As the first of the Bournemouth AC road runners group to take on their 2025 spring marathon, Louis Suggett was striving for success in Limassol, Cyprus.

Working hard to get into the best possible shape he could, Louis attended some of the Wednesday night marathon group sessions and put in some good long runs to help prepare him for challenge he would face on the big day.

He’d shown some impressive potential in the marathon sessions, often being one of the faster members there despite not even having a Garmin watch to view his pace on.

The only problem for Louis was that with the Limassol Marathon taking place over a month before the London Marathon, he didn’t get the chance to go through the full schedule. He’d done what he could though in the time that he had but wouldn’t know until the day itself whether he had done enough to achieve his target.

What he was hoping for, ideally was a sub 2 hour 50 minute time. That was no easy task but Louis certainly possessed the speed and strength to make it a realistic prospect. What it would really boil down to would be whether he had the stamina and the endurance to sustain that sort of pace for the duration of the run.

The course for the Limassol Marathon started at the centre of the city and first headed in a westerly direction for the first 10k before turning and heading back to the city centre. After that it followed the seafront along the Mediterranean coastline in an easterly direction going up to 19 miles before turning and heading back to the city centre where the finish lay in wait.

It was mostly a flat course with only a couple of slight inclines but nothing majorly taxing. The Marathon race started at 7am so it the temperature was quite cool at first but it got warmer as the race progressed, ending at about 20 degrees.

Louis was aiming to get to the half way stage in 1 hour 24 minutes which would give him a realistic chance of getting the time he craved. Going through 10.3km in 40:51, he then went on to reach the 18km point in 1:12:58. It was going okay at that stage and he’d settled into a group that seemed to be going at the right sort of pace.

Unfortunately things started to derail for Louis after 25k when the group disintegrated and all manner of pains and stitches began to appear. Reaching 27.9km in 1:51:48, he was now in for tough ending to the race.

Making it to 30.4km in 2:20:58, he was then hit by some pretty deep muscle fatigue. That slowed him down significantly but he had the character and the commitment to keep going. Reaching 38.4km in 2:39:50 he now had less the 4km to grind out.

Going over the finish line in 2 hours 57 minutes and 19 seconds, he’d still come away with a very good time, albeit some way off the time he was targeting. A sub three marathon is never a bad result though but a first half of 1:24 and the second half of 1:33 tells its own story about his pacing strategy.

There were certainly lessons to be learned though and with hindsight, Louis realises that he probably didn’t practice marathon pace enough in his long runs and didn’t really do enough weeks of training beforehand. He also hadn’t done any half marathons or 20 mile races in the build up so it was difficult to assess what sort of pace he might be capable of.

That said, it was good to get back in the groove for Louis as his last road marathon was six years ago. He’d also finished 20th out of 652 who successfully completed the course so from a wider perspective, it was an excellent result and one that the vast majority of runners would be well satisfied with.

There were quite a few British runners out there, including Nick Bester who has a massive social media following and has his own running group based in London. He’d taken his group out to Cyprus on a training camp so he was doing Limassol as a training run, with the London Marathon being his main target race.

He ran the first ten miles at around 5:50 pace, then moved up the gears to around 5:35 for the next nine miles. Then he started to lift it to around 5:20 pace for the remainder of the race which took him to the line in 2 hours 28 minutes and 53 seconds.

The only man who could beat that was Cypriot local Giorgos Tofi who got round in 2:27:50. Michael Taylor of St Neots Riverside finished third in 2:30:25. A further three runners got inside 2 hours 35 minutes.

Daniel Beazley of Biship’s Stortford finished 12th in 2:51:31 and Alex Revell of Nick Bester’s group got round in 2:56:07 which put him in 17th place. Andrew Hodding of London City finished just in front of Louis in a time of 2:56:56.

Cypriot woman Eleni Ioannou was first female, completing the course in 2:54:42 which put her in 14th position overall.

Louis knows that with a more thorough training block and a more conservative but consistent pace on the day, he has the ability to go much quicker and there’s every chance that he could contest for a sub 2:50 next time. Now he’s had a taste of it, he’ll certainly be keen to go again.