Yaz’s hot takes
“I hate crowd support sometimes!”
Yaz had a tough first London Marathon. It was tipping down with rain and by the time she got to the London Eye and Big Ben, she was desperate to stop and walk, like many runners around her.
“People kept coming on to the course and walking with the runners who’d stopped. They were saying, “You can do this!”. The only thing in my head was that I did not want that attention on me. I wanted to be left alone! That’s genuinely the only thing that stopped me from stopping.”
She says that people assume that runners want encouragement and motivation, but sometimes, at that point in the race, it’s the worst thing you can do for someone. “Sometimes people just want to be left to their own devices. They don’t want to talk and they don’t want encouragement. They just need to zone inwards.”
“Finishing the marathon isn’t always the best feeling in the world”
When Yaz finished her first marathon, she burst into tears. “It wasn’t an overwhelming feeling of achievement or pride or even exhaustion. It just felt like my body was confused and didn’t know what to do.”
Her marathon aftermath was not the party many of us envisage, either. “My mum was trying to book a nice lunch but I couldn’t stomach the…
