The walk/run method

In an exclusive extract from her latest book, Lisa Jackson explains how the chance discovery of the walk/ running technique enabled her to complete the Paris Marathon – and bag a PB

Lisa Jackson

Fairy or bunny?

© LISA JACKSON

Orboth?

No way,” said my husband Graham when I proposed we enter the Paris Marathon. “I’ll come along to support you as I don’t see why you should have fun on your own – if that’s what you call it – without me, but I’m not doing another marathon. It’s just so boring. And painful. And besides, I hate running.”

“It’s boring only because, unlike me, you don’t chat to people when you’re running,” I said. “And it’s painful only because you did a sum total of three training runs for the Edinburgh Marathon. I told you that wouldn’t be enough. And you don’t hate running. You haven’t done nearly enough of it to know that.”

Graham wouldn’t budge, so I roped in my Aunty Rosie, with whom I’d run the London Marathon the year before. “You’ve got your stress face on,” observed Graham the night before the race. “You’re clenching your jaw and grinding your teeth.”

We were in the Hotel de Milan, across the road from Gare du Nord Eurostar station. Though we enjoyed drinking coffee out of soup bowls, the way they served it at breakfast, the hotel had a very Parisian laissez-faire attitude to service and upkeep. Our room boasted a hula-hoop-sized circle of mouldy carpet caused by a radiator leak, and when I sat on the corner of the bed I slipped to the floor because the mattress springs were wrecked. It wasn’t the state of our room that was stressing me out, however, but the state of my knees. An osteopath had put the agonising pain in my patellas down to a leg-length discrepancy, and had recommended I put padded leather heel lifts into my left trainer. The pain disappeared, but I had my doubts about running 26.2 miles on what felt like a wobbly pile of Scotch pancakes.