Paula Radcliffe: My journey to my final London Marathon

It is time to say goodbye. Paula Radcliffe will battle with her body one last time on Sunday, force it to cover a daunting distance on a course where she once took the breath away. Like all farewells, her London Marathon hurrah will be painful and emotional.

Here, the women's marathon world record holder talks about her final journey, from fearing she would never run again to finally being able to achieve the swansong she craved and needed.

One of the greatest female distance runners in history is no longer shuffling on crutches or wobbling in a surgical boot.

Now the miserable months spent getting around on a mobility scooter is just a memory. She doesn't have to psyche herself up to walk 200m to collect her daughter, Isla, from school anymore. Those worst of days are over but so too, she fears, is her ability to do what was once as natural to her as flying is for birds: run.

Shortly after she withdrew from the London Olympics, forced to tearfully watch the women's marathon from a hotel room, Radcliffe underwent a bone graft on an 18-year-old stress fracture.

Eight months on and the pioneer of women's marathon running can now put one foot in front of another, a minor triumph, and is ready to up the ante, increase the tempo. But only for a few minutes.

"My first run back was literally a five-minute jog and it's been a gradual process governed by how my foot was recovering," Radcliffe tells BBC Sport.

"If I walked for an hour I could do a couple of minutes jogging. It's then I started to appreciate what a gift it is just to be able to run."

The woman whose iron-willed work ethic meant she ran 140 to 150 miles a week during her pomp has been reduced to gingerly trotting in the park at an octogenarian's pace. But it doesn't matter because this is progress.

Radcliffe, a woman with gravel in her guts, a runner accustomed to kicking through the pain barrier like a mule, is learning to be patient.

She is trying to appreciate teeny-weeny improvements, trying to keep perspective. But for an athlete whose average pace per mile when she broke the marathon world record in 2003 was five minutes and 13 seconds, some days - perhaps inevitably - feel like "crap".

Her left foot is still only as flexible as a lamppost, but 2014 is the year the athlete who inspired millions finally tests her aching tendons and ts on the road, a surface where she proved herself to be the finest female to have ever raced over 26.2 miles of asphalt.

"My foot prefers to have a little change in surface, running on grass and soft surfaces, because it likes to be able to move around," Radcliffe explains.

"Because I've gone from being genuinely scared I might have to get my foot fused and never be able to run again, I've had to be patient. It's been difficult not pushing myself because I'm quite good at pushing myself."

Every night, once her two children have gone to bed, Radcliffe's husband, Gary, will massage his wife's arthritic foot for an hour or so. The foot will clunk and it will click, she says, but there's been an improvement. The former marathon world champion can now jog for 10 minutes.

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