Claire's world record at the London Marathon

When Claire came to me asking if it was possible to get 3:53 at London Marathon this year, my answer was “I don’t know. It’ll be tight. It’s possible but your level of prep will have to be second to none or you won’t make it.”

At the time she was theoretically capable of a 3:50 but you don’t just run a marathon at London due to the amount of people you have to dodge round. You run a lot further.

Bear in mind that she would have to be running at 5 min 30 sec per km (or 8:53 per mile) so even 400m extra would add on almost 2 and a half minutes. All contingency was gone before she was due to start.

On top of her normal marathon training we made sure she was going to be up for the mental challenge.

All or nothing

Normally the instructions are to stay within yourself at all points as it’s quicker than bonking — but this time it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to miss by 30 seconds. She was either going to make it or she was going to miss by 15 min. Everything would have to be laid on the line (literally and figuratively) to be successful.

The 2 biggest things that would stop her:

Extra distance
Not enough mental resilience to get over the things that were inevitably going to go wrong

Controlling the controllables

We could control distance to a certain extent. Run on the line for as much time as possible. She did this. Running only 200m more than the marathon — so just over 1 min of the 3 min contingency used on distance.

The things we couldn’t control

Two days prior to the world record attempt, Claire was told she would have to wear a mask instead of painting her face. I do not know how she breathed, saw anything, controlled the sweat and itching. The mask must have added a level of hell none of us want.

Then the GPS on her watch went out at Canary Wharf so she had no idea if she was going to make it.

But the mental training kicked in and she just lived in the present, ticking off the time on the current kilometre, focusing on the process to get her there and not make any stupid decisions that would have a catastrophic effect on the run.

The final kilometres

I have no idea how stressed she must have been with 2-3km to go, all basically uphill and knowing that if she made it, it would be with seconds to spare.

But she did it.

Trust the process

As a coach, I’m proud of the result but so much prouder of her because she trusted the process and fell back on the instructions and parameters she had pre-set to avoid costing time.

Well done Claire — you have the World Record for running a marathon as a skeleton (female) and did it whilst raising funds for such a good cause.

Coach T xxx