Hunting Souls: Rory Flanagan's Run2PB Journey From a 2:56 Debut to Chicago and the Sub-2:40 Chase
Rory Flanagan has now joined the Better With Running podcast four times, and each visit adds another chapter to one of the most relatable stories in the Run2PB community. A former school 400m runner and soccer veteran turned Bendigo electrician, the 45-year-old went from a self-coached half marathon to a 2:56 marathon debut, and has since worked his way down to a 2:40:46 PB under Run2PB coach Ben Stolz — with Chicago next on the list and the sub-2:40 barrier firmly in his sights.
We've pulled the four conversations together to trace Rory's journey, what he's learnt along the way, and the coaching approach Ben has built around him.
From the Soccer Pitch to a Sub-Three Debut
Rory's running story starts, stops and restarts. A decent cross-country and 400m runner at school in Geelong, he made the state championships in Year 12 after coach Mandy Cole took his 400m time from around 56 seconds to 52. Then came a move to Ireland, a few too many beers and more than a decade of soccer — around 300 games and a life membership at the Surf Coast club — before a move back to Bendigo during COVID sparked a return to running.
The original goal was modest: break 90 minutes for the half marathon. Armed with some Googling and a home-made plan of broken threshold sessions — adding two and a half minutes to the reps every week — he time-trialled it on a rail trail and snuck under by about 15 seconds. The marathon was next, and with Melbourne and then Port Fairy both cancelled along the way, he messaged the man who'd already been fixing his legs as a myotherapist and asked if he could write him a plan.
"I know for a fact that I wouldn't have had as good an experience with the marathon if I hadn't talked to Benny before that and signed up."
Ben's advice for the debut, on a cool 10-degree December morning in Melbourne, was simple: let the sub-three pacers go. They run to gun time and tend to charge out too hard, so Rory and his brother-in-law sat back, ran negative splits, started picking runners off from 33K and finished together under three hours, with Rory pulling away on the run down off the Shrine to clock 2:56.
From 2:45 to a Hard-Earned 2:42
Melbourne 2022 followed the same blueprint. The instruction from Ben was to sit with the pacer until around 16K, then leave and start taking souls. Rory was so relaxed that he barely remembers hitting 16K, and he finished in 2:45 — just 23 seconds short of a Berlin qualifier.
Gold Coast 2023 brought a 2:42 PB but a tougher lesson. Rory had COVID nine weeks out and still arrived fit. The plan was 3:50s to halfway and then let a strong southerly help him home, and he did go through in 1:19:55 — only for the sun and humidity to arrive and the closing stages to turn into a death march.
"I was super happy, but it wasn't the way to run it."
By early 2024 Rory was a 2:42 marathoner with a 16:58 5K on the track and run a 1:16:30 half marathon. But he'd also worked out where the next gains would come from. If he wanted to go faster, he reckoned, he'd have to work on getting quicker, not just fitter — a theme that comes back later in the story.
A Melbourne Heartbreak and the Long Road Back
Everything was lining up for Melbourne 2024. Rory was, in his own words, "cherry ripe", finishing sessions with a rep left in the tank — then, about eight days out, the insertional Achilles trouble that had followed him since his soccer days flared up. He started the race but had to pull out at halfway.
What followed was a patient, unglamorous rebuild: shockwave therapy ("literally the most painful thing I've ever experienced"), eccentric calf raises kept above parallel to protect the insertion, a gravel bike for cross-training and a lot of restraint. Rory didn't run consistently again until around February or March, and Ben deliberately set the bar low.
"In planning terms, there was sort of no expectations from my end." — Run2PB Coach Ben Stolz
Ben's plan was to rebuild the mileage and the long run first and bring speed in gradually, starting in March with a handful of one-minute reps. Rory admits he was, for a while, a bit scared of running anything faster than marathon pace. The first real reward came at the Ballarat Half in April, the longest run he'd done since September. With no pressure on the clock it became a joyful day out, and a reminder of why he does this.
"There's a real good argument the training block is better than the marathon."
Berlin: Running for Something Bigger
By September 2025 Rory was running 95–100K weeks again, had rolled a 34-minute 10K at Lakeside and was heading to Berlin on a new load-and-deload structure from Ben. He was also running for a cause close to home: raising funds and awareness for MEF2C haploinsufficiency syndrome, a rare genetic condition affecting his cousin's young daughter, with around $3,700 raised by the time he joined us on the show. His motivation was simple: more awareness means more people getting tested and more research getting done.
"This is why we need to raise awareness about this syndrome. This is why we need people to have the gene testing."
Berlin itself turned out to be, in Rory's words, the hottest marathon ever. He followed Ben's pre-race instruction — go out conservatively, then hunt in the second half — and ran an even-paced race in the heat that left him with a very satisfying statistic.
"Literally no one went past me."
(As ever, the kit was part of the story: a rainbow singlet and bright orange shoes that Rory cheerfully admitted would be visible from space.)
Ballarat: A Short Block, a Bad Patch and a PB
Rory's Achilles flared again around ten weeks out from Ballarat this year, leaving him roughly a week behind everyone else on the block. Rather than panic, he and Ben leaned into a shorter build and a lighter taper — Rory's view being that many marathoners do too big a base block — and he leaned on the bike for cross-training while still managing three 100K weeks. A late confidence-builder was a 5-4-3-2-1K session at the same lakeside spot he'd used before Berlin: he finished within three seconds of the Berlin effort, with a lower heart rate.
On race day Rory sat in the 2:40 pack with Chalky Milk teammates, watching only average pace and time of day on his watch. A collision at 7K produced a runner's very colourful, very public meltdown, which at least made a good distraction. The real test came near 28K, when the pace started to feel too hard and Rory found himself, in his words, in a dark place. He leaned on the visualisation work he'd done beforehand — picturing the perfect marathon, but also how he'd respond to a bad patch.
