Ready your meal and eat heartily - for on Sunday we dine in hell.

Well London actually.

At this moment I am sitting in my office, merrily shovelling paella into my mouth. Nothing particularly alarming in that, until you consider that my food intake today has been:

• A large bowl of porridge
• A round of toast & honey
• A chocolate cookie
• The aforementioned paella (large)

Still to come today is a bowl of pasta and probably a couple of other things later on. I love my food, but I'm struggling.

All this is carb-loading for the big day on Sunday. The Virgin London Marathon. And this will be the last blog post before heading down to That There London tomorrow.

It's been a long slog to get here, I worked out some numbers for my training last week that surprised me quite a bit:

• 480 miles run
• 87 hours running said miles
• 58,000 calories burned

The training has been full of highs and lows too:

I was quite surprised at the start of the caper that I could actually run more than a mile without stopping.

I have experienced the joy of running in the warm late summer sunshine through the beautiful Leicestershire countryside and the misery of having to pry myself out of a warm bed to run 15 miles in the freezing cold winter rain.

I have learnt that I run best when I'm angry.

I have seen and heard things on night runs through the city that made me run just a little faster.

I can sometimes be a little competitive.

Sunday's target has taken up a huge amount of my life over the past 6 months or so and by extension has had a significant impact on those around me. The support that I have had has been fantastic and I know that without it I would have had a much harder time keeping going through the winter.

And for those of you that have commented on my "it's-so-tough-running" posts, thank you. You have helped more than you realise too.

Wish me luck!

NDC