Paula Radcliffe: ‘The mindset of a marathon is a great precursor for going through life’

One of Britain’s most successful ever sportspeople, distance runner Paula Radcliffe, may have retired 10 years ago, but this year she completed two marathons for the first time since hanging up her professional running shoes.

“It was definitely with a view to taking part,” the 51-year-old says, with a laugh, and she has to manage a foot joint niggle doing 26.2 mile races these days.

“And the camaraderie of runners together on marathon day – it’s very special. You have 50,000 or 60,000 people, largely going through the same motions, on the same day and sharing that together.”

Radcliffe, who held the women’s marathon world record from 2003 to 2019 after setting a time of 2:15:25 in London, completed the Tokyo and Boston marathons in the spring and plans to run the Kielder Marathon, Northumberland, in October.

But her relationship to running has evolved in the past decade. Previously, “pushing myself and seeing how good I could be was this huge motivating factor – now it’s just like, OK, I feel a bit better after I’ve run.”

Plus, the three-time winner of the London Marathon says running gives her time to think. “That’s one of the reasons I try and encourage kids to find the sport that’s good for them. It may not be running, but it was running for me, and when I was going through the stress of exams or trying to work on homework problems, I would find if I went out for a run, part way through that run, sometimes, [I’d realise] ‘Oh that’s how you do it’.

“Even now, if I’ve got a full day of work, it’s like that. My mind is a little bit sharper. If I’m trying to write something, I’ll go out for a run first and then come back and start writing. [It could be] the increased oxygen to the brain, I don’t know.

“And equally, when