Decision time

There are less than 11 hours to go until the start of the Virgin London Marathon. One thing doesn’t change when I am in London. I have spent much longer on my website than I planned tonight.

But now it’s all set up and I am ready to start compiling the results tomorrow afternoon.

Before than I need some sleep and to run a marathon!

It’s my 12^th London since I decided to run it as a one off in 1995!  My 11 runs are fairly neatly grouped into three.

I’ve run five that I have been very pleased with. Four of these were between 2.43 and 2.45 (I conveniently ignore the seconds) and one was just inside 2.50 but I was 53 last year and so I happy with that.

Four have been bad ones between 3.04 and 3.21. There were also reasons why I was slow but in each case I failed to sufficiently take account of my injury or illness when determining my pace.

And there were two controlled races when I recognised that I was not at my best but controlled and judged my pace to finish just inside three hours. That is what I must do tomorrow. I’ve run under three hours in training so, even with a couple of excuses up my sleeve (if I wasn’t wearing a vest), it will be a failure if I am over 3 hours.

For the last two years I have predicted by time within a few seconds. So here goes. I am intending to run at 2.55 pace but think I will lose a little so I will predict my own time as 2.57.30. Of course I will be happy to be proved wrong if I am one side of it and take the flak if I am on the other.

There is one common factor in my 11 London Marathons to date. In none of them did I start too slowly.