She wants to run fast, sure, but mostly she just wants to finish.

She will line up and run with the masses and, for once, carry a similar mentality to them. On Sunday, though, Radcliffe will get a taste of what it feels like to be ordinary, as this race brings the curtain down on a marathon career that was anything but. It’s a time that still puts her three minutes ahead of everyone else in history, a vast chasm of superiority. It will, however, almost certainly be her last marathon-a 26.2-mile sayonara to the daunting distance she so often pummelled over the years, never more famously than the day in 2003 when she reeled off 5:10 miles on the streets of London like they were going out of fashion and set the current world record of 2:15:25. It won’t be a goodbye to racing, either, for she still sees an occasional 10K or half marathon jaunt in her future. “I want to give back to the sport,” she says. It won’t be goodbye to the sport between media work for the BBC, supporting Seb Coe on his campaign for IAAF presidency, and being an ambassador for several brands, she still plans to work in running. In terms of Paula Radcliffe, professional athlete, the time has come to say goodbye. She may have taken women’s marathon times into outer space, but the subsequent fall to earth has left collateral damage on her body that time alone cannot heal. Then other days you’re running along and it feels like your body doesn’t want to move in the same direction.” “Some days you’re running along and it feels like 10 years ago,” she says. She turned 41 just before Christmas, and while Radcliffe certainly doesn’t look it, the evidence is there, manifesting itself in the form of pain-tendons that occasionally creak like a rusty gate, joints that sometimes ache like those of a woman twice her age, muscles which once flexed like rubber bands but now stretch with the rigidity of a fisherman’s rope. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play

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