Preview - London Marathon 2019
The Virgin Money London Marathon course is undoubtedly a
long and testing one, but the road to reach the start line as an
elite runner is immeasurable by comparison.

Four Welsh athletes are due to take their places amongst
the cream of global distance running at the head of this year's
event on Sunday, April 28.
Swansea Harriers Dewi Griffiths and Josh Griffiths are
joined in the elite field by Stockport AC's Andy Davies and Natasha
Cockram, of Mickey Morris Racing Team.
They will literally be rubbing shoulders on the start line
with the likes of marathon world record holder Eliud Kipchoge,
serial world champion and Olympic gold medallist Sir Mo Farah, and
women only marathon world record holder Mary Keitany.
Each one of the Welsh athletes has taken a different path
to reach the same ultimate goal.
But for each one of their stories, there will be dozens of
other Welsh runners of all abilities, pounding the streets on
Sunday morning with their own personal goals in sight.
Enthusiastic jogger looking to improve their fitness,
charity fund-raiser or talented club athlete, each will have been
inspired to lace up their trainers for different reasons and join
the growing number of enjoying the running revolution sweeping
Wales.

For the elite athletes, however, their ambition will be to
reach the finishing line on the Mall in the fastest possible
time.
As well as personal best performances, Welsh and British
Marathon Championship titles are on the line along with potential
selection for this year's World Athletics Championships and next
year's Tokyo Olympics.
The fastest Welsh runner on paper is Llanfynydd's Dewi
Griffiths whose path started as a young boy told by his parents to
go and "run around the field" to keep him occupied while they
worked on the family farm.
Those laps sparked a love of running which saw him start
competing in fun runs, aged five. The seven-time Welsh Cross
Country Champion and Commonwealth Games athlete ran a hugely
impressive time of 2:09,49 in Frankfurt on his marathon
debut.
Natasha Cockram's route to marathon success took her to
college in the United States, where she suffered a
career-threatening knee injury.
Having undergone successful surgery and returned home to
Gwent, Cockram combines a full-time job as a civil servant with an
athletics career which saw her last year burst onto the
international stage by winning the Newport Half
Marathon.
Andy Davies is no stranger to running on the streets of
the capital, having represented Great Britain in the marathon at
the 2017 World Athletics Championships in London.
The Newtown College lecturer started running to keep him
fit while playing football for League of Wales side Caersws, where
he won three Welsh League Cups and played in Europe.
Since then, he has also represented Wales at the
Commonwealth Games and is a Great Britain international mountain
runner. His training takes place in the mid-Wales hills alongside
his terrier, Scrappy.
Davies was joined at the World Championships by Josh
Griffiths, who claimed his place when he shocked the athletics
world by emerging from the massed ranks of club runners to finish
as the first Briton at the 2017 Virgin Money London
Marathon.
The Swansea Harrier's performance was such a surprise that
even the BBC's athletics commentator Steve Cram had to scrabble
around for details of the Welshman as he came into view on the
Mall.
Griffiths recalls: "2017 was a great race and I gained a
lot of things from it, but 2019's a new year and I've got new aims.
It's time to move on from 2017 and run a good London
again.
"It's going to be really competitive for the Welsh
Championships positions, and then you've got the British
Championships as well with a brilliant field, so it's really cool
to be a part of it.
"Obviously, the London Marathon is the race, but there's
lots of smaller races within the race. You've got the guys at the
front, you've got the Welsh Championships, the British
Championships . . . there's lots of mini-battles going on
throughout the field, so it should be a good day."
Carmarthenshire-based Griffiths started his running
journey after watching Ethiopian legend Kenenisa Bekele's
5,000m and 10,000m double gold at the 2008 Beijing
Olympics.
As a result, the then 14-year-old joined his local
athletics club - Carmarthen Harriers - and nine years later he was
alongside his running inspiration Bekele at the post London
Marathon gala dinner.
Exactly one year to the day before competing at the World
Championships, Griffiths was running the Swansea Bay parkrun
alongside club runners, enthusiastic joggers, families and walkers,
some tackling 5k for the first time.
If ever there was a perfect example of how inclusive
distance running can be, then Griffiths' story is surely
it.
The Mall in 2017 also witnessed one of the London
Marathon's most iconic moments as Griffiths' Swansea Harriers
clubmate Matthew Rees stopped to help distressed fellow runner
David Wyeth when a personal best time was within reach.
The selfless act epitomised the spirit and camaraderie
shared by runners of all abilities and made headline news all over
the globe.
But perhaps the most celebrated Welsh success in London
was Steve Jones' triumph in 1985.
The Ebbw Vale-born runner took the London crown after
having set a new marathon world record in Chicago the previous
year.
There was a further Welsh triumph in 1985 when the late
Chris Hallam won the wheelchair race in a course record, before
repeating the feat two years later.
Hallam was the inspiration for Wales' greatest paralympian
Dame Tanni Grey Thompson, who went on to win the London Marathon a
remarkable six times.
With thousands of new runners taking part in Couch to 5K
initiatives and local parkruns every week, who knows where the next
generation of Welsh athletes will come from and where their running
journeys will take them?