The final countdown

It's less than sixteen days until the 2019 London Marathon begins, so how am I feeling about it? Honestly, I just want to get out there and start running. I've got a serious case of itchy feet. After the last seven months of constant worry and stress and hard, hard, hard training, I know for certain that I can reach twenty miles in a decent time and with enough energy remaining for the final push. All I want to do is get on with it now.

Seven months have flown by, but these final weeks are dragging their heels...

At the time of writing, I have begun to taper my runs and steadily ease back on the distances. I never managed to reach 20 miles a second time, much to my disappointment, but this past Monday I ran a fairly respectable fifteen in around three hours. Still experimenting with my pace, but five miles running and one mile walking seems to be doing the trick.

Good (or at least dry) weather also helps.

I'm finding a strange new problem when running for these distances now. I eat a dry bagel about an hour before heading out (as I read was the best thing to do), but damn does my stomach rumble after about two and a half hours. It's fine on these practice runs - there's a bakery on my road currently offering pasties for £1.50 - but what will I do on the day? Will being hungry make me run faster? I have no idea! Hope I run past a bakery on the day, though. Nothing nicer than eating a pasty while walking in the sun.


Keeping this blog going has really helped me manage my thoughts. It's been really useful to catalogue and chronicle my progress, to keep it all in one place. Even though I haven't kept it as updated as I'd like - mostly due to my own desire to keep every post interesting and different, instead of endlessly adding 'did a run, went good' - it's been good fun to chart my rise through the ranks. Maybe when it's all said and done, I'll go back through and see how I grew and changed from a casual jogger to a full-blown marathon runner. That feels so weird to type - in sixteen days, I'll proudly be able to call myself a marathon runner. What an achievement that will be.

I cannot wait to stand on the line with thousands of other enthusiasts and newbies and athletes and get the greatest marathon in the world underway.