London Marathon 2026: Fear and loathing on the training regime

Here’s what eats at me when I’m staring at a pair of inordinately expensive trainers and hating the frivolous ambition of my former self: I wasn’t coerced; I was under no pressure.

I chose this, told myself it would make me reassess my relationship with my body and fitness before the ravages of time did it for me. I’d lose those five kilos which all seem to sit on my jowls, sort out the matchstick ankles and bag-of-milk physique.

Deep down, if I’m being honest, I wondered how hard a marathon could be, all the heady arrogance of youth with none of the physical benefits.

My spasmodic fits of running to date have been fuelled by compulsive competitiveness with myself, almost always thrashing out 5km or 10kms with no plan other than to run faster than I did last time, inevitably ending in burnout or injury. I ran a sub-20 minute 5km during the pandemic out of sheer self-loathing. Now I’m five years older and five stone heavier than I was then.

And so this time I believed I was going to do it right. At 6ft 4in, I was told by a chiropractor that they didn’t recommend running as a form of exercise for me, so I found a physio at a community centre who doubles as a personal trainer. He curated a daily plan – clam shells three times a week, bird-dogs and wall squats daily – which I have religiously ignored ever since.

At monthly appointments I obfuscate and mumble and often downright lie about the screaming agony my hips are in. Just seeing resistance bands triggers a throbbing guilt, but it turns out every day is busy when there’s something you’re trying to put off.

The gym in the block of flats I live in is so far away. Exercises hurt, and every time I try them they hurt just as much, perhaps more, which I suppose is how not doing them enough to make any progress works.

And so my ankles still collapse inward. I can’t remember what un-splinted shins feel like. I haven’t run more than twice weekly since “training” began, and my knees are flirting with giving up entirely. It’s a good week if I don’t put away a large Domino’s pizza in one sitting and my health is still largely something I consider a future problem.

My relationship with exercise is both toxic and slipshod, but changing. I know running is supposed to be particularly good for my ADHD brain, but I’ve never particularly enjoyed it. Maybe it’s not meant to be fun, but if I’m supposed to be chasing a runner’s high I’m yet to find it. The whole charade takes too long - the warming up (a rare occurrence), warming down (an even rarer occurrence), the 40 minutes of compulsive scrolling while I wait for my reward takeaway to arrive.

But I’ve learned to love easy runs, something I never thought possible. There is something in the rhythm that helps you switch off and focus, brief flashes of clarity and calm. Pacing myself, leaving something in the tank, slowing down in service of an ultimate goal of going faster; these are things I never really do. Any endeavour in which the primary aim is just to finish has never really made sense to me, but I’m finding the beauty in it.

The whole process has been defined by fighting a body that seems desperately to want to fall apart, fuelled by a petrifying fear of not being able to do something I’ve actually tried to, of failure. Given I had seven months’ notice, I only really started training in January, about as late as I could feasibly get away with it.

I initially earmarked a half-marathon to run in December which passed decidedly un-run. But across three weeks in February I did long runs in Melbourne, London and Copenhagen, navigating both 25C and three kilometres of unlit ice. Earlier this month I ran my first half-marathon in a time I was happy with, despite forgetting any food or gels and having to avoid the hordes of Spanish schoolchildren which plague central London.

Since then, I’ve had to miss two weeks of training – the revenge of a reheated chow mein from Jasmine Garden (2.3 stars on Google, from enough reviews for that to be a fair judge) – almost certainly kiboshing my only real target from the process: finishing in less than four hours. But equally a fortnight largely spent in bed has probably given my body enough recovery time actually to get to race day with two functioning legs, a concern easily avoided had I done my clam shells and wall squats for the past seven months.

The marathon is four weeks away now, and I’m unprepared and scared and finally starting to understand why I signed up for it in my younger and more vulnerable days. I’ve always been bad at being bad at things, petulant and avoidant, a last-minute merchant in the extreme (I even filed this piece late).

These are the antithesis of marathon running’s fundamental principles, and so it has forced me to confront my greatest shortcomings – to slow down to speed up, to respect process and routine and the accumulation of little efforts. It’s just about getting to the finish line now.

Photograph by Andy Hall for The Observer