Tomorrow I will (hopefully) be running the 2019 London Marathon. To say that the event has taken over my life for the last 7 months is a little bit of an understatement.

Last year I suffered from a slightly early midlife crisis. In previous years I had already done the normal midlife crisis stuff like buy a motorbike. So when the next wave of crisis kicked in, I thought it would be amazing to enter for the London Marathon. Something I had always joked in mind “how on Earth do people do that to themselves”. Yet, to my disbelief, in early October 2018 I received the devastating news that I had been accepted for the event. What made even more surprising was that I did this without entering via a charity.

Although I have done many running events before, even by my standards this was next level stuff. I had previously ran multiple 10k and half marathon events, but going from 13.1 miles to 26.2 miles is a challenge. After over 500 miles of training in the last 7 months, running through wind, rain, snow, heat waves and slow walking tourists I have come to learn more about nutrition than I ever did before but also more about myself. I cant tell you whether I will be able to complete tomorrow’s mammoth task of running for around 4 hours solid, but what I can say it has been an amazing journey so far. Not too bad for someone who is asthmatic, smoker and who always came last at cross country at school (mostly because a group of us were smoking behind the goals).

One thing is for sure though, there will be a big void in my life after Sunday’s race. Having to commit to at least 3 runs a week and eating the most boring “healthy” food, the need to do this will all of a sudden will have gone (along with my my healthy weight of 11 stone 10lbs and 15% body fat). In-between all of this training, I managed to run Cambridge Half Marathon in a personal best of 1 hour 42 mins.

If anyone finds themselves in a similar position to me as being tempted to enter for a marathon, I would recommend just do it. The journey has been hard but also incredibly enjoyable.