At 5pm on Sunday 27 September, the first wave of runners left Rozelle Parklands for the second Sydney edition of the Nike After Dark Tour. Ahead of them lay 21.1km of twisting paths, boardwalks and out-and-backs, past White Bay, through the Tramsheds and Sydney Fish Market, to a finish under the lights of Tumbalong Park. Now in its second year, After Dark is a global series of night races built around women runners, and Sydney’s leg drew some 7,000 of them. It also drew rain.

Renee Buckingham and Georgia Culpeper were among the crowd, and each of them brought a friend.

Renee and Liz

Renee, a Melbourne-based content creator and host who’s no stranger to the Tempo community, came to running during lockdown. “I used to hate running,” she says. “But I traded dusty Sunday mornings for a refreshing run, and because of that I found community. I’m not originally from Melbourne; I spent a lot of my time in Sydney so running’s been the vehicle for me to find a sense of identity, a healthier habit and a routine.” 

Six years later, After Dark has become a new fixture on her calendar, with a twist. “After Dark’s become a tradition of roping a new friend into doing their first ever half marathon,” she says. “Last year I paced my best friend, and this year I had another best friend run it.” 

This year’s recruit was Liz Miu, a food content creator with some 500,000 followers who Renee first met online. “She pretty much said yes naively,” Renee says. Over the following six weeks Renee became Liz’s unofficial coach, talking her through carb loading and fielding questions such as whether she might get lost on course. Liz’s longest run before race day was 16km. 

“So many women don’t run because they feel like it’s quite an intimidating sport, which it’s not once you’re in it,” she says. “So I always pitch After Dark as the best first ever half marathon you could do as a woman. It’s all women; it’s an incredible energy; you’re super safe.” 

On the Friday night, the pair attended a live podcast recording with Nike Running’s global head coach Chris Bennett, where Lydia O’Donnell, Nike Pacific’s head running coach, offered a thought that stuck. “Something she said was that running is actually just about trust, learning to trust your body and your mind,” Renee says. “My friend Liz wrote that on her hand as her mantra throughout the race.” 

Renee has a mantra of her own: “You don’t have to do this – you get to.” She says that we can second guess ourselves when we’re running, “Why do I do this? I’ll never do this again,” when in fact we’re incredibly lucky to be doing it at all.  “Look down at your feet and, actually, you get to do this. So many people would dream about having the mind or the body that allowed them to do this.” 

Her plan for race night was to set Liz off and then run her own race; coming back from an ITB injury, she can’t comfortably run too slowly. She left Liz a set of sticky notes to open along the way. “Open this one at 11K, open this one at 18K,” she says. “By the time she went to open them, they were completely drenched.” 

Thank You, Rain

Georgia welcomed the rain. “The day before, it was 30-something degrees and very warm and windy,” she says. Come Sunday evening, “it wasn’t pouring, but it was in and out and there were lots of puddles,” Renee reports. Combined with a tight, single-file opening few kilometres, it made for a slippery night. “It was not a PB course,” Renee says. “I didn’t actually think about what the race would be for me. I just wanted to get back, because it was raining.” 

By 18km she was, in her words, “pretty drenched, pretty over it, not vibing”. Then a familiar moustache appeared through the rain. Renee had interviewed Coach Bennett for Tempo Journal in the lead-up to the race. “Everyone describes him as a Ted Lasso character, and I totally get it,” she says. “He is so warm, so passionate.” On course, she gave him a high five. “His energy pushed me through the last couple of Ks.” 

Bennett, whose voice is instantly recognisable from the Nike Run Club app, has a new book, This Is About Running. This Is Not About Running. Renee had read it before interviewing him. “He said there will never be a perfect run,” she says. “And something I really admire is how much he speaks about weakness within the sport, and how weakness is a superpower.” 

For Bennett, the logic is simple. “The reason why people take on these great challenges is not to take advantage of their strengths. It’s to challenge their weaknesses,” he told Renee. “You could have taken on a lesser challenge. You decided to do a half marathon, which is wild.” Meet a weakness head-on, he says, and “your weaknesses can potentially become strengths. You’re not running away from your weaknesses. You’re running to them and through them.” 

Renee, coming back from injury, has taken that to heart. “If you can take that injury and learn from it rather than resist or hate the body,” she says, “that’s something that stood out to me.” 

In hindsight, Renee reckons the weather did everyone a favour. “It might sound a bit witchy, but it needed to rain,” she says. “I think women needed to be reminded that it’s not about how you look, if your hair is perfect, your makeup. It’s about embracing the messiness of this sport and the messiness of being a human.” Coach Lydia agrees. “I think the rain just brings out the toughness in us,” she told Renee after the race. 

Renee’s verdict: “Didn’t love it at the time but, upon reflection, thank you, rain.” 

