Two weeks ago I made a bold call on camera. I said Lee, a bricky from Barnsley who’d only been running a few years, was going sub 3 at Chester on his first ever marathon. He didn’t just go sub 3. He ran 2:49:17, more than ten minutes inside the mark, and I’ll be honest, that beat even my own expectations.

What gets me about this one is the shape of the race. Two near-identical halves, nine seconds apart, which tells you everything about the pacing discipline we’d built in. His slowest mile was the first, his fastest was the last, and he dropped his group at 20 and started picking people off from there. Heart rate sat steady from 158 to 164 for the first 25 miles. That’s not luck, that’s a lad who trusted the plan on his hand and the gel every four miles, and just did the job.

In the video I walk through the whole 19 week block that got him there, from 22 miles a week at the start up to 66 at the peak, the long runs, the marathon pace sessions, and the three tests I use to tell whether someone’s genuinely sub 3 fit before I’ll ever say it out loud. I also go through whether I actually got the call wrong, because looking at what he did on the day, I think I trained him a touch too conservatively. That’s a good problem to have as a coach.

Lee’s already got his London place booked, and I reckon 2:45 is close to a given with a sub 2:40 somewhere in him if things line up. I’ll be keeping tabs on that build.

If you’ve got a half time or a marathon target sat in your head, drop it in the comments under the video and I’ll tell you straight whether sub 3, or whatever your number is, is on for you. I read and reply to every one. But watch the full video first, every mile of Lee’s race is in there, and it’s a proper lesson in what consistency actually looks like.

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