Murray Goodwin

After a 10 year break from the sport and at the age of 31, Murray Goodwin has run onto the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games team.

In his junior years Murray represented Gold Coast Little Athletics and Qld School Sport on several occasions over distances of 200m-800m. He won a national medal 800m medal when 12 and state title at 17 years. But then study took over. “I made the difficult call to focus on my teaching degree and obtaining full-time work as at the time I didn’t feel I had the momentum to become a full-time athlete post-school. While studying I paid the bills by picking up a small wage playing in the Qld State League Soccer League, then after having established

a permanent position with Varsity College in the Education Queensland system I began to slowly build up some training in 2014 (age 27).”

Ten years on from his last athletics involvement he decided to have another shot at the sport. “A lot of this motivation can from a mindset of not wanting to have any regrets about what could have been.”
In 2015 he and coach Brett Robinsion and I devised a plan to start to train towards the Stawell Gift. He was fortunate to have former Stawell Gift champion Mitchell Williams-Swain in the squad for motivation and guidance. He was successful in winning in 12.0 seconds off 6.5m. Next he targeted a return to the ‘amateurs’ over 400m. However in mid-2015 he suffered a hip condition that ultimately resulted in hip surgery in January of 2016. He was told it would be unlikely he would return to the sport. In late 2016 he did start training and ‘the body responding to training again’. He ran his first open national titles in April 2017, now aged 30, reached the semi-final and had reduced his PB to 47.51.

“We continued to work hard during the rest of 2017 and the rest as they say is history.” Over the summer of 2017/18 he ran five consecutive PBs 47.19, 46.64, 46.37, 46.26 and 46.24 to take the national title at the Commonwealth Games trials. Although he did not have a Games qualifying mark, the selectors named a 4x400m relay team which Murray was a member of.

His hobbies are Fishing, Guitar. His father Shane Goodwin was an Australian junior 800m champion. He has a degree in Education (HPE Major) from Griffith University. Played: Football (soccer) at State League Level.