The Milestone Pursuit is designed to help people set their milestones (in running and in their careers) and then develop the step by step plan, often over many months or years to reach them (the pursuit).
But that’s not all. We have a pursuit of our own – to help improve the standards of British elite marathon running.
British marathon runners used to be at the vanguard of the sport, with, for example, Steve Jones and Paula Radcliffe both setting world records and winning world marathon majors. However, while East Africans have dominated podiums since the late 1980s British runners have struggled to compete on the international stage for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is investment. British marathon runners receive little in the way of financial support, especially considering the extraordinary commitment required to compete at that distance.
Being a marathon runner is tough. You can only really race twice a year, you have to train hard, and train long, and East Africans are picking up most of the prize and appearance money and UK governing bodies only fund and support those athletes with the potential to win medals at global level. This means athletes require other jobs and careers which, in today’s world, aren’t good bedfellows for marathon running/training and so it’s easy to see how elite or sub elite athletes can become disillusioned.
Why does this matter?
We are all, almost always, pursuing some kind of personal development milestone, from buying nicer clothes to home improvements to getting a promotion at work, we are all trying to move forward. We have aspirations. In running, it’s our evolutionary instinct to look at who/what is ahead of us, not behind, and so inspiration starts at the top. If elite level role models don’t exist, it reduces the aspiration levels of everyone further down the chain.
A British guy running 2.08 or a woman running 2.25, for example, shows that it can be done.
The sub elite (lets call them women who run under 2.45 and men under 2.30), see people pushing through, which gives them something to aim for.
The same is then true of ambitious club runners (2.45 to 3.15) and so it goes on all the way along the chain of aspiration to the thousands of people participating in parkrun each week.
Someone may not necessarily run their first 5k as a direct result of Natasha Wilson running a 2.25 marathon (they probably haven’t even heard of Natasha, no offence) but the nature of human aspiration dictates that there is indirect participatory benefit to having strong elite performers.
At a time when society’s biggest health issues centre around obesity and mental health, which running is evidenced to help, there is a societal benefit to having strong elite performers.
Of course it works the other way around too. The more people we have competing for international selection the higher the standard will naturally become and to an extent we are seeing this with significant improvements in strength but also in depth since 2019, in particular.
What are we doing to help?
Since 2017, we have invested a percentage of our revenue into supporting British elite marathon runners which means that all the work we do with our athletes directly contributes to British marathon running. That means YOU directly contribute! The current beneficiaries of that scheme are Natasha Wilson, Josh Griffiths, Callum Hawkins and Charlotte Purdue. We won’t claim any credit, but it has been brilliant to be part of their respective journeys, which have been full of equal measures of frustration and success. We are constantly reviewing our programme to support the elite level of our sport, and are open to ideas about how we can do more.
