There will be few more fascinating contenders in this year’s London Marathon than Olympic triathlon champion Alex Yee.
The 26-year-old Briton is putting his swim / bike / run career on hold for a few months to focus on his first attempt at the 26.2-mile distance.
He says it’s a golden opportunity to improve his run speed, already his greatest weapon in triathlon.
Yee was a track runner – the British 10,000m champion – before he went all in on triathlon and he conquered the highest peaks of that sport last year when he became both Olympic and world champion.
His track PB for 10km was 27:51 and he recently clocked 28:07 on the road in Valencia, which if you put into an age-grading calculator suggests a marathon time of 2:09 is feasible.
‘Exciting’ learning curve
And that’s the sort of area he’s targeting as he told Matt Stephens in an absorbing interview on his Unplugged podcast for Sigma Sports.
Asked what time he’s aiming for, the reply was characteristically honest: “I think it’s funny because I have an idea, but I don’t have an idea. I think sub 2 hours 10 I would be satisfied with and happy with.
“As the preparation’s going on, my physiology can suggest something but then it’s the ability to withstand the aerobic conditioning and the load of what happens at about 20 miles to 26 miles of battering the pavement for that long.
“I’m not used to that because I run 10k off the bike [in triathlon], which is a similar stimulus to running 15 to 21 miles in a marathon. So it’s going to be super interesting and it’s an exciting project.
“And I think the exciting thing is that I could fail and it might not go to plan. And that’s a good thing [because] there’ll be a huge amount of learning either way.
“Failure is probably the wrong word that I use for that. Because it’s my first one, it will be the fastest I’ve ever done if I complete it. I think the fastest you ever do something, you can never complain, and it sets a benchmark for you to do something in the future.
“And maybe I will come back to marathon, who knows? But I think the important thing from that is learning.”
READ MORE: What is a good 10k time?
READ MORE: What is a good marathon time?
Lifetime ambition
For Yee it’s all about the bigger picture, with long-term gains the overriding aim.
He explained: “The marathon for me is all about moving on my threshold speeds.
“It does really benefit me from a physiological point of view to be able to step away and work on this and then come back to triathlon with a higher LT1 (first lactate or aerobic threshold).
“If I have a bad day, I can run at that speed and if I have a good day then I can run as close as possible to my LT2 (second lactate or anaerobic threshold) and hopefully run as close to 28 minutes off the bike in the future. I think that’s exciting for me. I keep pushing at trying to get better and this is the avenue we’re now looking at.
“So for me this is purely about improvement of running and I feel like that is something I’ve really wanted to do all my life.
“The London Marathon, growing up watching it, sitting on the barriers and cheering, watching Kipchoge run some amazing times.
“And for me, London will be an amazing experience. I mean, the last 10k might not be that fun, but hopefully I’ll have fun for the first 32 of them.
“I think that’s exciting for me. As I say, I keep pushing and keep getting better.”
‘It’s got to be done’
In terms of his training, how does that look?
Yee said he’ll be taking on a half marathon in a race environment first: “That will give me an idea of where roughly my LT2 is at in, in a real field testing kind of way. You can test it in the lab as much as possible, but that gives you a bit of a real idea of that.
“And then after that it’s going to be all about kind of pushing on from a speed perspective. And then it will be all about working at first threshold – or just above first threshold – and just getting in pure muscular conditioning, which is going to be probably not the most fun kind of preparation!
“But it’s going to be an exciting new challenge. And for me, I probably will run up to 40k, 42k for my long run eventually.
“It’s got to be done to know you’re going to be ready. I’ve always been a fan of making training just as hard as racing. So I think if you know you’ve been there before and you’ve experienced that, then you’re ready to make those informed decisions especially when your brain’s not working as optimally as it could be.”
