What if you could give everyday runners the kind of support system usually reserved for elite athletes? That’s the idea behind The Ballarat Project. Over the past three months, a group of six recreational runners has been tested, measured and trained by an integrated team of physiologists, strength coaches, dietitians, physiotherapists and mental performance specialists,

The goal? To see if this professional-level approach can unlock these athletes’ full potential as they prepare for the Ballarat Marathon, half marathon, and 10K races on Sunday 27 April. The results are being shared as a documentary series on Instagram.

But to understand The Ballarat Project, you first need to understand its coach-director Dave McNeill – and the journey that led an Olympian to pour his energy into helping six recreational runners chase their potential.

Building What He Never Had

“A big part of my experience as an elite athlete and a professional athlete is that it is easy to get support and help when you’re doing well,” Dave explains. “It’s much harder to get support and help when you’re not doing well.”

With his lean frame and tidy salt-and-pepper beard, the 38-year-old is sitting outside a cafe on a backstreet in Clifton Hill, Melbourne. We’re not far from the George Knott Reserve where an extended Ballarat training squad – much bigger than the core six involved in the project – has been meeting on Tuesday mornings for track work. On his head is a NTHSIDE Collective cap, advertising the business he started as a social run club in January 2022 and expanded in early 2023 to include physio (McNeill is a qualified therapist) and coaching services. The group now numbers five coaches, including fellow Olympian Rose Davies. On his right hand, Dave wears a silver ring bearing the Olympic rings; on his left, a silver band marking his recent marriage to the woman he describes as his backbone, Chloe Jackson.

The importance of support is a lesson Dave learnt firsthand throughout his remarkable career. Despite representing Australia at the London 2012, Rio 2016, and Tokyo 2020 Olympics, he never received access to the National Athlete Support Structure that provides facilities, performance specialists and financial assistance to Australia’s top athletes.

“There’ll be plenty of Olympians that never get any support from their governing body,” he says without a trace of bitterness. “I look back on my career and all the mistakes I made from an injury perspective, probably from a diet perspective as well, and just think, man, it would have been great if I had this 15 years ago.

“I think a lot of really good athletes have probably slipped through the cracks because they didn’t have the support when they actually needed it,” he says. “They got the support when they didn’t need it, which is when things were going smoothly.”

An Unexpected Challenge

Dave would have a chance to put that belief to the test right from the start of the Ballarat Project. Three of the six participants – Walter Tsang (marathon), Anna Loughnan (event TBC), and Conor Murtagh (half marathon) – suffered injuries before the cameras even started rolling.

Those injuries weren’t apparent when Dave began choosing his athletes around October and November last year, but they soon manifested in the form of, respectively, shin splints, a complicated ankle sprain, and a foot-based stress reaction.

For many coaches, this would have been reason to replace the injured runners. Not for McNeill.

“That’s probably the overarching reason I wasn’t going to drop these athletes because this is when they actually need physio and a dietician and all this sports performance help,” he says.

This decision speaks volumes about Dave’s priorities. The Ballarat Project isn’t just about producing highlight-reel performances; it’s about the process of improvement, learning, and overcoming obstacles – just like in his own athletic career.

The other three participants – Samuel Bourke, Susi Kinnear and Lizzy Howells – are all preparing for the half marathon distance and have remained healthy throughout the project so far, notwithstanding a niggling hamstring that Susi is managing. She and Lizzy, in particular, have formed a strong training partnership.

“The Lizzy and Susi combination has worked really well,” Dave says. “Of all of the participants, they’ve probably done the most together, partly because they’re the two that have been the least injury hampered.”

That’s only part of it though. As Dave points out in the video episode dedicated to these two, they’ve also bonded socially and have a lot of fun at every session. I should know, as – full disclosure – the pair have become my training buddies as I too prepare for Ballarat with the larger training squad. I’ll be making my marathon debut, and you can see me shadowing Lizzy and Susi in some of the videos’ scenes.

The Multidisciplinary Approach

The real magic of The Ballarat Project isn’t just in the collection of expertise Dave has assembled – it’s in how these specialists work together.

“Sports science keeps evolving,” he says. “If you look at professional running groups now, they’ve got a team around them, and that team is all conversing so that everyone’s on the same page.

“Otherwise, you can have an athlete that goes and sees a physio and a dietitian and all these other specialists, but that physio will never chat to the dietitian, the dietitian will never chat to the coach, the coach will never chat to the physio, so there’s always an opportunity for things to get lost in translation.”

“Generally outcomes are better when people communicate better,” Dave says.

He draws a parallel to his own experience as an athlete. “I had great people around me during my career, but it was always services I had to seek out myself. I was never very good at that, because I always felt bad about asking for help and oftentimes I felt almost like people were giving me a bit of charity.

“So I kind of wanted to just remove that and go, ‘You’ve got it, here it is.’ I’m really fortunate with the partners we have on the Ballarat Project. They’re all doing this for free because they believe in the idea of the project.”

The project brings together experts including exercise physiologists who conduct detailed testing, strength and conditioning coaches who design personalised programs, dietitians who analyse and optimise nutrition, and mental performance specialist Burt Gershater, an 80-year-old counsellor who spent 50 of his years in the rarefied air of Flagstaff, Arizona, and who has been a foundational influence on Dave’s own approach to performance psychology.

“The real moment where, irrespective of what the result was, I knew that we’d have a great story to tell was the first time we got all six of the athletes together in a room back in early January,” Dave recalls.

“We sat down with Burt, and each of the athletes talked and told a little bit about their story. Then I realised, irrespective of what the outcomes would be, I knew that these six would get the most out of the project. They are all clearly very goal-oriented, high-achieving people, with different personalities and different backgrounds, and in that session with Burt I understood that each of them would lean into the whole experience and make use of everything at their disposable.”

The Philosophy of Potential

The first documentary episode is titled “chasing potential”, and when Dave describes his approach to that concept he uses a metaphor of a slippery slide with unexpected forks in the path. Forks you smash into when you inevitably don’t know which way you should go.

“My career has just been this constant process – try, make a mistake, learn something, refine it, go back, make the same mistake a different way, refine it again,” he explains. “The guiding thing is always, ‘How can I do this better? How can I keep progressing forward rather than going backwards and stagnating?’”

This iterative approach to improvement underpins The Ballarat Project. Dave isn’t looking for quick fixes or magic bullets; he’s helping the six participants understand the complex interplay of factors that influence performance.

“It would be so much easier if you just had to do one thing and you would automatically get better. And sometimes that works,” he says. “But if you’re truly chasing potential, there’s obviously multiple avenues where you can find it, and then wisdom is probably just deciding which one to chase at what point, and not necessarily trying to do everything at once.”

For McNeill, unlocking potential isn’t about prescribing a one-size-fits-all solution; it’s about helping athletes see the possibilities within themselves.

“You help them to see it themselves,” he says. “With the resources that we have available, it’s pretty easy to show where the potential is, but showing them is only as useful as them making sense of it and understanding it.”

This philosophy extends to the delicate balance between pushing limits and exercising patience – something Dave sees as two opposing forces in the pursuit of potential.

“Probably one of the hardest things with chasing potential is patience,” he reflects. “If what you were trying to do is to be better, the easiest thing to do would just be to hammer yourself, push yourself, but it rarely works out. Or it might work out for a little while and then you completely break down.”

The Coach’s Journey

While guiding The Ballarat Project, Dave is navigating his own transition. After a distinguished international career – most recently he won gold in the 5000m at the Oceania Championships in June last year – his body had other plans. After that win in Suva, he briefly returned to Melbourne before setting off for the European racing season. Disaster struck almost immediately.

“I got sick within a couple of days of arriving in Europe, and I just never seemed to recover,” he says. “It wasn’t until I got home and had some blood work done that I realised I’d had glandular fever.” The diagnosis was both frustrating and relieving – an explanation for months of unexplained fatigue.

The recovery took six months, during which Dave conceived The Ballarat Project. “I thought, well, if I can’t run, I might as well try and do something else with my time.”

Today, Dave describes himself as a “hobby jogger,” though his competitive spirit hasn’t disappeared entirely. When asked about potentially tackling the marathon distance that he never contested during his track career, his answer is measured.

“If I’m going to do a marathon, I don’t have any interest in going and running 2:20. If I’m going to do a marathon, I want to be all in on it,” he says, suggesting that anything slower than 2:10 “doesn’t get you very far anymore” in elite competition. As a reminder, Andy Buchanan rewrote the Australian marathon record in December with a time of 2:06:22 at Valencia.

Would he consider such a challenge? “I’d really have to devote a good 12, 18 months to the type of training that you need to do for marathons – probably more mileage and longer long runs. I’m keeping the door open on it.”

“If there’s any chance of attacking marathons and half marathons, it may change a little bit about how much I’m doing all at once,” he concedes. “Which is a lot at the moment.”

The Real-World Application

The obvious question about The Ballarat Project is whether it’s replicable for everyday runners. After all, your average recreational runner probably can’t afford to engage half a dozen different specialists on a regular basis.

“It’s unrealistic that this will work for everyone,” Dave admits. “But I think the real-world application is for people to see that there’s multiple different factors influencing your performance.”

This is perhaps the most valuable takeaway: that improvement doesn’t come from a single magic solution but from understanding how various elements work together to influence performance.

“We’re trying to create an idealised situation where we try as best as we can to tackle it all, which is still hard to do,” Dave explains. “These are all people that work full time and have other commitments. It’s much harder to constrain all these variables compared to in a professional team.”

As race day approaches in Ballarat, success for Dave won’t necessarily be measured in finish times or personal bests – though those would certainly be welcomed. For him, success is about the six participants gaining a deeper understanding of their potential and the factors that influence it.

“For Walter, Anna, and Conor, the Ballarat experience on race day might not be what they’d hoped for,” he acknowledges. “But they’ve also, I think all of them have, and myself included, will have learnt something about staying healthy and staying injury-free.”

That learning – that process of trying, failing, refining, and trying again – is what chasing potential is all about. It’s a philosophy that has carried Dave through a decorated athletic career and now guides him as he helps others on their own journeys of discovery.

The Ballarat Project might be an experiment, but it’s one built on a simple, powerful principle: that support is most valuable not when everything is going right, but when athletes face their greatest challenges. It’s a lesson Dave McNeill learnt the hard way, and one he’s now passing on to a new generation of runners.

The Ballarat Marathon, half marathon, and 10K will take place on Sunday 27 April. Follow The Ballarat Project through weekly episodes on the NTHSIDE Collective’s Instagram feed.