Go for Green

This year’s London Marathon saw more than one first! Yes, Sabastian Sawe may have broken the two hour barrier, but this was also the first year that the London Marathon provided air quality data for runners and tracked the levels during the event.

And provided by… you guessed it, Air Aware Labs!

After writing about the impact of high ozone last year, we were very excited with the event organisers contacted us about bringing data and recommendations to runners this year. We provided insights on best routes and times for elites in the run up to the event, a bespoke app for all runners and information for the big screen at the Green team start.

Of the 59,000 runners, we were particularly cheering on a few with connections to this blog! Mete Coban, Deputy Mayor covering environment, was running and posted on air quality before the start. Hannah Cox, officially superwoman, not only due to completing 100 marathons in 100 days across India, was running because she hadn’t run enough (!) - and she’s on the final push to raise £1m for the planet. And Air Aware Labs’ chief scientist and co-founder, Will’s, father was also out on the track despite injuries!

A good reminder of why we were there to raise awareness of air quality:

→ Every 1 µg/m³ rise in fine particulate matter slows male runners by 32 seconds and female runners by 25 seconds (Brown University, 2.5m runners analysed)
→ Marathon runners inhale 10–20× more air per minute than at rest
→ 46% of the global population lives in areas where particulate matter is high enough to cancel out the health benefits of regular exercise.

Luckily in London, the road closures and general environmental improvements have made it a relatively clean and health route. This year the ozone was looking potentially high again but came down with the change of weather before the day - we will be analysing this more over the coming weeks.

Where next? One of the pictures above shows us chatting to a colleague working on the Athletics for a Better World standard which includes air quality. This is a new requirement for global events so we are hoping and expecting London to be in the vanguard.