The 14th annual City of Newcastle NewRun was held on Sunday, April 11, with 1690 runners crossing the finish line in the ultimate festival of running.
Newcastle saw multiple running events held across the day, including Marathon Tyres 1⁄2 Marathon (21.1km), Newcastle Herald Hill to Harbour 10km, H Events 5km and Hunter Orthodontics 2k4Kids races.
NewRun also featured the first-ever City of Newcastle Marathon, a massive 42.195 km race seeing 203 individuals and 16 relay teams take on four laps of a 10.55km course around Newcastle Harbour.
H Events Director Paul Humphreys said the day was a great success with spectacular weather and many enthusiastic entrants.
“The event was absolutely unreal; it was a beautiful day and ran really smoothly,” Humphreys said.
“It’s a very complicated event because we close roads and footpaths from Bar Beach to Wickham, so we appreciate the community is in favour of these healthy events, albeit that we close a few access points.
“The feedback has been incredible; everyone is really happy, and I think they were all just so excited to get out and do something compared to last year’s lockdown and event cancellation.”
Humphreys said overall, they had 2300 entries, but some were entrant transfers from the 2020 cancelled event, so it was understandable that some who entered 18 months ago weren’t able to partake this year.
“1690 participants is still an excellent number, which is around what we had in 2019, so we are stoked with that,” Humphreys said.
“It’s undoubtedly the most significant event we have run since COVID-19 restrictions, so we were thrilled to get it off the ground.
“The finish line at Market Street Lawn was great; everyone was respectful, but the start line was a bit trickier trying to maintain social distancing—however, we were able to achieve a COVID safe event.
“Quite a few locals won, including one of our interns, Liam Dixon, who placed first in the Hill to Harbour 10km, and his twin brother placed second by about 2 seconds!”
The overall City of Newcastle Marathon winner was Devon Deppeler, who completed the 42.195 km in 2:51:03, and the first female and seventh place overall was Michelle Mcadam finishing at 3:02:17.
Results can be found here.
Hayley McMahon