If there was ever a day when Alex Yee had second thoughts about his London Marathon experiment, it came not on some gruelling training run, but with Eddie Nketiah’s clinching goal in last month’s FA Cup quarter-final for his beloved Crystal Palace.
“Honestly, that moment where I Googled the date of the semi-final was the worst,” he tells Standard Sport. “It came up with April 26 or 27 and I was like: ‘You have got to be kidding me?’ If it was the final, mate, there would have been a tough call!”
In the end, Palace have been booked for the earlier of those slots, meaning they meet Aston Villa at Wembley on Saturday evening, before the Olympic triathlon champion makes an intriguing marathon debut on the streets of his hometown on Sunday morning.
“I’m definitely scared,” he laughs. “Compared to my triathlon stuff, there’s a lot of unknowns going into it and that’s something I’ve been trying to embrace as much as possible. I keep saying to everyone that I go into the marathon like 40,000 other people, with that excitement and that anticipation that we’ve got 42.2km ahead of us.”
Ahead of those thousands of club and fun runners, Yee will line up alongside some of the all-time marathon greats — including the greatest in Eliud Kipchoge — in arguably the strongest field ever assembled in London.
“I’m looking forward to probably waving them all goodbye at the start!” he laughs, though he is determined to pick a few brains around the athletes’ hotel. “To be in the same race as [Kipchoge] is really special and a bit surreal.”
Yee has his own serious pedigree as a runner, most notably for having won the British 10,000m title on the track in 2018, and though it came as a surprise when he announced his marathon plan just before Christmas, it was by no means a spur-of-the-moment call.
“I’ve been asking my coach [Adam Elliott] every year if I could do it,” he explains. “It’s never worked out and always seemed a bit of a pipe dream.”
The idea was raised more seriously at the end of 2023, when Yee and Elliott began planning for post-Paris, wary of the notorious Olympic comedown that might follow a three-year mission to turn Tokyo silver into gold.
Even with that foresight, Yee admits he “probably got it wrong” and struggled in the weeks after claiming a dramatic victory at the Games.
“Definitely, after handing over in the mixed relay, you sit on the floor and you’re like: ‘What am I doing now?’ I didn’t have the answer for the first time in three or four years. It’s hard, once you’ve achieved one of your lifelong dreams, to keep finding ways to strive to be better, to keep going again. I guess this is a way of me trying to do that.”
How fast can he go?
So, onto the nerdy stuff. Yee has been doing most of his running solo and averaging around 150km per week, significantly more than his 90-100km in triathlon mode, but significantly less than the likes of Kipchoge and Jacob Kiplimo, with whom he is about to share a start line. Instead, he supplements his training with easy bike rides and swims, in part to keep those disciplines ripe and in part to reduce the risk of injury.
“There’s a huge level of muscle damage from doing a 20-mile run compared to a long bike,” he explains.
“A long bike is all about depletion. If you keep eating then, within reason, you can keep going forever. There’s nothing as rewarding for me as doing a long run, that feeling of finishing and those endorphins. But you pay the price with the leg-loading. That’s unique to running.”
Within the endurance world, there is a huge amount of interest in Yee’s approach to what is a unique transition: no triathlete as successful has effectively taken a gap year to target the marathon while, at 27, still in their athletic prime.
Some have even wondered whether his training programme could unlock a new route to marathon success for athletes who struggle with the physical demands of a conventional, high-volume regime.
Even to Yee, this is an “explorative phase” and in making large chunks of his training data available on social media he is encouraging runners at all levels “to come along on the ride”.
Yee’s recent race record makes for an amusing gauge of how he his shaping up. His last two outings are a rapid 28-minute 10km in Valencia, where he admits he would have liked to run a smidge quicker, and a 55-minute 5km at the Bromley Parkrun, where he certainly would have had he not been accompanying his 93-year-old grandfather. (Ever the competitor, he “ummed and ahhed” before handing in the barcode that registers an official time.)
I’m very proud to be where I’m from. I strongly believe that if I’d grown up somewhere else, I wouldn’t be the same athlete I am today.
Ultimately, though, Yee believes he is still in the same ballpark as when “sticking my neck on the line” and declaring he hoped to run between 2:07 and 2:10 at the start of this project. The 2:08-mark, he says, is looking more realistic as a lower end target; only four British men have ever broken it.
Untapped potential
Beyond this weekend, immediate plans are fluid. Yee may return swiftly to triathlon, or continue as a specialist runner through the summer and explore his potential over shorter distances.
He is also considering a second marathon at the back end of the year. Regardless, from the start of 2026 he will return to triathlon full-time to go all-in on defending his Olympic title in 2028. Already he is sure that he will do so a better athlete all-round.
If only part of this endeavour is directly about the “Marathon” bit, though, how much of it is about the “London”?
“Probably quite a lot,” Yee smiles. Born and raised in Lewisham, he ran the Mini Marathon five times as a junior athlete and has “stood over the barriers” to watch numerous renewals of the real thing since.
Last month, he came home to do a course recce and slept in his old bedroom before jogging the mile-and-a-half to the start.
Yee has made the capital a central part of his story and his identity. He talks up the formative influence of local facilities like the Herne Hill Velodrome or the athletics tracks at Crystal Palace and the Ladywell Arena, the latter of which is now named in his honour.
Concerned about accessibility, this summer he has secured backing from the Merchant Taylors’ Foundation to stage a free triathlon for schoolchildren in Lewisham.
“I’m very proud to be where I’m from,” he says. “It moulded me and gave me opportunities. I strongly believe that if I’d grown up somewhere else, I wouldn’t be the same athlete I am today.
“I know a lot of people aren’t going to find triathlon as their ‘why?’, but I want kids to experience as many things as possible.
“I’ve called my charity ‘Lewisham To The World’ because I don’t want it to be about triathlon. I want it to be about people finding their purpose.”
Still, there is nothing like London Marathon Sunday for delivering inspiration, and along a two-way street at that.
Yee will be the best supported athlete on the course and has been visualising sections that will be particularly noisy in a bid to ensure he is not overwhelmed.
“At the same time, I just want to soak it in,” he says. “This has been a bucket list event for me for so long. “As much as I have performance goals, my No1 is to enjoy it, have fun and put a smile on people’s faces. Then, hopefully, I’ll cross the finish line and have a smile on mine as well.”
