You didn't get a Dublin place. Here is what the next twelve months look like

The Irish Life Dublin Marathon took 47,000 applications for 17,200 places this year. The arithmetic is brutal: roughly 30,000 people applied to run a marathon and were told no.

If you were one of them, the useless advice is “there’s always next year”. Here is the useful version.

A year is not a long time. It is exactly the right amount of time

Most people who get into Dublin have somewhere between twelve and eighteen weeks to prepare, because that is when the ballot result lands. You have fifty-two. That is not a consolation prize — it is the single biggest advantage available in distance running, and almost nobody gets it.

Twelve weeks builds a marathon. Fifty-two builds a runner who then builds a marathon.

What to actually do with it

Autumn and winter: get aerobically bigger. Not faster. Bigger. More weeks at a sustainable volume, more easy running, fewer heroic single sessions. The people who improve most over a year are the ones who ran consistently for forty of its weeks, not the ones who had six brilliant ones.

Race the shorter stuff. Ireland has no shortage of 5Ks and 10-milers, and parkrun is every Saturday in almost every town — over half a million people in the Republic are registered, about one in ten. A 5K in February tells you more about your marathon fitness than another long run does.

Pick a spring goal. Not Dublin — something in April, so the winter has a point. It converts twenty weeks of dark evenings from “base training” into “training for a thing”.

The part nobody puts in the plan

The threat to a fifty-two-week build is not injury or motivation. It is November through February, when it is dark before you leave work, the paths are wet or frozen, and the run becomes a negotiation you lose about twice a week.

Two lost sessions a week for four months is roughly thirty runs. That is the whole difference between arriving at next year’s ballot as a better runner and arriving as the same one.

Decide now how you are going to protect those months, because willpower in January is not a plan.

And when the ballot opens again

It will be oversubscribed again. Enter anyway — but do not let a lottery decide whether the year was worth anything.