Right, this is the one I’ve been wanting to make for a while. Fifteen weeks out from Valencia and my Garmin is telling me I’m good for 2:32. My actual PB is 2:24:35, set at London last year, so there’s a fair old gap between what a watch thinks I can do and what I know I’ve done before. This series is going to follow the whole build, start to finish, so you can see exactly how that gap gets closed — or doesn’t.

In this first episode I talk through where my fitness genuinely is right now, why I think the Garmin race predictor gets the marathon wrong in particular, and the phased block I’ve mapped out between now and race day. Seventeen seconds a mile is what I need to find, and I don’t think that comes from one big session — it comes from getting the structure right over the whole block.

I’ve been coaching and working as a PT since 2010, so I’ve seen plenty of watches make confident predictions that don’t hold up over 26.2 miles, and I’ve got my own history to compare against too — a 4:04:22 debut back in 2013 all the way through to 2:24:35 last year. Every day’s running in between, streak intact since 30 November 2015, so this Valencia build is being layered on top of a lot of years and a lot of miles.

I run for Barnsley Athletic Club and I’ll be sharing bits of the training alongside this series as it goes, but the video itself is where the real detail lives — the numbers, the thinking behind the block, and why I’m not taking the Garmin’s word for it. Give it a watch, and stick around for the rest of the series to see how the fifteen weeks unfold.

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