I headed to the London Marathon expo on Saturday with the family to pick up my race bib for the race the day after.

Having ran the Boston Marathon on Monday and traveled back to the UK Tuesday, I wasn’t really planning on spending much time at the expo, I wanted to spend as little time on my feet as possible. Never an easy task when you are traveling with a 7 year.

To be honest, though, I am not a big fan of expos, the large crowds and queues really make me anxious and I would much rather not go but they force us to attend just to pick up the race number so here we are.

The bib pick-up here was fairly smooth, I did forget to bring my photo ID but I was able to use a bank card as proof, totally my mistake not bringing ID, I just hadn’t thought about it with the traveling earlier in the week and rushing work Wed – Fri. It wasn’t an issue luckily. Whilst the photo below looks busy, the actual queues for the number pick-up were not too bad, even on a Saturday lunchtime.

After that, it was time for the obligatory race bib photo.

Then we left, but not without having to walk all the way through the expo and through the crowds. I didn’t bother looking at any of the New Balance London gear having spent more than I had planned in Boston.

To be honest, again, the whole expo just felt really down key and lacking in comparison to the Boston Marathon Expo last week. It’s hard not comparing the two given they are both big World Marathon Majors and so close together but even as a city, I just didn’t get a feeling of a big marathon happening, in fact, you wouldn’t really know the marathon was on when walking around town.

Compare that to Boston where the whole city breathes the marathon, there are runners everywhere, Boston celebration jackets all over the city, posters, and flyers, you cannot go without noticing there was a big marathon happening. In London, there was none of this unless you are in the expo or on the Mall. very few runners around and very few WMM jackets around.

I came away from that lunch and afternoon in London feeling quite down and underwhelmed by the whole experience. Like I said earlier, I would much rather they posted the bib to me to save that hassle of going into the expo.

After the expo, we took our daughter to some of the sights of London, she was 2 and a half when I ran the London Marathon 2018 so it was good for her to see the Palace after learning about the Queen last year and as the school had been preparing for the King’s Coronation next week.

We went to Pizza Express in the evening for my traditional pre-race pizza then headed back to the hotel to rest up for tomorrow. I was resting legs for a second marathon in 6 days and my wife and daughter resting legs ahead of trying to follow me around town in the rain.