Start
6:30am, Bunbury Runners Club, 1 Ocean Drive
Marathon · 42.2 km
The Full Three
All three waters, twice. Two certified laps from Ocean Drive, starting in the dark and finishing in the sun.
Presented by
Cut-off
12:30pm — six hours
Checkpoint
Rocky Point car park by 11:00am
Field cap
500 Opens 1 Oct
Minimum age
18 years on race day
Entry
$135 incl. GST · 10% off for club members
Pacers
3:00, 3:30, 4:00 and 4:30 — from the WA Running Podcast team, some of them club members
Nutrition drop
Bring your own gels or bottles and hand them in at bib pick-up on Saturday, or on Sunday strictly by 5:45am. Label them with your bib number and a colour or ribbon you’ll spot at a glance — someone else’s gel at 30 km is a mistake you only make once.
Prize money
1st $2,000 · 2nd $1,000 · 3rd $500 — for the first three men and the first three women. Same money, both fields.
The race the whole weekend grew from. Fourteen people ran it in 1982. It has been run every year since, bar 2020.
Two laps of the certified 3 Waters course. You leave Ocean Drive in the dark and drop south to Big Swamp Nature Reserve before first light properly arrives, then work north along the Back Beach with the Indian Ocean on your left. The climb to the checkered lighthouse on Marlston Hill is the only real hill on the course, and the zig-zag that drops off the back of it is the bit everybody talks about afterwards. From there it's down onto Jetty Road, across Whalebone Bridge into Koombana Bay, past the Dolphin Discovery Centre, and around the still water of Leschenault Inlet on the boardwalk. Then you turn around and do the whole thing again.
It is not a flat course and it is not a hard one. The record has stood at 2:24:17 since 1985, which tells you it is fast when the wind behaves, and the six-hour cut-off tells you it is generous when it doesn't.
What you get
The medal and the cup
Every finisher gets both. The 45th medal, cast and colour-matched to your water — and the commemorative cup, back for the first time in fifteen years.
Aid every 5 km
Water, electrolyte and fuel at every station. Personal nutrition drop-off at stations one to four — hand it in at bib pick-up by 5:45am on race morning.
Certified time
Chip timing, official splits, and your name in the same results archive that goes back to 1982.
The record
| Record | Time | Year | Holder |
|---|---|---|---|
| Men's marathon | 2:24:17 | 1985 | David Eltringham |
| Women's marathon | 2:50:03 | 1984 | Tessa Brockwell |
| Women's marathon (equal) | 2:50:03 | 2021 | Astrid Feyer Roberts |