Georgia Squared

Twelve months earlier, Georgia had followed the inaugural After Dark Sydney on her phone in Melbourne, “with an insane amount of FOMO”. She has since moved to Sydney, and this year she ran it with her friend, also named Georgia. Their friends call them “G Squared”. The two met in grade 7 in Tasmania, danced ballet together and, after years of crossing paths, ended up neighbours.

Over the past few years their dancing has turned into running, and the other Georgia’s work has her training at all hours, including 4am laps of a pitch-dark Centennial Park. Georgia joined her for as many as she could, for both moral support and safety. “I didn’t always want to do it,” she admits. “But if I can do it, I feel like I should.” Even as a pair, it was tense. “We were constantly checking our shoulders,” she says. “We’ve got head torches and little pocket lights and every safety accessory you could have under the sun, and even then the heart rate is so high.” 

No woman should have to run with one eye over her shoulder. “Being a woman, there are so many risks associated with running that men just don’t have to consider,” Georgia says. “We all deserve to be able to fit in our training and run and feel as safe as possible doing it.” After Dark was designed to acknowledge exactly that, she says, and “to try to reclaim some of that back for us”. 

The After Dark start line felt good from the moment she stepped onto it. “I could see what was going on, because I wasn’t the shortest one surrounded by all of these men,” she explains. “I didn’t feel claustrophobic. We could all see each other. We were all excited with each other, because you’re looking people in the eyes.” From that point onwards, the race was already won. “You’ve done the hard part now,” she says. “This whole thing is just a victory lap.” 

The other Georgia, O’Brien, was in PB shape, and Georgia was there to keep her on track, but neither was overly worried about the clock. Culpeper wasn’t even wearing her watch. At around 13km, friends were waiting at Sydney Fish Market with oysters. “We decided that was our replacement for a gel,” Georgia says. “We stopped, we saw our friends, I had a couple of oysters, we took some photos, and then we were like, ‘Cool, suppose we better keep running.’” How much time did it cost? “We don’t know and we don’t care.” 

Near the end came Bennett, alone with no entourage, shouting, “Come on, Sydney!” Georgia had met him at the podcast recording, and much of what he said that night resonated with something she first heard from a friend years ago, something she carries with her: “You want it so badly because you’ve already got it.” Bennett put a version of the same idea to Renee in his Tempo interview. “I would hope every woman on the start line realises that they are already who they wanted to become,” he said. 

Over the final 2km, with Georgia watchless and her friend under orders not to look at hers, the pair heard the crowd and started reeling in runners ahead of them. Georgia O’Brien crossed the line with a PB. Then they hit the dance floor. “We were like, ‘God, our parents are going to laugh when they see this,’” Georgia says. “Clearly we didn’t run hard enough, because we still had energy left.” 

7,000 Friends

For all the oysters and dancing, both women keep coming back to safety. “People always say, ‘Oh, I could never run in the morning,’” Renee says. “For a lot of women, that’s kind of their only choice, to do it in daylight for safety reasons.” She doesn’t like to run alone, and has had her share of frightening encounters on the run. “To do it specifically with women, and watch women go for it and do hard things, that for me is the real win,” she says. 

Coach Lydia sees the night race as part of the point. “Women haven’t always felt safe to run at night,” she says. “So it’s epic to have an opportunity where we can bring women together to go running in the dark, not just with a friend, but with 7,000 other friends.” 

For Georgia, who knows the alternative at 4am, the change was total. “There was not a single moment where that happened the other night,” she says. “Safety was not a concern.” 

Renee is wary of that message getting lost. “There’s been a lot of media coverage about how cute all the boyfriends and the supporters were,” she says. “I’d hate for that to take away from the conversation of what’s actually at play here, and that’s women’s safety and sport.” 

Looking Out for Others

For Georgia, running her first After Dark in her new hometown closed a loop. “I get to bring along a friend from 10 years ago who has been with me from Tassie to now,” she says. “It’s like all of my worlds colliding.” Her own time barely registered. Finding the fun and joy in running has been a priority for her since she took up the sport during the pandemic. Recently that has meant she’s been less concerned with racing. Instead, she’s having fun jumping into other people’s training. “I have a joke at the moment that I’m doing everyone’s training but my own,” she says. “Whatever anyone else is doing is an opportunity to spend time with the people who I care about.” On Sunday night, that suited her perfectly. “It felt like my run was the least important thing about After Dark,” she says. “It was about so much more than me.”

What Renee hopes others take from the night is simple. “If one woman saw me run, or saw someone else run, that they would see themselves in that and start their running journey, realising that if they can do it, I can do it,” she says. “That’s the real influence I would want to have.” 

She is already thinking about who she can ask to join her. “If they bring back After Dark,” she says, “I’ll be looking for my next victim.”