RACE MOTIVATION

Big goal hunters

The lovely thing about running is that the sky’s the limit when it comes to goals. We hear from women who have qualified for, and raced, the biggest races in the world

Words: Laura Fountain

Running can ignite a desire to get quicker or run further than ever before. From the moment you finish your first 5K, a curiosity to see if you can go a bit faster or run a longer race is often awakened. You start to chase faster times, aiming for a PB or to hit a particular milestone. A sub 30-minute 5K, a 50-minute 10K or a sub four-hour marathon. Any round number is up for grabs.

There’s no big prize for breaking these barriers other than the pride and satisfaction you feel on achieving them. But there’s another type of goal that runners are increasingly looking to smash – we’re talking about those sought-after races, the ones you have to qualify to enter on previous performance.

The most prestigious races on the running calendar are ones that can only be entered once you have reached – and proved – acertain level of running, and they are driving more and more of us to attempt things we’d previously thought was out of our reach by running faster marathon times and longer distances.

LONDON

World-famous and iconic, the London Marathon is famously over-subscribed, but there are ways you can avoid the bothersome ballot…

Like many runners, Gill Bland had long dreamed of running the London Marathon but the chances of getting a spot via the ballot are notoriously slim. A record 578,374 people entered the ballot in 2023, despite the fact that under half of the 40,000 places in the race are given to ballot entrants.

An alternative way of getting a spot in the race is by qualifying for a Good for Age (GFA) place. These are 6,000 places that are allocated to those runners who have run a time in another marathon that meets the qualification standard that the London Marathon deems to be ‘good’ for their age and gender.

Gill explains, “I ran the Mablethorpe Marathon with my husband to try and get a GFA time for London because we couldn’t be bothered with the ballot. That sounds really over-confident but to be honest, in retrospect I like the fact that we were foolish enough to think we could just do it. I think it really freed me up to run well.”

For people in the UK, the London Marathon is the natural choice when looking for a bucket-list race