Last year was amazing, but I want to break three hours

In a little over five weeks I will set out on my second Dublin, indeed any, marathon when I will have another crack at breaking three hours.

Last year was my first tilt at covering the 26.2 mile distance and it was a steep learning curve, though richly rewarding. It's hard to adequately describe the buzz on the day with such incredible support from start to finish.

When people found out I was going to run the marathon, many assumed that because I was a professional athlete, I can run everything. In reality, going from 400m to 42km is night and day.

Some found that hard to believe and there was a lot of "ah, sure you'll be fine", but it’s all about endurance and time on the legs, and I simply didn’t have any of that prior to last year. The truth was I had never ran more than 5km.

When I ran 400m, it was all about lactate tolerance, crucial in short and fast runs. You hit 300 metres and lactic acid feels like it is coming through the eyeballs. You tolerate that for another 100 metres. It is all anaerobic.

A marathon is the opposite, and focuses on aerobic. For me to run a marathon, and even in training if I’m constantly pushing the body and building lactic acid, I’m going to hit the wall in the hour. You are trying to push that wall a way back.

Physiologically, you have to change your whole system.

Running a marathon was never really something on my radar. I had neither the interest nor motivation to ever consider it. That changed somewhat in 2019 when I went to support my sister who was running Dublin that year.

I was at the UCD flyover, where there is less than three miles to go, and there was such a buzz around. I began to think, "maybe" and that was purely from the atmosphere.

When I was competing, it was my job. It was easy to