. I went to the front of that group, did a heap of work, tired myself too much, and then got to 12km and I was just cooked.”

After that, “I was just in get-home mode,” he says. “I’m not proud of it. Guys were going past me that normally I would hate going past me. Honestly, I don’t even know where I finished. I don’t know what time I ran, because it’s like: move on, be a goldfish.” 

He traces the error back to a single absent ingredient. “That missing confidence was just lack of racing. I made some silly decisions that I normally wouldn’t make when I’m confident in myself.” 

The next morning, on the same stretch of coast, Haftu Strintzos ran 2:06:20 to win the ASICS Gold Coast Marathon and take Andy’s Australian record by two seconds.

“I was blown away by Haftu’s result. He’s very talented,” Andy says. “I knew he was going to be the next big marathoner in Australia. But did I think he was going to do it in Gold Coast? Not at all.”

Astonishment gave way to something harder to admit. “That record became part of my identity. Is that a good thing, a bad thing? I’m not sure. Not many people can say that they have been, or were, an Australian record holder – but when you have that, you want to hold onto it for as long as possible. I think that’s human nature.”

Having it broken at a race he was attending made it worse. “I was constantly bumping into people that day or the next day and they just didn’t know how to react around me, because they felt a bit awkward. Which was fair. I felt awkward as well.” 

Anxious thoughts inevitably crept in. “It turned to, ‘What does this look like for me? Do my sponsors still want to support me? Were they only with me because I was the Australian record holder? What does my career look like now?’ All those thoughts rolled into a week.” 

Sitting With the Feels

Talking to Andy about this, I’m impressed by his openness about what must still be a painful episode. “That whole week I didn’t feel like running. I normally love going for my morning run, whereas that whole week I still ran every day, but I did not enjoy it.”

He let it be as bad as it was. “It’s completely okay to be feeling down or negative about things, because running’s my job and I had a pretty bad weekend. Sometimes you just need to sit with that. I think the worst thing I could have done is try to quickly move on,” he says. “If that’s to go out and have a great time with mates, or if it’s to get straight back into training, it’s just a band-aid approach. If you’re quickly shifting, that could very easily come up in a month or two months’ time.

“I was keen to just go through the feels – to listen to whatever emotional music I like listening to and really sit in that space for a bit of time, because I didn’t have any races that I needed to prepare for in the near future.”

Eight weeks on, the process has paid off. “Here I am, maybe two months after, and that’s not something I think about. I’m still the same person. I still have the same sponsors. I’m running well again. I think I just made it into such a bigger deal than what it was.” 

A Horizon Rather Than a Destination 

Unsurprisingly, Andy Buchanan would like the Australian marathon record back. But he’s not organising his whole life around getting there.

It’s worth remembering how he gained the accolade in the first place. Andy went to Valencia in December 2024 hoping to follow a 2:07:30 pace group. There wasn’t one. “I went to the technical meeting and they’re like, ‘Oh, pace groups are 2:01, 2:03, 2:06:30 and then 2:10.’ And I was freaking out, because I was like, where’s my 2:07:30 group?” He committed to the 2:06:30 bunch the night before and ran 2:06:22. “I was not going there to try and break the record.” 

Which is precisely why he thinks it can happen again. “Valencia was actually easier. That’s probably the easiest marathon I’ve done. Just with how I felt, I know I can run faster, which is exciting.”

But as for getting there, he has taken his hands off the wheel. “I told my coach and manager, I’m doing Sydney. You guys can plan what I’m doing after that, but I don’t want to know about it. I’m all in on Sydney,” he says. Olympic qualification opens towards the end of the year, and that’s the horizon. “That answer drives people crazy, because they think I’m gatekeeping what my next marathon is, but I actually have absolutely no idea.” 

Sydney Ambition: First Australian Home

Here is a fun fact: at 35, with seven marathons under his belt – three in Hamburg, the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, the Paris Olympics, plus Valencia and London – Andy Buchanan has never run a marathon in Australia.

“All very much in this small little part of the world,” he says of that European list. 

So Sydney is a first, and he is treating it as a stepping stone rather than a summit, a marathon to race rather than a number to chase. “I’m going in with no time goals at all. I honestly haven’t even thought about what time I want to run. I haven’t thought about what pace groups there are. It hasn’t factored into my brain,” he says. “I want to race.”

Sydney is a hilly course that favours tactical racing rather than a metronomic pursuit of paces. So Andy is focused on the leaderboard and not the clock. “I want to be first Australian. I really want to be top 10. I’d love to be top five.” He is not exactly sure which international elites are coming. “They put out a start list a few months ago. Who knows how many of those people have made it to Australia, just through illness, injury, different races. And then who knows how many of those top guys get to 30km and go, ‘Today’s not my day; I’m going to pull out.’ You see that in the majors all the time.”

It’s a course that rewards that mindset. “I think we runners in general get so caught up on times, and that is the measurement of success. It’s natural, because it’s a clear-cut yes or no — you either run a PB or you don’t,” he says. Last year’s winner, Ethiopian Hailemaryam Kiros, set a course record of 2:06:06, and Andy reckons a fast time remains available to the disciplined. “If you’re smart about how you pace it, you can actually run quite fast. But if you’re silly at the start and get carried away, the hills towards the back end will really affect you. It’s a race where you want to race it rather than time trial it.” 

His homework has been physical as much as cartographic. He has looked at the map on his Shokz case but he hasn’t watched the course flyover, despite half the running community sending it to him. “Right now I’m just enjoying living my normal life in Bendigo, and then I go up to Sydney on Wednesday and I’m going to have so much time to think about the race. Whereas my coach knows the course. He’s been manipulating my training in different ways so that I’m prepared for it. So why do I need to think about the course right now?” 

If he’s scared of Sydney’s hills at all, it’s not how you might expect. “Growing up in Bendigo, I run a lot of hills, so I’m not that nervous about the uphills. It’s more the downhills, and how you can run down these hills without beating your legs up too much and still feel good in the next period after the downhill,” he says. City2Surf, it turns out, was a laboratory. “City2Surf has so many downhills; it’s actually quite deceptive. I wanted to know what it felt like to go full send down a hill, trying not to brake, and how that feels for the next K. That felt like really good practice.” 

Ready for the Big Dance

For all the talk of placings and being the 2026 domestic champion, Andy’s first measure of success is far more modest.

“I feel like I’ve nearly already achieved it, in that I’ve got to the start line,” he says. “For me, 2025 was not a good year at all. I ran London; I missed World Champs; I missed Valencia, and then I was down to do Boston at the start of this year and I missed that. So a big tickbox success criteria was: get through the training block and get on the start line. And feel like myself again. Feel like myself in training and have the confidence to attack a marathon.” 

Before he does, in the last quiet training runs and shakeouts before the noise starts, we can tell you exactly what will be going into his ears along with his Shokz. For a while now, Andy has been thrashing a playlist called 2000s Girly Bangers. Beyoncé, Britney, the Spice Girls. Lately he’s been mixing that up with Role Model, Olivia Dean and a bit of Lily Allen.

“It’s a good playlist,” he says. “I reckon you’d like it.” 


 

The OpenRun Pro 2 TCS Sydney Marathon presented by ASICS Co-Branded Edition is available exclusively from Shokz at Booth 17 during the TCS Sydney Marathon Running Show presented by ASICS, 27–29 August. Other OpenRun Pro 2 colourways are available at shokz.com.au, the Shokz Amazon Store, JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman.