From Workhorse to Thoroughbred

What looks like overnight success is often years in the making. That’s certainly true of Cameron Merrick. The Sydneysider only ran his first official marathon in 2024 and has gone on to take 10th place at last year’s Melbourne Marathon with a PR of 2:21:53. But the 29-year-old is building on a fitness foundation earned over a lifetime of serious amateur football, and he’s far from peaking anytime soon. Next stop, Boston. What role does genetics play? What’s nature and what’s nurture? And what limits might a dedicated aspiring runner – (mostly) new to the sport in his late 20s – reach? These are some of the questions we (that’s Mack Dewar, Tempo’s content king, and me) had when we called Cam. To try to answer part of that question, while his dad ran track in his early teens, and would go on to be a keen cyclist later in life, and his mum played netball into her 20s, Cam believes his success comes down to the “huge base” he’s built through sport.

He has played football since he was six years old – two games a weekend across club and school for most of his childhood and teenage years. Tennis, basketball, volleyball: if it was competitive, he was in. “I was never the best technically,” he says, “but I always prided myself on being the workhorse – bridging the gap with effort.”

In Year 12, 2014, a mate talked him into trying track and field. Eight weeks of training later, Cam ran a 1:59 in the 800 metres and a 4:15 in the 1500. He was racing in the same catchment pool as Olli Hoare, who went on to represent Australia at the 2024 Olympics, and came fourth at the interschool championships. Then he graduated and didn’t touch structured running again for nearly a decade. Football was the thing, and he still plays competitively in his local league. In the years after high school, the occasional run – maybe once a fortnight, never more than 5km – was just a way to shake off the rust pre-season.

Then came the lockdowns. Stuck at home, Cam’s football team started a group chat to keep fit. Someone would post a 10km run, someone else a 12km, then a 14km. “I’m very competitive,” Cam says. “I would want to post the fastest time.” By the end of 2021, he’d worked himself up to a self-directed half marathon – no race, just a watch and a route – and ran 90 minutes flat. He thought it was the fastest he’d ever go. But he’d been training recklessly – every run a time trial – and soon paid for it with a hip flare-up that kept him out for months. He gave up on running for a couple of years, drifted a bit, changed jobs. Then in early 2024, feeling like he needed to get his life in order, he started going to the gym, lost some weight and accepted a mate’s invitation to check out Unofficial, the massively popular Sydney run club, on a Friday morning.

Within weeks he was hooked. He signed up for City2Surf and trained hard; he finished one second under the elite threshold. “That was the first proper moment of, okay, maybe there’s something here,” he says. A mate convinced him to enter the Queenstown Marathon that November. A year earlier, Cam had been in Queenstown during race week but thought he’d never run a marathon. Now he was keeping pace with the leaders. “There was this Irish guy – he ended up winning – and a kilometre in he’s like, ‘How many marathons have you done?’ I’m like, ‘It’s my first one.’ He’s like, ‘What’s your half PB?’ I’m like, ‘I’ve never really run a half either.’ And then I ask him and he’s like, ‘Oh, it’s been a few years, but I’ve run a 2:18.’ And I was like, ‘Fuck.’”

Cam held on with the lead pack for the first 16km before they dropped him, then ran alone the rest of the way. He describes it as a “full marathon debut, going through everything … head noise everywhere, cramping … blowing up”. He held it together and finished fourth in 2:42 on a hilly, mostly-gravel-track course. Not bad for a debut. With that kind of positive reinforcement, he decided to take his running even more seriously in 2025. He got a coach, added two or three gym sessions a week and set a goal of 2:30 at Gold Coast. By the time the Sydney Half Marathon came around in May, he was flying: fourth place, 1:09:52. At Gold Coast in July, he ran 2:23:45. At Melbourne in October, still playing football on Saturdays, he ran 2:21:53 and finished 10th overall. The training load that got him there is eye-watering. A typical week during his Gold Coast block: gym and sauna on Monday; an easy 10km in the morning on Tuesday, then intervals at night; a 20km long run on Wednesday morning, soccer training at night; an easy run Thursday morning, threshold session and gym Thursday night; an easy run Friday morning; a 17km tempo on Saturday morning followed by a football match in the afternoon; then a 30km progressive long run on Sunday. That’s nine or ten sessions a week, peaking at over 150km when you count the 25–30km he might put in on the football pitch. “You make a deal with yourself and it’s non-negotiable,” Cam says. “And then you take pride in ticking every box off.”

[IMAGE 5] He’s not doing it alone. One of the reasons he joined Unofficial was to broaden his social circle, and running has delivered. “There’s something about a long run where phones are away and you just have to work through a lot of topics to fill that time,” he says. “You can have a pretty good chat with someone in an hour and a half.” Cam even finds time to cohost a weekly podcast, Never Run Alone with a few of the crew he met through Unofficial. He seems genuinely touched that, ahead of Melbourne, five listeners – people he’d never met who’d been following his story – messaged him on Instagram to wish him luck. After the race, he met some of Melbourne’s top runners at a pub. When they found out he’d finished 10th, they were baffled. “They were like, ‘Who the fuck are you? Where have you come from?’”

He is enjoying being noticed for his running and has notched sessions with Nedd Brockmann and popular UK runner Mary McCarthy; brands are beginning to pay attention and he’s done some sponsored posts on Instagram. But he won’t let it go to his head. “There’s something about running that forces you to be a little bit humble,” he says, “because there’s always someone better than you.” Now, Cam is just under 13 weeks out from Boston. He’s building back after an Achilles niggle over the break, aiming for sub-2:20 – maybe 2:17 or 2:18 if he has a good day. Eight or nine mates are making the trip with him. “That’s also been a big part of the last couple years – those away trips to do a race are just unreal. Like Gold Coast last year with probably 25 people all running either the half or the full – just such crazy energy. And Boston is just going to be that times 10, I think.” He’s hoping to start just behind the sub-elite wave and, depending on who else shows up, finish as one of the top Australians.

Longer term, he’d love to compete for a spot on an Australian team. But he’s careful not to get ahead of himself. “It’s easy to draw the straight line of, ‘I’ve taken 20 minutes off here, I’ll take another 10 off here, and then I’ll be at the Olympics,’” he says. “That’s a bit disingenuous. You’ve got to have a bit more respect for the guys and the girls who are at that level.” So what is nature and what’s nurture? Cam doesn’t have a neat answer. He knows he’s built on a lifetime of sport, that the competitive fire was always there, that the right community found him at the right time. Where talent ends and work begins is a question he’ll keep testing – one non-negotiable session at a time.