This year, Jimmy Dale was due to run the 40th London Marathon, but ended up having to defer his place when wife Sarah realised their baby’s due date was 25 April, just one day before the event.
As it turned out, the endurance run was postponed due to coronavirus, and baby Elsie came along at 5.45am on 26 April – the morning the race was supposed to take place.
Friends joked that Jimmy would have still had time to make it to the start line if the race had been going ahead as planned, so he hatched a plan for Elsie to join him on the rescheduled virtual run.
Initially the marathon was postponed to 4 October, but with restrictions still in place they’d decided instead to allow people to complete the 26.2 miles themselves, choosing their own route.
Jimmy, 34, now plans to run from his home in Woodford, east London, to Victoria Park, pushing Elsie in a running buggy for the 40k ‘so the marathon she would have shared her birthday with she will get to participate in’.
The adviser for the Church of England said he assumes five-month-old Elsie, who he describes as ‘an absolute bundle of joy’, will be the youngest person ever to complete a London Marathon if she joins him for the full distance.
His wife Sarah, 30, a social worker, will support them at Victoria Park, providing feeds, nappy changes and buggy breaks for Elsie – although the five-month-old may sleep for much of the run.
Jimmy hopes she will be happy to share the entire journey with him, telling the PA news agency: ‘Part of the reason that it’s so special is that she will have done the marathon as well as me.
‘If she has only done 24 miles it wouldn’t have the same significance.’
The 2020 Virgin Money London Marathon will be the dad’s 22nd marathon and his second in London, but he is not worried about how long it takes him.
The first he completed, in London in 2009, was ‘an absolute train crash’ after he measured training runs using a device which he later realised had overestimated the distance, meaning he’d run only 12 miles as his longest training run.
He finished in five hours and 11 minutes and said: ‘To say I hit the wall was an understatement.’
His personal best of three hours and 23 minutes was in Paris in 2019 and he has also run in Chicago, Berlin and Porto as well completing many marathons in England.
Jimmy said he had tried to get another place for London about 10 times through the ballot but had not been successful until 2020 because the event is so popular.
There are 45,000 people taking part in Sunday’s virtual run, but it’s going to be a completely different experience for Jimmy and others.
‘The idea of going out to run 26 miles on your own is quite bleak,’ he says.
‘The take-up was enormous, that’s so telling about how much people want to do the London Marathon.’
As well as being able to take part in the virtual race, runners who had a place for 2020 have been able to defer so they can run in either 2021, 2022 or 2023.
Jimmy, a member of East London Runners, has deferred until April 2022 and hopes, by then, the mass event will be able to return to central London with the atmosphere and crowds that brings.
To support Jimmy and Elsie, who are raising money for youth work charity Newham YFC, you can donate here.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2020/10/02/baby-born-on-original-london-marathon-date-will-complete-26-2-miles-with-her-dad-13360409/
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