Heart-wrenching beats and record-breaking feats: The day London comes alive
LONDON MARATHON 2026 : Marathon day invariably illustrates the best London has to offer. On a day of elite-level achievement paired with grassroots stories to touch the soul, Kieran Jackson walks the streets and queries: why would we all not want another day of this?
It is unquestionably a day like no other. On marathon morning, dawn breaks crisply over the capital but the city doesn’t so much wake as sparkle into life. Away from the tourist-goers and money-makers of the regular weekday hustle-and-bustle, this is the day that London truly comes alive.
Starting in Blackheath and winding through the city’s east before finishing on the historic Mall, 59,000 people take on the 26. 2-mile challenge of a lifetime. The estimates are that for 93,000 energy gels consumed, £100m will be raised for charitable causes.
And at every juncture, stories that touch the soul heroically stroll by. Each running vest tells a deeper story; each costume a burden bigger than oneself. By Sunday night, a video of Jordan Adams in uncontrollable tears after he crosses the finish line, with a 25kg fridge on his back, had more than 400,000 likes on Instagram.
The 30-year-old is one half of ‘The FTD Brothers’, formed after their mother died of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) at the age of 52. Both Jordan and his brother Cian carry a rare gene linked to FTD, and to raise awareness, Jordan is running 32 more marathons in 32 days across Ireland, starting on Monday. London was just the start.
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