A bit more than year ago I made a deal with Pádraig that he would try really hard to get better and I would try really hard to run the 2013 Dublin Marathon. We both kept the deal and our promises. He tried really hard and I did too.

Then in May of this year, we made a similar deal. This time it was the Hamburg Marathon.

Tomorrow, it will be the third deal for us, and, as with the previous deals, I am sure he will keep his end of the bargain as will I. We will both try very hard.

I told him that I’m ready to do this running lark for as long as it takes – but that I wouldn’t be disappointed too much if tomorrow was the last run of our deal, just in case it turned out that he was going to take a few really big steps towards getting better.

As it happens, tomorrow, it will be 16 months to the day that this 4.3 ton van hit him on what we now know has been a well-know deadly strip of a country road for cyclists and pedestrians – so narrow that a cyclist and a truck do not fit beside each other in one lane, so deadly that they are now investing US$6m to make it safer.

I told Pádraig that I will be running in the company of giants: friends without whom he’d never had got as far as he did, without whom I’d long have been drowned by these relentless tsunamis hitting us for now 16 months.

Someone once told us that this was no sprint, that it was a marathon. They never mentioned that it was not just one, but a whole marathon series.

We’ll keep going. Making deals. Trying really hard. Moving.

Eventually we’ll get there (it’s not about the time it takes, it’s about finishing) – knowing that if we stumble on the way, there will be someone there to help us up. And that makes all the difference!

Thank you to all who wished us well for tomorrow! Good luck to all who’ll be running!