London Marathon 2015: Paula Radcliffe and the mother of all goodbyes

A photo hangs in the Monaco home of Paula Radcliffe, beaming with a Union Jack draped over her shoulders, daughter Isla in her arms, as she celebrates victory in the New York Marathon. It is Radcliffe at her peak, a snapshot of what life once was and part of an interesting tale into the machinations of family life with her husband Gary Lough and the couple’s two children – they also have a son Raphael.

“Gary teased her one time,” recalls Radcliffe. “I came back from a run and she was crying at the door. I said, ‘what’s wrong?’ She said, ‘Mummy, Mummy is is true you were holding me up in that picture to see if anybody wanted to buy me?’ She had been naughty while I was out and Gary said, ‘she was only doing that to see if anybody wanted you’.”

Isla, eight, will be at the finishing line for today’s London Marathon with her four -year-old brother and Radcliffe’s parents Peter and Pat, there to see the greatest female marathon runner of all time’s final competitive hurrah.

But as children do, they have a remarkable capacity to bring her back down to earth. When Radcliffe explained to her daughter this was to be her last competitive marathon, the response was “but Mummy you haven’t been competitive for a few years!” For Radcliffe, it is important to have her children there, to see their mother run on a course that defined her career where she set her remarkable world record of 2:15.25 – a record no one else has got to within three minutes of breaking.

Mother time has caught up with Radcliffe, the body and legs no longer able to withstand the punishing nature of mile after mile on the roads.At the finish, she will be awarded the first John Disley London Marathon Lifetime Achievement Award to honour her achievements and her London legacy. Race director Hugh Brasher recalls working in a running store when she broke the world record, the knock-on effect being the store completely sold out of women’s running shoes.

That run, in 2003, would have been enough to place her 15th in the men’s race; among the women’s elite, her next closest finisher was a mile further down the road. But that is just a small part of her achievements, which include the 2005 marathon world title and three victories in both London and New York.

That she is here to say a running goodbye at all is a formidable achievement. Two years ago, she had to physically will herself to walk Isla 200 metres to school, grimacing in pain following surgery on an 18-year-old stress fracture in her foot.

Slowly but surely she came to terms with the fact she would probably never run again. But steadily that changed and while the road back has been far from straightforward – in February an Achilles injury flared up in Kenya forcing her out for six weeks – she will start the race.

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How fast will she run? She has no idea other than that it will be over 2:30. Is there, though, a danger that the public will see her display as a disappointment? “People will be really frustrated because they still expect you to be right up there,” she says. “I appreciate it more because of how bad it was – a lot of people didn’t see that – when I couldn’t even walk to school to get Isla without feeling pain. It will annoy me that my time is slow but it doesn’t matter because it’s a bigger battle for me to actually be able to be here.

“Just to have the chance and honour to take part in this race again has been a carrot to keep going through this and to get this point.”

As much as London shaped everything good about Radcliffe’s career, there were the Olympic Games. There was Athens in 2004 when everyone was ready to drape the gold over her neck only for her to break down and pull out. Not one to make excuses, she rarely mentions the fact a freak accident – a stone skipping off the road courtesy of some Portuguese joyriders – left her with a deep abscess in her knee, with anti-inflammatories prescribed messing up her digestive system. At the time, she was on course to run under the 2:14 barrier. A stress fracture in her femur meant she was far from her best four years on in Beijing, where she finished 23rd, and injury denied her competing in 2012.

After 2004, she never quite attained the same heights but there is time for that final goodbye, although she is adamant it is not exactly goodbye. It is her last competitive marathon, what she calls a halfway house in that she won’t be running with the elite but doing her best among the club runners, before the fun running begins.

All around her on Sunday will be runners she inspired to first lace up their shoes. Sebastian Coe perhaps best summed it up: “She democratised our sport. She gave women permission to go out, run and be part of the London Marathon, not just the elite contribution but a generation of runners male and female that have taken up the sport because of Paula Radcliffe.”