How To Survive the Week Before Running A Marathon
Useful tips to best prepare you for race day before the big event
The London Marathon is this Sunday and I’ll be one of the lucky ones with a place on the starting line. As the weekend approaches, I’ll be following the best advice in advance of race day — and hopefully having my most enjoyable run yet.
It seems only yesterday I started my 16-week training plan. It was January 1st and I’d just completed a month’s worth of Advent running — committing to 30 minutes of running every day in Advent.
I knew I had a ballot place in London back in July when my annual rejection email turned out to be a celebratory one. I’ve applied every year since I was 18, with a rejection every single year for nearly 20 years. The one bonus was back in 2013, under the old sponsor — they used to offer an automatic place in year 5 if you received 4 consecutive rejections — but the maths of that no longer work, such is the popularity of the London Marathon (an article for another day…). I was lucky enough to get in on the last year of this scheme in 2012, running a time of 4:26 in one of my first marathons. 12 years on, and I’m back in the grove and raring to go.
