Yeah. Do you think he'll go for it? Or is it just like a celebration of just... I know as an elite athlete, you can't just run a race for the sake of it. But do you think he'll just party pace? No. I don't think he does party pace yet. I think party pace is post-retirement

when you come back again. Although saying that, Paula Radcliffe obviously came back recently and she's still not messing about. She's under three hours. I ran to the second the same time as her in Tokyo, which is quite

fascinating. Really? We near her? I saw her ahead of me, but yeah, we finished at the exact same second. That's cool. In good company. It'll be interesting to see how Cube

Choke goes. That's an exciting signing for Sydney. It's their first year as a marathon major which those two things can't be unrelated.

Because when is, you're going out to Sydney?

Yeah I'll be out in Sydney

as well. September? End of August. End of August. So that's not April to August. Not loads of time in terms of an elite marathon cycle. Obviously for Mo, just bashes one out every

week. But I guess we'll find out what the reality is of Kipchoge being competitive again. Like you can't ever write off the greatest marathon runner of all time. No. But in 2024, he, I think, finished 10th in Tokyo Marathon at the beginning of the year, which is his lowest position in a marathon, then was unable to finish Paris in the Olympics due to injury so I love watching him run I'm desperate for him to be back to his best but the reality is age catches up with us but

do you want to know another interesting fact that I got from my psychology book? Oh no! You're going to get so sick of this so in it someone was talking about kipchoge and apparently physiological tests have been done on kipchoge which don't show like necessarily anything that is kind of above the average or like out of this world in terms of like physiological capability but actually like a huge component of why kipchoge is so successful is his mentality yeah um and in the first attempt where he tried to break two hours around the monza track yeah he was smiling the whole way and that was like one of the things even though he missed it like very narrowly yeah that was one of the things that people talk about of like his willpower and his ability to like smile through suffering yeah

were you smiling no i wasn't smiling i did try i did have it in my

head of like remember to smile but i forget

the period but i'm pretty sure he was unbeaten over the marathon between something like 2013 and 2019 or maybe maybe even longer but yeah and obviously you don't win two olympic marathons and run sub two hours in an unofficial marathon without being yeah yeah incredibly mentally tough yeah no for sure um

well he is running London

which is also purported to potentially be the biggest marathon of all time in terms of number of finishes because that was just set by New York in 2024 and then London think they're gonna gonna beat that so that's

really exciting very cool I think we'll blow out the water. I say we.

Oh, absolutely we. And very excitingly, we will be having another pop-up shop at London Marathon.

And it'll be so much more than a shop. We're not, I mean, that's like second week. Pop-up space. Yeah, like come and visit us. Yes, all of those things. We'll be celebrating lots of things. We're going to have a treadmill for people to run on. Jess is going to be doing a really exciting thing over the marathon weekend on the treadmill in our space you'll be able to come and get merch come and meet us there'll be a live podcast there's gonna be so much stuff happening that actually I'm a bit overwhelmed by and I'm gonna let someone else deal with it nice

same yeah

so I'm just gonna show up yeah but watch this space watch our uh social media and look for announcements because we would love to see you so anyone is coming to London or if your friends and family are coming to London, then send them our way because we would like as many people as possible to drop in and say hello.

Definitely. Right, should we cover some questions?

Yeah, we don't normally do this, Sarah. Rick reads this out. Me too. I don't know what we're doing. Should I take his place? You've got a great record of reading out place names, Sarah. Yeah, go on.

I think I can do the first one. So can I have a crack. Donegal.

I

thought it was Donegal. Yes.

You said Donegal. Mike from

Pontefract in West Yorkshire. Hi, I have a question that I really hope TRC can help me with. I'm running the London marathon this year. Woohoo. Come along this year. And I'm following an advanced 16 week training plan. And I hope that I'm going to finish in under three hours. Very nice, Mike. I also have a place for Berlin Marathon in September. How should I carry my fitness through after London? I don't really want to start back on day one, week one of the advanced plan. Again, 16 weeks out for Berlin. Any help or advice or recommendations would be amazing. So

this is how to connect London to Berlin and not wanting to kind of start again yeah well you won't have to start again because the big thing for a lot of marathon plans is they're assuming that you're running a little bit but not very much and so you do build up from a relatively low level from that from that 16 weeks although it is an advanced 16 week training plan um but i would be saying the first thing is you have to like recover properly yeah after the marathon so don't don't just be thinking, I don't want to lose this fitness. I'm going to go steaming straight back in again. You've got to give yourself a couple of weeks of like. And

that is helping your overall fitness as well. Like the marathon itself is such a big effort that like the. Probably the best thing that you could do would be to put yourself onto like a recovery plan or in like a plan that gets you from through that recovery period because it's so important to take the time because if you do try to just bank the fitness and carry on like you just run so many risks of not being recovered enough overtraining

