The OCR World Championships are coming to Queensland, and here’s why I’m racing

I finished the event wrecked and humbled. Somewhere around halfway, I remember thinking I might actually die out there. But what really stuck with me wasn’t the pain.

It was standing there at the start line watching the elite wave racers, a sea of lean, fast bodies, shirts off in the Queensland winter sun, completely in control, and thinking, I want to look like that. I want to feel like that. I want to belong in that group one day.

It would take me another decade to get there.

What’s happening at Ivory Rock in May 2026

Ivory Rock Peaks Crossing sits about an hour southwest of Brisbane, tucked into the rolling country of the Scenic Rim. It’s one of those spots you don’t really know about until you drive in and wonder how you’ve lived in Queensland your whole life without stumbling on it. This May, it’s about to host one of the biggest weekends of obstacle course racing anywhere on the planet. Two back-to-back global events, thousands of athletes from dozens of countries, and some of the toughest race formats in the sport.

If you’re coming in from overseas or interstate, the weekend doubles as a brilliant excuse to explore this part of the country. More on that later.

Why Ivory Rock is a perfect stage for this

The venue alone is worth the trip. Ivory Rock is a huge stretch of Australian bushland in the Scenic Rim. Rolling hills, native wildlife, nature trails, and the whole thing anchored by an ancient volcanic plug known simply as The Rock, or Muntambin to the First Nations people of this country. It’s striking. It has weight. Driving in, you get that particular Queensland feeling of sky opening up and country stretching out in every direction, and it gives the race a sense of scale you don’t get at most venues.

The wider region is worth exploring, too. The Scenic Rim is one of those parts of Australia that travellers tend to overlook, and it shouldn’t be. If you’re flying in for the race weekend, build in a couple of extra nights. Ivory Rock is also less than an hour from Brisbane International Airport, which makes the whole thing easy for international athletes and spectators flying in. Easy to get to, hard to leave.

The 12-year gap between my first race and this one

I want to tell you what happened between that 2013 Spartan Super and now, because I think it matters.

As a kid, I was a runner. I represented Queensland at the National Cross Country Championships in my senior year, ran competitive times over 800, 1500, 5000 and 10,000 metres, and won a few fun runs. Fitness wasn’t something I had to work at. It was just there.

Then I hit my 20s and found travelling, partying and all the things that come with both. In hindsight, I was abusing most of it. An ankle injury in my 30s dogged me for the next decade, and slowly, without me really noticing, running fell away. The fitness fell with it. My 30s were a long drift.

The fun started catching up with me in my early 40s. Somewhere around 2018, my body started shutting down on me. I couldn’t breathe properly. I lost my sense of taste and smell. I spent three years cycling through specialists who couldn’t work out what was wrong: two surgeries, countless appointments, no real answers. I got used to feeling unwell as a baseline.

Then one day in a hospital room, a doctor I’d never met walked past, looked at me, and recognised something no one else had seen. She gave it a name. She gave me a path. And from that day, I got my life back. I see her every six months now. I have overwhelming gratitude for what she did for me.

Then New Year’s Day 2023. My partner of 14 years told me she no longer wanted to be married. The months that followed took just about everything with them. The marriage, the relationships I thought were forever, the business, the job, the pets, the plan for what the next few decades were supposed to look like.

I leaned on alcohol as a crutch for about a month before I woke up one morning and said out loud: “This can’t be my story.”

That was the pivot. I found a mentor. I got around men who were levelling up. I found a trainer who looked me in the eye one day and told me I was going to step on a bodybuilding stage. I laughed. Then I did it. I started paying attention to what I ate, how I slept, how I recovered, and who I spent my time with. I stopped drinking. I got obsessed with discipline in a way I’ve never been obsessed with anything.

The results came. Slowly at first, then all at once.

In early 2023, I was lean but soft, a bit of muscle hanging around, but no grit. By 2026, I’m lean, strong, and in the best shape of my life. My discipline took me all the way to a bodybuilding stage, a sentence I never thought I’d write, and I came home with a medal in the masters category. Then I did it again last year and came home with another one. That still hasn’t fully landed.

Then I got back on the course.

The racing comeback

My first Spartan after the rebuild was Bright, in the Victorian high country, in February 2024. Alpine gums, cold mornings, that particular kind of thin air hurt. I went in not knowing what I had in the tank. I came out with a top-five overall and first in my age group, and I drove home with the fire lit properly for the first time in a decade.

Everything after that has been chasing the feeling. Fiji, brutally hot, hard up hills and through waterways, the kind of heat that sits on your chest. The Hunter Valley, taxing on uneven vineyard ground with some truly punishing obstacles thrown in for good measure. Wollongong. The times kept dropping. The finishes kept getting sharper.

Earlier this year, at a Sprint on the Central Coast, I wasn’t feeling great. I’d been managing a niggle in the lead-up, and I lined up without any real expectation. I won the whole thing, first across the line out of the entire field. Some days, the work shows up all at once.

A lot of that progress I owe to the running community in Brisbane, which is genuinely one of the best in the country. Run clubs across the city, the river loops, the Mount Coot-tha trails, the Saturday morning parkruns, the young and old legends who show up week after week and push everyone around them. If you want to get faster in this town, the community will drag you there whether you meant to come along or not.

Eleven Spartan races on the board now, spread across some of the most beautiful corners of Australia and the Pacific. Ivory Rock in May will be my twelfth. Full circle, at the exact same venue where it all started.

Why this one matters

Lining up at a World Championships is a different thing entirely. I’ll be 48 on race day. I get to race the 3K on Friday as part of the Championships, then back up on the Sunday for the Super on the same piece of country where I finished my first Spartan wrecked and dreaming of being someone else.

I’ll be honest. I do have a podium goal. I always want to win. That hunger is what got me off the couch in the first place, and it’s what keeps me turning up to the start line. I want to race my best. I want to be present in the course. I want to honour the work. But I also want to cross that line ahead of the field if I can.

And if I’m being honest about something else, part of me is racing for the younger version of me who crossed that finish line in 2013, wrecked and envious. I get to show up now as the man he wanted to be.

If you’ve never done an OCR and you’re curious

Enter a Spartan Sprint. Don’t worry about times or placings or whether you’ll get over every obstacle. Just show up. That’s the whole thing.

What I wish someone had told me before my first race is that it isn’t about being the fittest or the strongest on the day. It’s about being willing to try. The OCR community is the warmest in any sport I’ve been part of. People help each other over walls. Strangers stop to pull you up. You finish every race with a new set of mates.

And if you’re sitting where I was a few years back, tired, heavy, unsure, watching your life come apart, I want you to know that you can rewrite the whole thing. It takes work. It takes people. It takes a line in the sand. But it’s possible.

I’ll see you at Ivory Rock.

Best travel resources for your trip!

_{If you found this post useful, please use the affiliate links below. I’ll make a small commission at no extra cost to you. Rest assured, these are the products and services I love and use. Read the disclaimer for more information. Thanks for your support! – Matthew.}

Hotels, I use Agoda
Insurance: Cover-More
Rentals: Discover Cars
RVs: Motorhome Republic
Transfers: Welcome Pickups
Tours: TourRadar
Travel eSIM: Saily