Come with me on a journey into the unknown, along a road I've never travelled, the road that will hopefully take me to Blackheath Common on a Sunday morning in April, to compete in the London Marathon. Hopefully I'll be unscathed and ready to do battle against whatever the capital can throw at me. This will be an account of that journey, part travelogue, part biography, part comedy, part tragedy. Certainly not a guide on how to train for and run a marathon but a guide on how I've trained and run a marathon via training runs around some of the blackest parts of the Black Country, via warm up races to the final show down culminating in a finish on The Mall. A story of training miles and training mates, a story for runners and non runners, for those who run and those who just watch others run. A club runners odyssey towards 26.2 miles.