"I'm going through a bad patch… just accept it and roll along."
By around 35K he was reeling runners back in, helped by teammates and Ben on bikes handing out drinks and encouragement around the lake, and he kicked home to a 2:40:46 PB — just shy of the 2:40 he'd been chasing. That's the marathon in a nutshell, he said: it's such a long race that you can ease off, adjust and still gain a lot of time late.
More Than a Training Group: The Choccie Milk Run Club
Behind every Rory story is the Choccie Milk Run Club, the Bendigo group he and Ben founded around long Saturday tempo loops at Flora Hill. It now has somewhere between 15 and 20 regulars, a chocolate-brown club kit and, as of Ballarat, its first official course sign: a banner at 15K reading "Nobody likes a fast finisher".
"Getting back out with the boys every Saturday really does make you realise why you love it."
The Ben Stolz Blueprint: Specificity, Patience and Smart Load
Ben Stolz is a Run2PB Coach & Bendigo myotherapist with a sports physiology background, and a handful of themes run through all four interviews.
Train marathon pace on tired legs. Ben's key sessions are big, continuous and unglamorous: long runs of up to 36K, a hard 2 x 10K at marathon pace inside a longer run, and Rory's favourite, a 5-4-3-2-1K progression with a float kilometre between reps. The aim isn't to nail a particular number on the day. It's to show the legs can hold marathon effort when they're already tired.
"If you want to run a pace for a marathon, you've got to do it on hard, tired legs… We want to be able to feel bad in training and then hopefully feel good on race day."
Build gradually and listen. After setbacks, Ben rebuilds the base first and brings speed back in once confidence returns. Blocks follow a load-and-deload rhythm — in early 2024, for example, seven or eight solid weeks, a two-week dip, then seven more before the taper — and he adjusts sessions around the feedback Rory gives him.
Keep the number in perspective. With a sub-2:40 goal on the table, Ben works hard to keep athletes from tying their self-worth to a time. The job, he says, is to run the paces you can run on the day and let whatever comes out come out.
Race the second half. Ben's advice for Rory is simple: stay a touch slower early, then go hunting. It's where he reckons Rory does his best work.
Strength, Springs and Cross-Training
The biggest change in Rory's recent training is what Ben calls "free pace". When Ben opened his new Bendigo clinic, The Movement Co, at the end of April, he tested Rory on a plyo mat and load cells and found weak jump numbers and a left-to-right imbalance. A twice-weekly program of basic plyometrics and single-leg strength — lunges, calf raises, hip hinges — followed, deliberately gentle to avoid aggravating the Achilles.
"If you've got springs on the end of your legs, you don't have to work for that. The tendons just do all the job for you. So it's free pace."
Three months later Rory's strength numbers were up about 30%, and his heel — the source of years of trouble — felt, in his words, amazing.
"My answer to everything at the moment is strength training… because strength training leads to consistency and consistency leads to improvement."
Cross-training is the other pillar. Rory bought a road bike, joined a Thursday-morning group ride and uses it for VO2 max work — 4 x 5 minutes hard with easy spinning between — where the impact is far lower than on foot. In the Chicago block that meant 100–105K of running plus 40–80K on the bike each week, and legs that, he says, feel better coming off the bike than going on.
Fuel, Sweat and the Small Stuff
Ben's sports science side extends to fuelling. At his clinic he runs sweat testing — a painless test with a couple of electrodes on the forearm and half a millilitre of sweat — that measures how much sodium you lose, on one of only around ten machines of its kind in Australia. Rory turned out to be a heavy sweater with a relatively low sodium concentration, so his plan is built around a handful of salt tablets and regular fluids to keep body-weight loss under 2% across a marathon.
Rory's carb-loading has become part of podcast folklore too. In 2024 he told us he'd put away around 5,000 calories on the Friday before each of his previous two marathons, with jasmine rice, maple syrup and cornflakes high on the list.
Chicago and the Sub-2:40 Chase
When Rory and Ben joined us for the Chicago episode, Rory was days from flying out with a Chalky Milk contingent — several of them bringing their eldest sons along — for a six-day trip from San Francisco to Portland before heading to the race. He admitted he doesn't love the taper and does love travel, so he was ready to be on the plane.
Ben says every box has been ticked: a minor back niggle early in the block, then 100–105K weeks with the bike, strength and plyometrics all in place. He's even been holding Rory back, with a 28K long run in the plan that Rory wanted to stretch to 30K.
The paces tell the story. Marathon-pace efforts that once sat around 3:48–3:52 per kilometre are now closer to 3:40–3:45. The plan for race day is to "have the easiest 80 I've ever run" through halfway and "start dropping bombs late" — the same instinct that has driven so many of Rory's best races.
What Rory's Journey Teaches Us
Four interviews, one common thread: Rory is patient.
Back your coach. Rory's best races have come when he's trusted Ben's plan, even when it meant sitting back early and letting the pacers go.
Strength is the quiet multiplier. Years of niggles faded once targeted strength and plyometrics became part of the weekly routine.
Plan for the bad patch. Visualising the rough moments in advance helped Rory turn Ballarat around.
Keep the fun in it. From the Saturday tempo loops to the rainbow kit, Rory's love of the process — which he reckons is almost as good as the race itself — is what keeps him coming back.
Run for something bigger. Whether it's a charity cause, a training group or a trip away with teammates and family, the marathon means more to Rory than the time on the clock.
Listen to Rory featured across four episodes of Better with Running Podcast.
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