"I'm not a person who likes running when I'm running but I love it when I'm finished so I play these mental games while I'm doing it," Ms Gallagher said on Sunday afternoon, having finished the 10-kilometre run in one hour and 24 seconds, and nominating the highlight as the 9.5-kilometre mark when the finish line was in sight.

Having steeled herself for a tough run, Ms Gallagher is now steeling herself for a difficult week, with cabinet tackling some of the most difficult issues of the year – final decisions on whether to go ahead with the tram network, and the fraught detail of the Mr Fluffy mass demolition.

Her time in The Canberra Times fun run was better than she expected – her personal best is 58 minutes but that was when she was doing a lot of running, and Ms Gallagher said six-minute kilometres are her limit.

She found it tough but said she was helped by a boy aged only seven or eight who ran in front of her the whole way.

"He kept me going," she said. "Every time I thought about stopping I'd see this little guy with these little legs running along, bouncing and laughing, and I thought I've got to keep going."

But she draws the line at the humiliation of being overtaken by a runner weighed down by fancy dress.

"My one rule is never to get overtaken by a mascot. I can come at 80 year old people running past me and seven year olds but someone with a big bear suit if they lumber past me it's a hint to get moving."

She ran the event with a friend and said she wasn't troubled by runners wanting to talk politics of neighbourhood issues. Not that anyone who tried would have got far.

"I can't talk and run. I can't speak to anyone … I have headphones in, pumping '80s hits. It's very daggy running but it's all I can manage."

While Ms Gallagher was the only politician to race on Sunday, with Liberal leader Jeremy Hanson nursing a calf injury, Greens Minister Shane Rattenbury returned from South Africa on Sunday, where he raced a 120-kilometre endurance event.

Mr Rattenbury came sixth overall in the 100-strong field, and second in the veteran category (over 40s), with an overall time of 11 hours 43 minutes in four days of racing. He returned with an injury for his efforts, with what he suspects is a torn calf muscle sustained on day two of the race. While he ran through it, he now thinks it might put paid to plans to run the Melbourne marathon in five weeks.

Despite the injury, Mr Rattenbury was happy with his race, achieving a better time than expected, and running as well as he could have hoped.

"It was a very technical course," he said. "Some of it was not even on track, you just had to navigate through the bush, so it was much more technical and challenging than I expected, but there was also incredible scenery." The race traversed swathes of multicoloured wildflowers, a natural display that Mr Rattenbury said "took your mind off the pain of running".

His splits over the four days were: 21km, 1hr 49min; 42km, 4hr 9min; 29km, 2hr 45min; 27km, 2hr 59min.

"The legs are obviously tired after an event like that. It's very hilly, very rough in places, so it takes its toll, but at that same time I felt very satisfied at my result and a real sense of achievement at doing something like that and getting through it in good shape."

The winning female came in seventh, two minutes and 42 seconds behind Mr Rattenbury.