A Really Long Way To Go

Hello! Happy Friday, and happy new year from a wintry New York. Wishing you all the best for 2026.

In an interview with Footprint, pro runner Patrick Dever reflects on his debut marathon, how it felt, and what he learned running further than ever before.

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One of the architects of the New York City Marathon saw running 26.2 miles as a test of patience. This is a distance, Ted Corbitt told Gail Waesche Kislevitz, author of First Marathons, that demands “a willingness to stay with it.”

Corbitt, often hailed as the father of US long distance running, broke the event out of Central Park. The course he calibrated – an unrelenting, unabating parade through the heart of New York City’s five boroughs, and across five bridges – tests the patience of tens of thousands of runners each fall.

British Olympian Patrick Dever didn’t fully know what to expect. A seasoned distance runner, and former NCAA national champion in the 10K, he was about to run his debut marathon.

“You’re just out there for such a longer period of time,” he told me in an interview for the Guardian ahead of November’s race, “so you just have way more time in your own head to talk yourself out of it, or keep yourself calm.”

On a gloriously sunny Sunday morning two months ago, Dever nervously waited at the start. He laced up his shoes. He laced up his shoes again, just to check they were okay. He put on his sunglasses. And he prepared to dial in.

Off went the gun. Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York blared. And as a pack of some two dozen men started to scale the Verrazzano Bridge, including former winners and perhaps the greatest marathoner of all time, Dever was a part of it.

“Okay,” he thought to himself, “we’ve got a really long way to go here.”

Head down. Eyes up. “I did just love the pure race element of it,” Dever, 29, reflected in an interview. “I do think sometimes, not just me, but people get caught up in times. It’s easier sometimes when you don’t have to think about that at all.”

Different marathons serve different purposes. Flat and fast courses are where records fall. But athletes come to New York to race.

“Obviously I looked up to a lot of people in the race, who I was competing against,” said Dever. “But I definitely didn’t think on the day that I couldn’t challenge, or beat, any of them.”

As the pack climbed, and settled into a steady, unaggressive, pace in the first mile, he shook off the lingering nerves, concentrated on the rhythm of his steps, and tried to switch off his head.

When Dever finally allowed himself a brief glance down at his watch, more than two hours had passed. During training he and his coach, Puma Elite’s Alistair Cragg, “never really spoke” about the time it might take to finish.

While he said Cragg had suggested that top five was “possible,” Dever’s main goal was not tied to time, or position. It was not predicated on when he crossed the finish line, but the race he ran to get there: to follow the leaders, and match any of their moves to break away, “until I couldn’t”.

For around 24 miles, he was willing – and able – to stay with it.

“Because I was in it so late into the race, I never really thought about how I was feeling,” recalled Dever. For him the wall, described by most marathoners with a shudder, never materialized. “Instinct basically took over: if someone’s going to surge, I’m going to follow this move, and stay with them,” he said.

Only in the closing stages did two leaders – Benson Kipruto, a former Boston, Chicago and Tokyo Marathon champion, and Alexander Mutiso, a former London Marathon champion – break away from Dever, leaving him to battle with Albert Korir, a former New York City Marathon champion, for the final podium spot.

“I enjoy the safety of running with another person, because then you’re not really in your head as much,” said Dever. “You’ve got something else to focus on.”

He and Korir stuck together until almost the end. Images of Kipruto’s narrowest of victories over Mutiso, whom he beat by three hundredths of a second, made their way around the world. But the battle for third place was also close.

Korir ultimately prevailed, capping an all-Kenyan top three – with Dever just one second behind. 

Those last few miles have been played back in Dever’s mind more than a few times over the past two months. “I know it’s easy to say,” he said, “but I think I could have tried harder to, I don’t know, do something a little bit before the sprint.”

A marathon can be a lot of things. Exhilarating. Exhausting. Exciting. Exuberant. But it’s almost never perfect. Staying with it for the best part of 26 miles, and only having a little bit you would change, is pretty close.

Dever ran his debut in 2:08:58, within touching distance of the podium. “It couldn’t have really gone any better, to be honest.”

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The entrepreneur Sir James Dyson, inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner, has been running since he was child. He still does today.

Guest editing an episode of Today on BBC Radio 4 in the UK over the holidays, Dyson wanted to explore the sport’s lessons around endurance, resilience and pushing through difficult moments.

“There’s a sort of wonderful monotonous addictiveness about running, especially road running, which I love,” said journalist Matthew Parris, a former politician, who holds the record for the fastest marathon ever run by a British member of parliament.

Many long distance runners “actually get better through their twenties, and into their thirties,” noted Parris, 76, “when physically speaking, they must be declining.

“The psychological stamina – because I think stamina is as much psychological, as a physical thing – that builds. And that means you can carry on with running well into your thirties, and many people into their forties, as well.”

“And you’re a little older even than that,” he added, with a chuckle. “Just a little,” replied Dyson, 79.