Introducing our Sydney Marathon ambassadors series

Editor’s note: A regular Tempo Journal contributor, Tara Meakins is the co-founder of the Coogee Run Club and a community ambassador for the TCS Sydney Marathon. Over the next few weeks, she’ll be speaking to some of her fellow ambassadors as we explore how Australia’s major is building community. Before then, we wanted to take the chance to find out more about Tara and how she’s made her Coogee crew such a success.

There was “something powerful” about that first night, Tara Meakins remembers. It was Tuesday 24 May, 2022, getting into the middle of autumn in Sydney. It was dark, it was cold, and three women had met up at Coogee Beach to go for a run together.

Tara had recently moved from Perth to Coogee and, as a social runner, couldn’t believe that there wasn’t already a run club in such a beautiful coastal area. She’d come across a disused Facebook group, from where she read that someone had started a WhatsApp chat for local runners. She posted a message, inviting anyone to join her for a run, and that’s how she met Hannah Gandevia, the Coogee mum rallying runners.

The two bonded so well over their shared passion for fitness with friends that a week later the Coogee Run Club was born. At its first event, just one other woman turned up to run through the moonlit streets.

“It’s not something I would have done by myself because of the darkness, but with the three of us together it felt very empowering,” Tara reflects.

From that night forward, Tara and Hannah built the Coogee Run Club into a force that would play a part in one of the most significant developments in Australian running: Sydney’s elevation to become the seventh World Marathon Major.

The numbers tell an extraordinary story. What started with “one person showing up to our first run” has exploded into a club with almost 4,000 members who run together five times a week.

But numbers don’t tell the full story. What makes the Coogee Run Club special is its unwavering focus on community connection. Tara describes it as “a social club with a bit of running on the side” which lives by the motto “All faces, all paces, all welcome, always”. After every run, the group gathers for coffee, breakfast, dinner or drinks. “It’s always about the social side because we know that’s where people really connect,” Tara explains.

This inclusive philosophy has helped create the kind of engaged running community that marathon majors require. The friendships formed within the Coogee Run Club extend far beyond running – members spend holidays together, there are several couples who met through the club, and the social connections run deep.

It’s this community focus, alongside the club’s widespread appeal, that led to the TCS Sydney Marathon reaching out to make Coogee one of its run club partners – and to ask Tara to be a community ambassador.

The Coogee Run Club has been working with Sydney Marathon for two years, beginning their partnership in 2023. By 2024, it had become one of the event’s most powerful grassroots allies. “We were the biggest social run club that took part in the Sydney Marathon last year,” Tara says proudly. “We had 183 runners, and I think about 50% of them were first-timers.”

Even more significantly, almost 50% of the club’s marathon participants were women – a far higher percentage than the marathon’s overall demographics. “As a female-founded club, it’s this beautiful movement that we’ve created that’s encouraged women to get into running,” Tara explains.

Tara believes the explosion of Sydney’s run club scene has been instrumental in the marathon’s success, helping drive its huge upsurge in not just participant numbers but also community engagement and crowd support.

“Sydney run clubs erupted in the second half of 2023,” she observes. “We had started about a year and a half earlier and definitely in 2023, towards the end of the year, there were run clubs popping up everywhere.”

The surge in Sydney Marathon participation since then has been dramatic. “If you look at the statistics, it’s absolutely incredible to see how far we’ve come,” Tara notes. “In 2023, they had about 17,000 runners enter, and then the following year, in 2024, they had about 25,000 registrations. And now we’re expecting a record 35,000 people at the start line in 2025.”

The partnership between the Coogee Run Club and Sydney Marathon deepened significantly this year. As one of 20 official partner run clubs, Coogee is hosting four Sydney Marathon Run Club events, bringing the marathon’s training program directly to the community. “It’s really great to have that open connection with the marathon,” Tara explains. “I feed back a lot on things our runners might say or feel, and it’s really wonderful to have that direct line of connection to the Sydney Marathon and feel like we’re a part of it.” This year, Tara was also selected as one of a dozen community ambassadors, a role that reflects both her leadership within her running community and the club’s influence. The marathon has invested in their partnership by putting Tara and the other ambassadors through a recreational coaching course with Australian Athletics, professionalising their approach while maintaining their grassroots appeal. “This is such an evolving concept for everyone with Sydney being a seventh World Marathon Major and it’s such a learning curve,” Tara reflects. “So it’s really great to have that connection between the marathon and directly with people within the community.”

Tara brings a unique perspective to run crew leadership through her background in the media. She’s been in the industry since 2010, working as a reporter in radio and television across Australia before moving to London for six years where she worked in PR, predominantly in women’s healthcare. Since August 2023, she’s been a freelance journalist, often writing about running for publications including Tempo Journal and Body+Soul. “I can’t believe I get paid to write about what I love,” she says.