and yeah mentally

getting a bit fatigued one thing i would say though is potentially think about what your goal is for Berlin like could you move the goalpost slightly and what is it like a different stimulus that you want like if 16 weeks feels like a really long time could you potentially do a bit of a half marathon block to start off yeah and then trick yourself by turning that into a marathon block for the end it's

exactly what I think that the timing is really good for you to go a couple of weeks easy gently build back into it and use those first few weeks of building back into it to put a good structure back in place and do all the stuff you might have neglected towards the end of your marathon plan like strength and conditioning usually the thing that goes away so get strong again in the gym then focus on a 10k or a half to use as like an intermediate goal on the way to the marathon and then if you're already doing 10k or half marathon training then you're probably running quite a lot of good quality because then when you start doing marathon pace one the pace feels easy and then two your baseline's already so high that you're not just going back to the start of a 16-week training plan you're like you're jumping on and leaping forwards and that's i mean i would argue how mo's gone from 259 to 243 is exactly that like you're sort of almost starting from scratch that first time around yeah

and

then

having real consistent training for the next 18 months where you never really had a time off yeah no agreed yeah I mean I can't give any more advice than you to have that's the perfect answer thanks

mate nice

well because we haven't had Rick keeping us to time we're going to to get in trouble. But we'll do a very quick one here. This is someone who's in need of inspiration and motivation from within the Running Channel Club. And actually, this is what the Running Channel Club is all about, is lifting people up and kind of showing that people all over the world experience running in broadly a similar way. So if you're the one that's struggling with motivation and trying to get out or you've had an injury or you've had a race experience like Sarah's just had, then there's going to be hundreds or thousands of other people out there that have had exactly the same experience. This is Steffi B who says, I'm in the middle of training for my first half marathon. The first eight weeks went great. Ticked off every session, did a strength workout once a week and even upped my training to four runs a week. By the end of week nine, everything went downhill. I had a feeling it was to do with donating blood on the Friday of week nine. And every run after that has felt awful my 16k didn't go to plan I couldn't hit a single interval and ended the session after 3k instead of 8k decided to take a break for the rest of week 10 even skipping my long run and I'm week 11 now and I do feel fine but my runs suggest otherwise also Steffi's been measuring their HRV which has been in the red until recently which I think is like actually Mo you and I had a conversation about almost exactly what Steffi's describing here it sounds like just combination of life stuff particularly maybe that giving blood has just tipped you over the edge in terms of everything's just a bit much yeah and all of a sudden it's

it goes from everything feeling great to everything feeling awful and you think you've thrown your fitness away whereas actually yeah if you describe how you felt so i mean i yeah stephi i was in exactly the same position uh not too long ago and i even put my own like uh i guess qualms in in into the club and i came back with such positive like feedback from everyone and yeah i did speak to you about it and you were telling me that they are normally indications of maybe your body needs a bit more time to rest and recover and taking one or two weeks off to make sure that your body is in prime condition is so much better than continuing to go and then your body forcing you to take four to six weeks off due to overtraining or injury um and i do think it is so valid having that uh like reassurance from someone like yourself andy to tell me that it's okay to take some time off yeah

the stuff you were telling me at the time actually i thought you were at that point where you're probably going to need four to six weeks off yeah but the first step for you was just easy yeah and then when you did and then you came straight back like relatively soon after that yeah and ran that amazing half marathon where you felt really within control you i think you just caught it in time so my advice for anyone feeling like this and steffi here is is just back off now yeah before before you do dig yourself a hole yeah and actually you'll find it'll bounce back quickly but remember like any time off running even if it's two days during a training plan yeah the next run when you come back you're like oh my oh my god have i ever run before yeah yeah that's how everybody feels that's completely normal also

take it as a huge win huge win you said your hrv was in the red until two days ago that means you have done everything right because it's it's bouncing back it's bouncing back and it's so hard to do but i would say a lot of people in your position steffi wouldn't have taken that week 10 off and that that is such a good decision it's so hard to do but definitely if you are if you are giving yourself that time to recover try not to beat yourself up in that time it It's so easy to do. I mean, I know I need to rest. I'm so annoyed about it. But yeah, just no training plan goes perfectly. And actually, if you can, I would say try and find an elite athlete to follow who shares a lot of their training. Like Philly Bowden does it so well. She openly admits like if she sets out her training of what she's going to do there is no way that she'll complete all of that because no no one has the perfect build-up or you can't write down everything on paper and then it it goes that way you might have like she was caught in a snowstorm this week and that yeah you can't you've

got to roll with the punches a little bit be sensible and then in the same way as if someone told you here's your runs for this next week that's my training plan this time your training plan is to get better

and