Athletics: Mayo is brushing up on his running

For Tom Mayo, the marathon is already over. It took him two-and-a-half weeks to finish the London Marathon picture he has had on display, alongside his other oil paintings, at Stand 291 at the Flora London Marathon Exhibition at the London Arena.

He has never run a marathon and won't be on the road from Blackheath to The Mall today, but the London Marathon painter knows a thing or two about the running game. Last month Mayo ran for Britain in the 3,000m at the World Indoor Championships in Birmingham. The month before that he ran in Haile Gebrselassie's world record-breaking wake in the Norwich Union Grand Prix two-mile race at the National Indoor Arena.

It was last summer, after struggling with injury through to the 1500m final at the Commonwealth Games, that Mayo took up his brush with a view to funding his running career. "I was left with six, seven weeks of the season to make some money from running but I had to stop because of the injury," he reflected. "It was my Uncle Adrian who said: 'Look, you've painted all these pictures. Why don't you do something with them?' "

So thanks to the prompting of Uncle Adrian – Adrian Metcalfe, a 4 x 400m silver medallist at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 – Mayo put his pictures in the Great North Run Exhibition and set up his own cyber showcase (www.tommayogallery.com). His works, loosely based on his running experiences, started to sell.

He was commissioned to design a London Marathon T-shirt for adidas (a marathon runner's route map of the capital featuring such points as Mile-never-end and Blister Square). He has also been shortlisted for young entrepreneur of the year in the North-east business awards.

All of which has left Mayo happily mixing his oils with his oxygen debt each day. "Being a runner, I don't want to come in from my morning session and sit and watch television," he said. "I used to do that. It's pretty dull after a month or so. You watch Kilroy for the 30th time and you just want to die – and Tricia. Two hours in front of the easel is much better. You're actually doing something creative and it's very therapeutic. It takes your mind off the running. There's enough time in the day to do your training and be able to paint. And it just takes the pressure off me now, not having to race for money any more."

Mayo is not exactly a novice artist. He continued to paint and draw after giving up an art-college place to follow a sporting path to Loughborough instead. At 25, he is a young man of many talents and of considerable drive too. He first broke into the British senior team after returning from a round-the-world backpacking tour on which he followed a strict training regime (and on which he did a stint as a stand-up comedian in Auckland).

And, while he has set up home on Tyneside near his coach, Lindsay Dunn, he has continued to travel – in pursuit of maximising his running talent. He prepared for the indoor season by training with European steeplechase champion Antonio Jiminez in Seville, and next week heads off to Soria, north of Madrid, to get ready for the outdoor season in the company of Fermin Cacho, Europe's fastest-ever 1500m runner, and Reyes Estevez, the former European 1500m champion.

"I refuse to just coast along here at my own pace," Mayo said. "I want to see what they do and see if it works for me. It might be a complete waste of time, but at least I'll have tried it."