As a writer on running she has a particular role to play in encouraging women to take up the sport. That might mean interviewing elite female athletes such as Olympian Jessica Stenson, who Tara spoke to recently for Tempo. Or it could mean talking about the rise of run clubs and deconstructing some of the perceived barriers to joining what – from the outside – can appear to be quite intimidating groups.

“It might just be breaking down exactly what run clubs look like and how they operate,” Tara says of her work. “Or perhaps tips for getting into running or sharing some advice, from what clothes you need to what type of shoes are the best to wear for different types of sessions, whether it’s a social run or interval training.”

“One of the things I really enjoy writing about and promoting is that women’s bodies are very different to men’s and that we face different challenges when it comes to exercise and running in particular,” she says.

Over the next few weeks, Tara will be interviewing some of the other Sydney Marathon community ambassadors to bring Tempo readers insights into how the race is building connections across areas including volunteering, cultural inclusion and international running groups.

“The Sydney Marathon is doing so much to expand the ways the broader community connects with the event, and I’m really excited to dig into some of these stories,” Tara says.

Hoping to share that community spirit, Tara’s own excitement about Sydney becoming a World Marathon Major is infectious, particularly when discussing the course. “Running across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and then finishing at the Opera House – my god, I can’t think of anything better,” she says. “Racing past Buckingham Palace and up the Mall was great at the London Marathon this year, but running down Macquarie Street to the Opera House forecourt full of people cheering – I get body chills just thinking about it.”

This year’s Sydney Marathon will be particularly special for Tara – her fifth marathon overall and second World Marathon Major after completing London earlier this year. She’s targeting a sub-3:20 time, though her preparation has been complicated by a significant health scare when, after London, she was diagnosed with a 17-centimetre blood clot in her calf – a potentially life-threatening case of deep vein thrombosis. With the right treatment and determination to take better care of herself, she’s back on the path to fitness, and the experience hasn’t dampened her enthusiasm for Sydney’s challenging route.

“Sydney is no easy course and everyone needs to respect that. It’s hilly. It’s up and down,” she acknowledges. “But there’s something to be said about hills,” she adds with characteristic optimism. “If you’re going up and down, you’re using different leg muscles and giving parts of your body a short rest”

Beyond traditional running, Tara continues to innovate. In February, she launched The Singles Run Club with co-founder Ben Hern, building on a 2024 Valentine’s Day event she organised with five other run clubs. “A thousand people showed up and I was just blown away. We had a thousand people running around Centennial Park!”

Convinced there was a market for the concept, Tara and Ben launched their new club on Valentine’s Day this year. Held monthly, the event has participants fill out a survey that sees them grouped by personality types for a 3km run. They’re encouraged to pair up with someone – a prospective date or just a new mate – and given conversation prompts. At the end of each lap, they change their running buddy before taking off again with a new icebreaker. Then it’s back to the pub for “singles bingo”, where ever-changing questions might encourage runners to find someone wearing the same shoes as they are, and so on.

“We have some really cute taglines like ‘trade apps for laps’, ‘run into your soulmate’, and ‘find a date that’ll go the distance’,” Tara says. “It’s a bit cute and corny, but our concept is so wholesome and our events are so genuine. People are really showing up as themselves, because I can’t think of anything more authentic than being red-faced and sweaty after a run. And if people can’t handle you as a tomato, they definitely don’t deserve you as a peach.”

“We’re very much of the attitude that this is a singles club for relationships. This is for people who want to find someone to be with and definitely not any kind of hookup culture.”

Tara’s energy seems boundless – juggling two run clubs, freelance writing, frequent travel and her ambassador duties. But it’s her role in cementing the relationship between the Coogee Run Club and Sydney Marathon that demonstrates how grassroots communities and major events can work together to elevate the sport.

And Tara has one last message for everyone as we head into Australia’s first ever major: if you’re not running on August 31, come out to cheer.

“Having crowds on the sidelines 100% makes the difference between a good race and a bad race, especially during 42.2km,” she says. “Cheering is also a fantastic way to be involved in an event if you’re not a runner or not a runner who runs marathons. You can still show up and support everybody else.

“We always have our incredible Coogee Cheer Crews at different points of the TCS Sydney Marathon course and, honestly, knowing that they’re out there, waiting for us, is the biggest thing that gets me through.

“London does it so well, and I will never get over the experience of having thousands of strangers cheer for me along the entire route. It was a truly unforgettable display of the power of humanity and human connection. So I encourage everyone to get out there on August 31, line the sidelines in droves, and support those running in one of Sydney’s greatest events.”

With 35,000 runners and at least 200,000 spectators expected to turn out on the day, it will be a lot bigger than that first meeting of three women on a cold autumn night in 2022. But sometimes the most extraordinary movements start with the simplest acts of showing up together.