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Three weeks after spending 20 hours in the Vietnamese mountains, I lined up in Perth hoping for 3:20 at best. I crossed the line in 3:15:54, a five-minute PB over Brisbane 2025, after drifting off my own pace plan from the very first kilometre. This post is mostly about why that plan was wrong, and why I’m glad I didn’t stick to it.

The first time I asked AI for a training plan, I wasn’t training for a marathon. I was trying to figure out how to bridge from marathon fitness into my first ultra trail block, and I wanted the plan to actually account for elevation gain, not just weekly mileage. What came back read like a marathon plan with the word “trail” swapped in: sixteen weeks, four phases, a taper, all correctly labeled. Nothing about elevation. Nothing about hiking the climbs instead of running them. It didn’t know how many miles I was running that month, or whether Saturday or Sunday was my long run day. It didn’t know that my left IT band starts complaining somewhere past 90 minutes on flat ground, let alone on descents.

I ran my first World Marathon Major in 2018. Seven years later, I’ve completed 3/6 of the original races: Chicago, Berlin, and Tokyo. I’ve also finished Sydney, which Abbott added to the roster in 2025. That leaves three originals still to go: New York, London, and Boston. The question I keep coming back to is a simple one: can I complete the original six before 2028? That would be ten years start to finish — which sounds like a long time until you understand how the entry system actually works.

The TCS Sydney Marathon 2025 was always going to be a management exercise. Tendonitis near the calf, a multi-week eczema flare, three weeks of international travel — by the time race week arrived, the question wasn’t whether to PR but whether the body would hold together for 42km. It did. This is how that happened, and what running the inaugural World Marathon Major actually looked like from inside a broken build.

My long runs in Sydney sat around 135 bpm at 5:30 min/km. Comfortable, conversational, well within what I’d call easy. Then I moved to Singapore. Same effort. Shorter run. Slower pace — 6:15 to 6:40 min/km. Heart rate: 155 bpm and climbing. Nothing had changed about my fitness. Everything had changed about the conditions. And that gap between what I expected and what my body was doing forced me to rethink something I thought I already understood: what “easy” actually means.

Running with eczema in Singapore and Malaysia can feel like negotiating with the weather every morning. Most advice around eczema and exercise tends to stop at “avoid sweat” or “stay cool”, which is not particularly realistic if you are trying to run consistently in Southeast Asia.

How you fuel is a key success factor to finish your first marathon. For first-timers, it can be overlooked and make it more difficult than needed. Today, I’ll share how I plan carbs and fluids from long run to race day, and what Kyoto Marathon 2026 added to my notes.

Training gets you to the start line fit. What gets you there calm, with the right kit, documents, and plan, is a different skill. StartLine is a simple checklist app I built that keeps travel, logistics, and gear in one place so you can focus on preparation instead of last-minute scrambles.

A few days after the Kyoto Marathon 2026, the finish-line high has faded. The hardest part is not the 42 kilometres I ran anymore; it is the discipline of not running again too soon.

Some races pull you in quietly, like a whisper. Tokyo is the opposite. It grabs your attention with neon lights, orderly chaos, and the promise of one of the smoothest marathon experiences on the planet.