Another wonderful London Marathon passes with many thousands of great stories, achievements, and more information about Mo Farah’s Ethiopian hotel bills than we probably need.

On a personal coaching level, the results across the board were almost enough to suggest I might be of some coaching use at the margins. 90% PB rating can’t be all bad, with the full house being ‘compromised’ by two guys running 2.29 on the day.

 At the sharper end, we had Will G, 2.24.18, a hard earned PB at age 44 placing 3^rd V40 in the entire field.  He also bags a National Champs Gold medal as part of Serpentine men's team winning again at both UK and England level. Then followed Chris O, almost 4 minute advance to 2.26.03; Paul P and Martin O both very solid 2.29s and chased home by another 44 year old, Martin G edging his PB to 2.30.  Then came a swathe of big improvers: Jeremy A 2.42 (11 minutes); Daniele B 2.47 (6 minutes); Edward A 2.48 (7 minutes), Andy Y 2.51 (4 mins), Ciro 2.55 (4 minutes) and Guy H 3.01 (5 minutes).

Some cracking and pleasing women’s performances too -  Eve B 2.51 back to her best after some ongoing injury setbacks; Jacqueline O 3.04 ( 9 minutes); Jo B 3.21 (11 mins) at age 45; and Charlotte C 3.33 (17 mins) also in the V45s.

 Finally a ‘human interest’ one from Hamburg. A year ago Andy T, a virtual newbie whose aerobic base was built almost totally on cycling to and from work within London contacted me saying he ‘would like to break 3 hours next year and would be willing to consider running more than 3 times a week if this would be useful’. I won’t quote the exact words of my reply but think in terms of when Leicester won the Premiership – Andy could run between 2 and 3 miles at 3 hour marathon pace at that stage. Things moved on remarkably, although weight loss wasn’t a factor nor did Andy exceed 40mpw at any stage. 2.58.36 yesterday – and now he can return to normal family life!