Elleker Running Festival returns for 29th year after Albany Athletics Club joins forces with Little Athletics

After a year-long hiatus, the much-loved Elleker Running Festival is up and running again, with organisers keen to welcome back a huge contingent of runners for Sunday’s event.

Many were disappointed by last year’s cancellation because of volunteers being stretched too thin and an increase in traffic management costs — none more so than race director and Albany Athletics Club president Carl Heslop.

He attributes the event’s last-minute return to a combination of new club collaborations, a $5000 grant from the City of Albany, and the ongoing support of sponsor Retravision Albany and the running community.

“Bringing in the Albany Little Athletics Club has given us access to an enormous amount of amazing volunteers who have been critical to putting this on,” he said.

“Without the two clubs coming together, the event would have been completely impossible. I don’t think we’d ever put it on again as a club.

“We’ve also had community members come forward as well to help us out, who aren’t members of the club, and have been amazing in helping, and been able to find some solutions with some of the traffic costs to make it a bit more affordable.”

The race program consists of the flagship half-marathon, a 10km run, and two children’s events: a 2km run for those aged 10 and above, and a 1km dash for kids aged six to nine.

All runners gather for a warm cup of soup afterwards.

Heslop said despite the short lead-up to the festival, registration numbers were very strong.

“We’ve got 125 people registered already for the 10km event, and 90 for the half-marathon — that’s more runners than we had in 2022 with a full lead-in and full promotion,” he said.

“In the 10km event this could be the biggest entry numbers we’ve ever had with a few more days left to go, and people jumping on late entries.”

While admitting Sunday’s weather forecast looked “pretty rubbish”, Mr Heslop said it was the community feel that kept people coming back to brave the typically wet and windy day.

“While I’ve been the race director of this event, we’ve had enormous amounts of rain during the event which is pretty challenging, but it’s about the community feel, so I’m not focusing too much on that,” he said.

“We’ll just focus on the fact that the community are turning out for this in really big numbers, and that’s the exciting bit.”

Registrations for the event will be open until Saturday on the Albany Athletics Club website.