The London Marathon’s Finishing Chute is a Portal—And We’re Missing It

The London Marathon’s Finishing Chute is a Portal—And We’re Missing It

The era of social media influencers is upon us. Gone are the days when working hard for results on and off the track actually meant something.  Todays new age athletes are what can only be described as modern online digital beggars.

Back in the day,  if you wanted a result and wanted to chase a dream, part of the experience was making that dream happen.  Through hard work and commitment at work and at running, dreams became a reality. Nowadays the hunger isnt there for modern athletes as the majority of the races they are entering are not even paid for by themselves!

For five hours, I stood in the shadow of Buckingham Palace, watching a river of humanity spill onto the red carpet of The Mall. This is the London Marathon finish, a place of raw, unfiltered catharsis. I saw runners weep with joy, stumble on weary legs, and cling to loved ones. But I also saw something else, something new: a sea of arms, bent at that now-universal 45-degree angle, holding a phone aloft like a digital talisman.

They weren’t just crossing the finish line; they were framing the shot, recording the reaction, live streaming the triumph. They were physically arriving at one of life’s great destinations while mentally being already elsewhere—uploading, broadcasting, performing.

It struck me that the finishing chute at London isn’t just a line of tape; it’s a temporal portal. For a few precious seconds, you exist between two worlds. Behind you is the 26.2-mile journey: the nervous laughter at Greenwich, the deafening roar at Cutty Sark, the silent, painful battle through the Isle of Dogs. Ahead of you is the rest of your life, forever branded as a marathoner.

But that portal is closing faster than ever. The instinct to immediately document—to prove we were there—is pulling us out of the moment and into the digital ether before we’ve even caught our breath. We’re sacrificing the deep, sensory immersion of the accomplishment for its shallow, external validation. We’re collecting evidence of a experience we were too busy curating to fully feel.

This isn’t about judging individuals. It’s about a cultural shift. The pressure to perform doesn’t start at the finish line; it’s woven into the entire fabric of modern running culture. We train with GPS watches that broadcast our pace to the world, we share our gruelling long runs along the Thames Path, and we meticulously plan our race-day outfits for maximum Instagram impact. The marathon itself can become the final act of a months-long public performance.

I spoke to a friend who ran London this year. She described a bizarre dissonance: the intense physical struggle of the final miles on the Embankment, juxtaposed with the mental calculation of which photo to post first. “I hadn’t even stopped my watch,” she said, “but my brain was already writing the caption.” Her story was no longer just hers; it was content, already being formatted for public consumption.

There’s a loss here. When we outsource our memories to our camera rolls and our sense of achievement to the metric of ‘likes,’ we risk flattening a profound, three-dimensional human experience into a two-dimensional post. The real, messy, painful, glorious truth of a marathon—the private victory that is yours and yours alone—gets edited out in favour of the inspiring, digestible highlight reel and exchanging Free goods for Free mentions.

My challenge, to myself and to anyone who loves this sport, is this: Next time, try to exit the portal first. Let your body and soul fully arrive in that moment of culmination. Feel the medal placed around your neck. Hear the crowd. Taste the air. Let your own eyes, not your phone’s lens, be the first to see the joy on your face.

The video can wait. The post can be later. The story you tell online will still be there. But the story you feel—the private, un-shareable, unforgettable truth of your accomplishment—that has to be lived in real-time. Don’t let the shot for the feed rob you of the memory for your soul. The London Marathon is too grand a stage to spend it staring at a tiny screen.