Children are often inspired by their parents, but Vikki Robertshaw’s motivation was sparked by her two daughters. As she watched them bravely show up to the starting line again and again, often getting excessively competitive and hard on themselves, she realized she “wanted to show them that it’s not all about winning,” she says. Vikki swam competitively as a teenager, but she had never tried running before.
And while she always made it a priority to take her daughters to athletic clubs and races, as a full-time working mom, she never prioritized her own fitness journey. By the time she got the running itch four years ago, her daughters were teenagers, old enough to be left on their own. I just wanted to do something for myself, really,” she says.
Vikki pushed herself to run farther and farther, and at some point signed up for a few half marathons—that’s when she discovered she absolutely loved racing. At the time, “I was running with no real routine or plan at all, just seeing how it went,” she says. But that all changed when she joined a running club and signed up for her first marathon.
Through the club, she started working with a running coach, George Woodburn. So he made it more realistic, and for me to be able to achieve my goals rather than compare myself to other people.” Her coach kept things very simple, advising Vikki to add one weekly track workout to help build her speed, on top of her weekend long run, and outside her easy runs. She kept up this two-key-runs-per-week routine for the four months leading up to her first marathon.
Vikki remembers taking off a bit too fast, propelled by the excitement of her first marathon. As she was running out of steam in the final miles, she serendipitously bumped into her friend Katie—who was running the metric marathon (26.2 kilometers instead of miles, or 16.28 miles)—at the point where the two race courses converged. I’m not sure it would have happened otherwise, but it was like fate that she was there.” At the end of the race, Vikki was overjoyed at her accomplishment—before she even learned about her finishing time of 3:17:20.
She was excited to learn that the time qualified her for the 2026 London Marathon. Leading up to it, she became even more intentional about her training, researching nutrition and including strength training to better support her overall strength and recovery. Before the race, she wrote her splits on her arm—in case her GPS glitched—which helped her maintain a steady pace through each mile.
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