The Scoreboard That Actually Counts

There's no photo of the moment I'm proudest of from London Marathon 2026.

It happened twenty minutes after I crossed the finish line.

I was sat on the pavement behind a drinks table near the meet-and-greet area, leaning against a wall, trying to convince my legs they'd finished. They were having none of it. Every couple of minutes a marshal would come up and ask if I was okay. I'd tell them yes, I just needed a few more minutes. I'd try to stand up. I couldn't. I'd sit back down. The marshal would walk away. Five minutes later the next one would come up.

I'd just run 2:23:03.

Sebastian Sawe had crossed in 1:59:30 about twenty-four minutes earlier. The first sub-two-hour marathon in human history, in a real legal race. The photographers were still up the road getting their shots of him. The gent from the BBC was somewhere doing his interview. Sawe was by all accounts looking fresh. Smiling for the cameras.

I was on the floor.

Eventually a bloke from St John's Ambulance came over for the third time and said mate, we need to actually move you now. I told him I'd love to oblige but my legs had checked out. He helped me up. We walked — slowly, with him taking most of my weight — to the medical tent. They got me a leg massage to bring the body back to life. Then a coke. A cold coke fixes most things after a marathon. After about an hour I could walk again.

That's the bit of the day I'm proudest of.

The clock said I ran my sixth-fastest marathon ever. The St John's Ambulance bloke and the cold coke said something else.

There's exactly one number that gets shared on Strava when you finish a marathon.

The time. Well pace and distance too, but mostly time.

It's also the only number most runners ever use to evaluate the race they just ran. Faster than last time? Good race. Slower than last time? Bad race. That's the whole framework. Twenty-six miles of effort distilled into one number with two possible verdicts.

I get why. The clock is external. It's defensible at the pub. It's the number that goes on your race CV and decides whether you got a championship qualifier. I've used it as my own primary metric for most of my career.

But it's broken as the only metric for one straightforward reason.

The time doesn't tell you what the time cost.

Two runners cross the line at 3:30. Let’s say: one did it on a 16-week build with three 30-mile weeks and a clean taper. The other did it on a build that fell apart twice, no long run over twenty miles, and a taper interrupted by a stomach bug. Same time on the clock. Two completely different races. The first runner got away with something. The second pulled off the most honest thing he'd done all year.

If they both go home and log a 3:30 with the same satisfaction or disappointment, they're both wrong about something.

The clock is a useful number. It's not a complete one.

Here's the bit that surprised me when I started reading into this properly.

Sports scientists have known for years that pace and time are external load — what your watch shows, what the world sees. Heart rate, perceived exertion, the actual physiological cost of the work — that's internal load. The honest one. The one that tells you what the race actually demanded of you.

It's a framework that's been the foundation of pro endurance coaching for fifteen years. Coaches at the top level don't evaluate a session or a race by the splits alone. They look at the splits next to the heart rate, the rating of perceived exertion, the cardiac cost (literally heart rate divided by running speed), the recovery markers in the days after.

There's even an academic finding from a recent study that captures exactly what I'm trying to say better than I can: "Perceived satisfaction provides a more sensitive indicator of performance outcome than finish position."

Translated: how you feel about the race you ran is a more reliable measure of the race you ran than the time on the clock.

I'm not sure I'd put it that strongly. The clock matters. The PB matters. But the academic version is making the same point I'm making. The clock is a useful number, not a complete one. There are honest 3:30s and dishonest 3:30s. The internal load tells you which one you ran.

Sixth fastest on the clock. Second best in honest terms.

Here's the receipt.

When I broke 2:20 at Berlin a couple of years back, I averaged a heart rate of 168 across the marathon. London 2026, I averaged 171. Three beats per minute higher.

Three beats per minute sounds like nothing. Three beats per minute averaged over twenty-six miles is huge. It's the difference between your engine working at 88% of capacity and 91% of capacity. Held for 26.2 miles. Roughly 4,000 extra heartbeats over the course of one race compared to my Berlin 2:19. The London course at 2:23:03 cost me more, biologically, than the Berlin course did at 2:19.

That's not me complaining. That's the receipt.

You can map that to a metric called cardiac cost — heart rate divided by running speed — that sports scientists have used for decades to compare two races by the same runner. It's the cleanest single number for "how hard did this race actually demand I work." Lower cardiac cost equals a more efficient race. Higher cardiac cost equals a more biologically expensive one. London 2026 had a meaningfully higher cardiac cost than Berlin did, despite being a slower time.

I was running slower because the prep wasn't there. I was working harder because I refused to leave anything on the road. Those two sentences are not contradictions. They are the whole point.

The 2:19 in Berlin was a faster time. The 2:23 in London was a more honest race.

And here's the bit that surprises a lot of runners when I say it out loud: I'd rather have one of those a year than three "easy 2:25s" where I left two minutes out there because the prep wasn't honest and I didn't have the discipline to chase what I actually had.

There's a moment in every long career when a runner stops measuring themselves by the clock and starts measuring themselves by depth.

It usually arrives somewhere between the third and fifth year of taking the sport seriously. It often arrives in the wake of a race that should have been a PB on paper but wasn't, despite the runner having done everything right. The runner sits with it for a few weeks. Eventually they realise the race was actually better than the time suggests — the conditions were rougher, the build was thinner, the body was a worse version of itself on the day. The honest internal verdict is that was a bloody good race for what I had to work with.

The first time you have that reframe, your relationship with the sport changes forever.

You stop expecting every race to be linear progress. You start understanding that the version of you on a given race day is the variable, not a constant. You start measuring against that version of you, on that day, in those conditions, with that prep — instead of measuring against your dream self in dream conditions on a dream build that you've never actually had.

You also start training differently. The "I have to PB or this race didn't count" runner makes worse decisions in the build, on the start line, and in the back third. The "depth is part of the metric" runner makes better ones. They go out more conservatively. They negative split more often. They actually finish their races, instead of blowing up at 32K because their target time required them to ignore the body they actually had.

That reframe is the difference between a runner who keeps PB-ing into their 50s and a runner who hits 35 and quietly drops out of the sport because the times stopped going down and they didn't know what else to measure.

You don't need a five-step framework to start using a better scoreboard. You just need three habits.

The first one is to log your heart rate average at every race and stop looking at it in isolation. Compare your HR average at this race to your HR average at the last race. If you ran a slower time at a higher HR, that race was not a worse race. It was a more biologically expensive race, run on a different body. The two numbers don't always go in the same direction. That's the whole point.

The second one is to write a one-line summary of the race the day after, before you've had time to overthink it. Given the prep I actually had, the conditions I actually got, and the body I actually brought to the line — was the time I ran the most I had to give that day, or did I leave something on the road? If the honest answer is the most I had, that's a great race even if the clock disagrees. If the honest answer is I left something out there, that's the work for the next block, regardless of what the clock said.

The third one is to remember that the photo nobody took is sometimes the most useful one. The twenty minutes after the line. Whether you could stand up. Whether you needed help. Whether you finished with anything in the tank, or finished completely empty. None of that goes on Strava. All of it tells you what the race actually was.

Best execution of the day I had — given a build that wasn't built for a PB, on a course that doesn't reward over-pacing, in conditions that asked the question early.

Sixth-fastest marathon of my career on the clock.

Second best on the scoreboard that actually counts.

The harder you work in those moments, the sweeter the post-race feeling is. I've never been as cooked as I was at the line on April 26th. I've also never finished a race more satisfied with how I ran it.

The clock said 2:23:03.

The bloke from St John's Ambulance who walked me to the medical tent said something else.

I think he said it better.

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Boom Shakalaka! 🔥
Coach Nick