This Sunday 4th October, make sure that you keep an eye out for runners wearing a New Balance-sponsored number on the front and back of their top: the odds are they won't be on a casual week-end 10-kilometre jog.
Rather, they might be one of the 45,000 participants running the 40th edition of the London marathon. Unsurprisingly, in the context of a global health crisis, the 2020 version of the sporting event is following slightly different proceedings.
Instead of going through the usual marathon route that crosses the UK capital, participants will be logging into an app and running the 42-kilometres race their own way, from their boroughs, towns and even countries.
Through the app, they will be cheered on by pre-recorded crowd sounds and virtually guided through what they would have seen, had they been able to run in London. At 20 kilometres, for example, they will be alerted that they would have been going through Tower Bridge.
For the organizing team behind the London marathon, coming up with the best way to set up the event this year has been a rocky journey, to say the least. The race, which was initially scheduled for April, was postponed in the early stages of the pandemic. But as Hugh Brasher, event director for the Virgin Money London marathon, explains, the challenges since then have kept accumulating.
"In mid-March, we agreed on a new event date on the 4th October," Brasher tells ZDNet. "I think we believed then that the world would be in a different place to the one we're in now."
"Through the months, we've had to keep adapting our plans as we got new information everyday. With the continuing effects of Covid-19, we had to keep lots of different plans and agilely work through them, often throwing them