If you had to pick one Australian state to run in and could only pick one, it would be this one — not because the running is better than Victoria's, but because there is more kinds of it within reach of a single city.
Verus currently lists 369 running races in New South Wales — 33 marathons, 60 half marathons, 58 10Ks, 44 5Ks, 35 ultras and 139 at other distances — alongside 123 weekly parkruns and 49 multisport events. Those counts come from the data on this site rather than from a claim about it, and they move as the calendar does.
Sydney
Sandstone, water and stairs. The Bondi to Coogee coastal path is the famous one, about 6km one way on clifftop boardwalk and steps; the Bay Run at Iron Cove is the flat 7km loop where the actual training happens; Centennial Park's 3.8km Grand Drive is the speed session. The Harbour Bridge has a footpath and you can run across it.
The two events that define the city sit two weeks apart in August and September. The TCS Sydney Marathon crosses the bridge in its first three kilometres and finishes on the Opera House forecourt, and has been an Abbott World Marathon Major since September 2025 — the 2026 ballot drew 123,000 applications. City2Surf runs 14km from the CBD to Bondi over Heartbreak Hill and is the largest fun run in the world.
The corrective to both is the Sydney Half at Sydney Olympic Park: flat, AIMS certified, and the honest place to find out what you can run.
The Blue Mountains
Two hours west of Sydney on the Katoomba train, and the centre of Australian trail running. The mountains are a dissected sandstone plateau rather than peaks: you start high, drop into a valley on a staircase, and climb back out on another one.
Ultra-Trail Australia is run here every May — a UTMB World Series Major, with the UTA100 covering 101km and 4,400m of climb and finishing up the 951 Furber Steps at 99km, plus a 161km miler, a 51km, a 22km and an 11km. The Six Foot Track Marathon in March runs 45km from Katoomba to Jenolan Caves on the historic track.
The coast and the escarpment
South of Sydney the Illawarra escarpment drops almost into the sea, which gives the Royal National Park its Coast Track — 26km of clifftop, beach and rainforest between Otford and Bundeena, raced as the Coastal Classic — and gives Wollongong a running festival with a genuinely coastal course.
North, the coast runs for a thousand kilometres through Newcastle, Port Macquarie, Coffs Harbour and Byron, and almost every town on it has a running festival. Newcastle has its own marathon in April; Port Macquarie hosts Ironman Australia in May.
The Snowy Mountains
The highest ground in Australia, and the only part of the mainland with a real winter. Ultra-Trail Kosciuszko by UTMB runs at Jindabyne in late November with distances up to the miler. Coast to Kosci covers 240km from the ocean at Eden to the summit of Mount Kosciuszko, also in November, and is one of the hardest events in the country precisely because it starts at sea level in the heat.
Inland
West of the Great Dividing Range the state becomes genuinely dry and genuinely hot, and the running becomes seasonal and sparse. What it does have is space — the Pilliga Ultra at Coonabarabran, the Dubbo Stampede, Mudgee, and a scattering of country town festivals that are as much community events as races.
When to run
Sydney averages a 20.5°C dawn in January at an 18° dew point — a 2-3% pace penalty before sunrise — and 8.9°C in July. April to October is the racing window on the coast; the mountains extend it at both ends, and the Snowy Mountains flip it entirely.