Sydney Marathon
A native iPhone app for eight days in Sydney, a 2:50:37 marathon, and a public guide to our favourite stops.
The app, screen by screen · swipe or scroll to explore
Eight days in Sydney, based in Kirribilli, with four young kids and a marathon on the Sunday. The race finished in 2:50:37 at the Opera House. The trip ran from 25 August to 1 September 2026.
The app started as a mobile-first web planner for travel days, coffee stops, bookings and race-day logistics. It became a native iOS 26 app on TestFlight, built for two phones that edit the same trip. CloudKit holds the shared record and SwiftData keeps an offline copy. Booking documents open behind Face ID. Maps, Calendar, widgets and a Live Activity handle the parts that belong on the phone.
The week is now a retrospective: what we did, where we went, and the result. The private web planner is retired. The source code remains as a record of how it developed.
The Kirribilli List
The part worth sharing is The Kirribilli List: where we ate, where the coffee was, and what worked with kids. The guide collects our recommendations from the week, illustrated with thirteen posters that pair a photograph with a drawn scene.
The ferry from Kirribilli to Circular Quay was one of the simplest pleasures of the trip.
