London, April 2027

Tucks Travels is a small nonprofit in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. They pay for a young person’s first passport, then for the trip that makes it worth having.

About half of Americans have never held a passport, and the usual assumption is that they’d rather stay home. Some would. But a first application runs past $150 a head once the fees and the photo are done, and for a family of four that competes with the car repair. It loses.

So it doesn’t get filed, and after enough years nobody in the house thinks of themselves as someone who goes abroad. That’s the part that gets me.

London runs over two days for the first time in 2027, Saturday 24 and Sunday 25 April, with around 100,000 people covering the same course across the weekend. It should be the biggest marathon anyone has staged.

I’m at the unglamorous end of that right now: slow miles through a New York summer. Proper training starts in December, and I’ll write about it here, including the weeks that go badly.

If you’ve run London and have advice, I want it.

The fundraising page isn’t up yet. When it is, the button below will take you to it.