Why I’m running London
In April 2027 I’m running the London Marathon for a charity most people need explained to them, so here’s the explanation.
Tucks Travels buys passports. They cover the application for young people whose families can’t easily absorb the cost, then pay for the trip that makes the passport worth having.
My first reaction was probably yours: thin premise for a charity. Roughly half of Americans have never held a passport, and we tend to assume that half just isn’t interested. Plenty aren’t. But a first application runs past $150 a head once the fees and the photo are done, and for a family of four that sits next to all the other real numbers. It loses.
So it doesn’t get filed. Then it doesn’t get filed the next year either. Somewhere in there it stops being a decision about money and becomes a fact about the family: they are not people who go abroad. That’s the bit I keep chewing on.
Why I noticed
I’ve worked in operations for a long time, and most of that job is noticing that the real obstacle is never the one on the status report. It’s a form nobody owns, or an approval step that made sense in 2019 and has been taxing every project since.
You don’t fix those with a strategy. You find the specific thing and remove it, and capability that was already there starts showing up in the work.
The passport is the same shape of problem with a much longer payback. Nothing about the kid changes when the booklet arrives. What changes is that a door they’d stopped checking is open.
Why a marathon
Because I know myself. I could have posted a donation link, some of you would have clicked it, and I’d have thought about it twice more before next summer.
Twenty-six miles is harder to let slide. It puts eight months of training in front of the ask, so anyone deciding whether to give gets to watch me do the hard part first.
The year helps too. London goes to two days for the first time in 2027, Saturday the 24th and Sunday the 25th of April, roughly 100,000 runners over one weekend on the same Greenwich-to-Westminster course. Largest marathon ever staged. Seemed like a reasonable one to pick for a first go.
Where things stand
Base miles through a New York August, at paces I’m not going to publish. Structured training starts in December and I’ll write about it as it happens, including the weeks that go badly.
The fundraising page isn’t open yet. When it is I’ll put it on the London page. If you want to give before then, Tucks Travels takes donations at tuckstravels.org/donate.
And if you’ve run this race: tell me what you wish somebody had told you.