announced that he was aiming to do the race in Zurich by way of a 50th birthday celebration, most people who knew him thought he was plain loopy.“Everyone thinks I’m mad,” he admits. A seasoned runner, with marathons under his race belt, Ratbag was fit

from the effort of picking up the rejection mailshot from the floor.But many look elsewhere for a marathon. Some go abroad and race in a big city event elsewhere. Others look to one of the smaller British spring marathons instead - there are at least

) Growing numbers of runners are looking beyond the mental and physical challenge of a marathon for their next long-distance goal, and this 40-mile point-to-point fixture along the Grand Union Canal is both the ideal introduction to ultras and great

Your fame doesn’t end on marathon day - come and tell the world how the FLM 2009 was for you! Simply drop us a line with your story and we'll add it to our growing gallery of reader reports below.Here's an idea of the sort of questions you could

Your fame doesn’t end on marathon day - come and tell the world how the FLM 2008 was for you! Simply drop us a line with your story and we'll add it to our growing gallery of reader reports below.Here's an idea of the sort of questions you could

forum. One morning another forumite suggested we do an Ironman. Not really knowing what it was, I signed up. Then, when I discovered I would have to swim 3.8km, bike 180km and run a full marathon, the enormity of what I had agreed to do hit me. My

and the contacts to book a swim for 2004, I took my background as a pool swimmer, and applied what I’d learned from years training for long-distance running events in order to begin training. Like marathon training, I built a solid aerobic base, added regular