Edition #17: trust the process
It's London Marathon week.
For many, this Sunday's marathon is another unremarkable (and likely inconvenient) date in the calendar. But it's a significant day for me, because I'm running it.
It's a journey that started exactly a year ago today: I entered the 2025 ballot on 22nd April 2024. Two months later, I got the inevitable email to say I'd been unsuccessful. This was fine. In fact, it was a relief. Entering a marathon ballot is just one of those things you do so that you can say you've tried to do it without actually having to do it.
But in a sign that maybe I really did want to do it, I'd also applied for a charity place with Prostate Cancer UK. This wasn't just a tactical move to increase my odds. My dad was diagnosed with and treated for prostate cancer 13 years ago, and our family has been fortunate to benefit directly from breakthroughs in research and treatments. If I was going to do this then it would be made all the more worthwhile by fundraising for a cause close to my heart.
Three months went by. Then, out of the blue in late July, I got a call from the charity. I was on the team. This was happening. I had 274 days to fundraise and come to terms with — and train for — what I'd signed up to.
That seems like a lifetime ago. It's now just five days away.
Whatever happens on the day itself, this has been a big part of my life for nine months. It has, to the enjoyment of absolutely nobody, become a large part of my personality too.
But actually running the marathon on Sunday will be less than 1% of the total journey to get there. So this week's edition is not about the result. It's about reflecting on how far I've come through the process.
Baseline
I started a 26-week training plan on 1st November. I've never really trained for anything before, and I've never particularly been the fitness or gym-going type. So this was already unfamiliar territory.
On the positive side, I wasn't a total stranger to running. I'd consistently run 10-20km every week for the past five to six years. I had half a dozen half marathons under my belt. This wasn't the worst starting point.
But going from a couple of leisurely weekend runs to four runs a week with intervals and pace targets and three hour durations... this was going to be tough. I needed a plan.
Training plan
The Runna app has been my guiding light. Whatever it told me to do, I did. For anyone training for an event of any distance, I highly recommend it.
My plan was based around three structured runs a week: a tempo session on Wednesdays, an easy run on Fridays, and a long run on Sundays. Relatively speaking, this is a pretty light regime, peaking at 65km a week. But with days in the office and family life to balance, it felt like an achievable commitment.
On top of that, we do a 5km parkrun every Saturday as a family. This is often the most challenging of the lot given it involves me pushing a buggy round!
Across the six months of the training block, this all added up to 910km of structured plan runs, plus 125km of parkruns for 1,035km in total.
Training progress
In the end, I'll have run 1,016km — or 98% of the total plan distance. Seeing this written down in black and white for the first time, I'm surprised by it; there were many, many times I felt like I was falling behind.
There was only one full week, in early December, that I skipped completely due to flu. That was 40km missed just five weeks in.
Then some juggling. In January, I missed an easy 10km (replaced by an extra New Year's Day parkrun) and an easy 11km (replaced by a 10 mile trail race). In February, I skipped a 7km tempo session 14km long run (replacing with a trail half marathon race).
A second round of illness hit in March. I missed a 12km easy run and 32km long run in one week, then a tempo 8km and 10km easy run the next. 62km out the window. Ouch.
When you've put your faith in a plan, these deviations can really knock your confidence. But the only thing you can do is pick yourself up and keep on going. As difficult as it is to accept at the time, pushing through on less-than-full health is always worse than taking the opportunity to recharge.
Of the runs I did, I can't say I enjoyed all of them. Tempo sessions were the worst — always coming after a full day of work, and after a commute back from the office on more than one occasion. Sprinting 800m repeat intervals up and down the same stretch of road in the dark for over an hour was gruelling. But the positive feeling of having done it beats out apprehension and tiredness every single time.
And that was almost always the pattern: dread having to do the run, endure doing the run, celebrate having done the run. Repeat this over the course of nearly 100 sessions, and you get pretty good at riding the rollercoaster and chasing the high.
There was one big wobble, which came after the longest run of the block. It just wasn't a good day. Maybe it was the weather, maybe it was fuelling. Maybe it was the psychological weight of it being the longest run. I came back from 34km exhausted and demotivated. It still haunts me. This is around the point in marathons where most first-timers fall apart, and my main preparation for it hadn't gone well.
Achievements
It's after the sessions like this that I'd tell myself to remember this was just one run; to take a step back and look at my broader achievements over the course of the plan.
Training is hard. But the worst part is that it works. A few months in and the cumulative fatigue starts to hit, and your legs beg you to just pack it in. But the undeniable efficacy of grinding through it keeps your brain coming back for more.
In tough moments, I'd relive the positives. I've run a 30km+ distance three times, improving from 2:54:25 to 2:45:48. My half marathon time has consistently improved too, from 1:58:22 in September to 1:50:02 in April. The first time I ever ran a half marathon in 2017, it did it in 2:13:41.
But perhaps more important that arbitrary numbers relating to specific activities are the benefits to my health. My resting heart rate has improved from 56bpm at the start of 2024 to 52bpm in April 2025. My VO2 max has increased from 47.4 to 54.1. Despite eating like a horse, my weight has remained the same. I feel good. I feel like I'm winning.
Goals
With progress comes pressure.
When I was first coming to terms with having to run a marathon, I had a tentative goal in my head of finishing somewhere between five and five-and-a-half hours. Now it's closer to four.
In many ways, this is good news: it reflects the work I've put in to improve my fitness and confidence. There is a time I'd have been delighted to just finish at all — and this is what most people recommend as a goal for your first marathon.
But having put in all that effort and dedicated so much time to training, there's an implicit, nagging pressure to live up to my potential. If four hours is even remotely possible, why not go for it? But I also want to enjoy it: to soak up the atmosphere and celebrate the fact I'm doing it at all.
To help balance these competing thoughts, I'm adopting an ABC goals approach.
My A goal is to finish in 3:45:00. This is what Runna suggests I should be capable of finishing in. I find this very hard to believe; it would require me to run not far off my half marathon PB twice over. I have no real expectation of achieving this but there's data to suggest it's not impossible, so it's there as the moonshot.
My B goal is 3:59:59. This is right on the edge of what I have reasonable confidence in achieving based on some of my longer training runs. I'd be ecstatic to break four hours, but it would require significant (and unprecedented) effort. If everything goes right on the day, it could be in reach.
My C goal is to finish before midnight. I've never run a marathon before. In fact, I've never run further than 34km before. That's 8km of unchartered territory, and there's a lot that could go wrong. Any finishers before midnight get the same medal as everyone else. That's still an achievement in my books.
The next week
It feels like tempting fate to be talking openly about achievements and goals before I've even crossed the start line.
Yes, the last six months have been leading up to the big day. But the big day is still just the 1%. There's no outcome on Sunday that could take away from the progress, learnings and achievement of the 99%. It's been a big part of my life and I want to remember it fondly.
It might seem seem self-indulgent too. Lots of people train for things. And I'm not getting ahead of myself: I have no doubts that the marathon will be humbling. With almost a week still to go, there's a lot of time to worry about anything and everything.
So this is a reminder to myself not to get too caught up in it all. I've followed the process. Now it's time to trust the process.
1 in 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime. In fact, 144 men are diagnosed every day. I'm running the 2025 London Marathon to raise money to help Prostate Cancer UK continue their vital research, support and campaigning.
Please consider donating to help me hit my fundraising goal — every pound counts.
👉 Ted Winder is fundraising for PROSTATE CANCER UK
This is the seventeenth edition of Tedlines, a weekly newsletter about management, life and creativity.
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