About 60,000 people will run the London Marathon this Sunday. More than 1.1 million applied. That number of applications is more than the sum of those for all the other major global marathons – Boston, New York, Chicago, Berlin, Sydney and Tokyo – put together. The capital’s taxi drivers might not like it but I am convinced that London could hold a marathon every week and people would continue to turn out in their tens of thousands.
I will be one of Sunday’s runners and I’ll be there for three reasons. The first is that I love it, the second is that I am acting as former England cricket captain Alastair Cook’s unofficial pacemaker – don’t worry, Cooky won’t be threatening any world records – and the third is that the company I co-founded, Let’s Do This, runs the AI registration platform which handles all those applications. With any luck, you might watch the race and decide to apply for next year.
Since we started working with London Marathon Events in 2023, those applications have trebled. Entering the ballot is free and you can double your chances by donating your entry to the London Marathon Foundation, which does fantastic work to support children and adults to live more healthy lives. We’ve removed the queues when you register, streamlined the entry process and made it easier and automatic to inspire your friends to join you.
We are focused on trying to inspire the first timer, the runner who doesn’t consider themselves a runner, who might never have known anyone who has entered and whose friends would never expect them to. We now have most of our growth outside of the demographics (male club runners) that dominated running up until recently. That’s hugely encouraging.
The result is London has become arguably the most in-demand participation event on the planet. It is also the world’s largest one-day fundraising event (£87m+ raised in 2025). It’s no surprise there are plans for it to get bigger: a double marathon weekend in 2027 and, beyond that, expansion into a week-long city-wide festival.
I do believe that the surge of interest in London, for example, outstrips the rise in demand which those other major marathons have enjoyed in that period. Yet it would be wrong not to acknowledge a global phenomenon which has been building since Covid, and one that has been charged by demand from Gen Z.
Several reasons have been offered for this but the most significant is the communal aspect which events such as the London Marathon provide. In a world increasingly shaped by platforms like Netflix and virtual environments, sport and exercise provide a rare sense of community and joint purpose. Running is also a relatively inexpensive interest.
The investors who backed Let’s Do This and other major sport-related tech platforms must be banking on this, too. Investors include Open AI founder Sam Altman, who I bombarded with emails. Another is Serena Williams. I went to Roland Garros to pitch to her, and I remember she was wearing her iconic black catsuit at the time. Soon after that, I crashed a bar opening which Usain Bolt was attending to sell to him, and he went on to invest. Former London champion Paula Radcliffe is also an investor.
Three of those four have sporting backgrounds and I suspect the reason they invested is because they understand better than anyone the benefits which physical exercise confers on the individual, whether that’s physical, mental or emotional. I refuse to believe that anyone ever came back from a run, whether that’s over 26 miles or 26 minutes, in a worse state of mind than when they set out. So, if you sign up today, good luck!
Click here to enter the London Marathon 2027 ballot
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Photograph by Leon Neal/Getty Images