No London marathon Good for Age place

Earlier this year, I ran Newport marathon in a big PB time of 3:52:43 – adjusted from my initial time of 3:54:14 because the course was too long. I ran the marathon because I wanted to, of course. But mainly I ran it because I wanted to try for a Good for Age (GFA) place at next year’s London marathon.

I’ve never run London marathon before and would really like to do it just once. I realised when I was watching it on TV in 2023 that the best chance for me to get in would be with a GFA place. (I do enter the ballot every year, of course, but it is ridiculously oversubscribed). To qualify for a GFA place, you need to run a marathon in the qualifying time in the year before London. For 2025, that was between 1st October 2023 and 30th September 2024.

For a woman aged 50-54, the GFA qualifying time for 2024 was four hours. This changed to 3:55 for 2025.

I was very pleased to run the time in Newport, but that was only the first hurdle.

Because there are less GFA places than people applying for them. There are 6,000 places – 3,000 for men and 3,000 for women. They are allocated to the best qualifying times – so someone 10 seconds under the qualifying time could apply, but would be unlikely to get in. Someone 10 minutes under would be likely to get in.

In November, I heard that I hadn’t qualified. I was more gutted than I thought I would be. For my age category, I needed to be 2 minutes and 34 seconds below the qualifying time. I was 2 minutes and 17 seconds below. That’s less than one second per mile! I could definitely have achieved that.

So now I’m taking a bit of time to think. Do I run another marathon in 2025 with the aim of qualifying for London in 2026? I don’t think I could face Newport again, having run it three times. Do I accept that I’m not going to manage it and let it go? Or do I wait until I’m 55 and the qualifying time changes again?

The qualifying times for 2026 haven’t been published yet. There’s no point me even trying if the time has been adjusted again. So I’m not rushing into anything. After initially thinking I have to do another marathon in 2025, I’m now thinking maybe I will just chill out and not run one. Because training for a marathon is a big commitment. It takes it out of you. I’m not sure I want to put myself through that again yet. I have to want to run a marathon, not just want to run the GFA time.

While I’m on the subject of big race disappointment…

When my husband and I first signed up for Cardiff half marathon, we realised it was part of a race series called Superhalfs. Superhalfs is a series of six half marathons around Europe – Copenhagen, Berlin, Lisbon, Valencia, Prague and Cardiff. It’s similar to the Six Star marathon series , but with no need to travel to the USA or Tokyo! I won’t fly for more than about two and a half hours, so I’m never going to do those (quite apart from the fact that I wouldn’t get a place in the races anyway).

Superhalfs seemed like a good idea for us. We enjoy running and we enjoy European city breaks. Now we’ve got an empty nest, we have more freedom and it’s nice to have things to look forward to.

You need to complete Superhalfs in under 60 months from your first race – which was Cardiff for us. We decided our next race would be Copenhagen in September next year. We booked flights and a hotel.

And then we didn’t get a place in the race! I logged on six minutes late and was in a queue for over two hours, before it sold out completely. It was like Oasis and Coldplay tickets all over again.

So now we’re rethinking. Is it worth trying to apply for another race in the series or is it going to be the same story with all of them? If we do two, then can’t finish, that wouldn’t be so bad. But it would be very frustrating to make it to five races then be unable to complete the Superhalfs because the race sold out too quickly.

I’m sure running isn’t supposed to be stressful. Maybe we just need to stick with the small, local races. They give us at least as much pleasure as big races anyway.