Here we go again, another year and back to London for the London Marathon, one of my absolute favourite races and an absolute nightmare to get into.

After running the London Marathon 2018 and London Marathon 2023 with my family supporting on both occasions, why break a theme. This year we all packed up and headed down to London on the train bright and early Saturday morning and made our way straight to the expo to collect my race bib and well that’s about it. It’s a short blog today….

Ok, maybe I can drag this out a little longer. So after running the Boston Marathon 2024 5 days ago and having a slight medical emergency post race which meant I did not get back into the UK until late Thursday. It is fair to say the prep for London isn’t quite what you would find in most textbooks.

It is fair to say that my mind wasn’t 100% focused on this race at any point this week. We only travelled down to London because the train fare and hotel reservation were non-refundable, so we figured we would go anyway and get the race bib then see how I feel Saturday night. I would say my body was at 50% at best after the fall on Monday, the head injury was mostly healed but the shoulder sustained ligament damage and basically hurts every time I move it. When considering the marathon will be ballpark 35,000 – 40,000 steps, the arm is going to move a lot and hurt a heck of a lot.

Anyway, we arrived at the Excel at 10:15am and it was busy as you would expect but the registration / bib pick up went quickly enough. As you can see below, there are loads of desks and you are free to go to whichever one you want.

This year I was in the green start and lining up as number 41083 for what it’s worth. At registration you are given your race number and a gear check bag. That’s it, the race number in the bag feels a little lost but I was happy to not be given a pile of leaflets and flyers which only end up going straight into the bin, so top marks on the sustainability there London.

For this year, you also collect the participant shirt at the expo rather than post-race, along the same lines as most other large scale events now. They did tuck the shirt pick-up away in the opposite corner of the expo, making you walk all the way through the expo and passed all of the stands… I wonder why they did that…

London’s main apparel sponsor is New Balance and you are directed straight into a huge New Balance pop-up store. Having spent too much money in Boston, I had zero intentions of buying anything at this expo. To be honest, I just don’t like expos, they are too crowded and too stressful for me, not what I want in the days leading up to a big race. So I just wanted to get out of there (almost forgetting to collect the participant shirt).

It was nice to take my daughter to see the Abbott World Marathon Major – 6 Star Finisher Wall of Fame and challenge her to find Dads name on the wall.

It took her a while but she found me. One day she may appreciate the amount of effort it took to get on that wall but for now she was just as proud seeing my name written on a wall.

We got out of there after that. No money spent, 1 race bib and 1 shirt picked up. Job done.

Now for lunch, dinner and resting up and see how the body feels about running another 26.2 miles tomorrow morning.