Paula Radcliffe reveals the poignant purpose for why this yr’s London Marathon might be her most emotional ever… despite the fact that she’s not even working it!

As Britain’s most successful marathon runner, Paula Radcliffe has crossed many a finishing line during her 30-year sporting career.

While some were record-breaking wins, none will be as emotionally significant as when she takes her place on The Mall at this year’s London Marathon.

In fact, the former professional athlete and BBC Sports commentator says, it will be perhaps her proudest moment: Not, this time, as a competitor, but as a mother.

For running headlong into her open arms will be her 17-year-old daughter, Isla, who hopes to follow in her mother’s well-trodden footsteps to complete her first ever 26.2-mile race.

And that poignant moment will mark the end of another, far more brutal trial – one which, for the past four years, has taken a gruelling toll on the whole family and on Isla, in particular.

In the summer of 2020, Isla, then 13, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in one ovary.

The weeks and months that followed shattered the family’s ordinary, happy existence – there was surgery, and repeated bouts of chemotherapy that left the teenager ill and exhausted, and caused her to lose her hair. 

Ms Radcliffe, too, struggled with an awful, nagging sense of misplaced guilt that she was somehow responsible for her daughter’s illness as well as the difficulty of maintaining normal life for her son Raphael, now 14, and husband Gary Lough.

Indeed, as she acknowledges today, it’s been a marathon of a rather more personal, emotional kind.

Today, however, there is cause for optimism – and relief. Isla is now clear of the disease, and is planning to run the marathon in April – which her mother has won three times – to raise funds for the charity Children with Cancer UK in honour of the support they provided to the whole family during her illness.

For the 51-year-old, who is commenting on the race for the BBC, it will be ‘really emotional’.

She is in tears even thinking about it; there will ‘definitely’ be more when her daughter crosses the finish line. ‘I have told her I will be there at the end for her,’ she says, in an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday.

‘Isla wants to make a difference – she just came out and told me she is doing it. It will be wonderful.’

Ms Radcliffe, one of the most recognisable names in British athletics who retired from professional sport after the 2015 London Marathon, knows all the tips and tricks to overcome most physical and psychological barriers. It has led her to extraordinary, record-breaking success.

For 16 years, she held the women’s world marathon record, has won both the London and New York races three times and, in 2002, was awarded BBC Sports Personality of the Year – the first woman to take the gong in a decade. But nothing, she says, could have prepared her for her daughter’s cancer diagnosis.

Like thousands of other families during the Covid pandemic, she and Gary, a former British middle-distance runner who has coached Sir Mo Farah, had bought their children a trampoline for the garden of their home near Nice, in the south of France, to keep them occupied. Ms Radcliffe lost her father, Peter, to congestive heart failure in April 2020.

When Isla complained that using the trampoline was causing her to keep needing to go to the toilet, her mother was not unduly troubled.

‘Like many kids at the time she was jumping around so I gave her pelvic floor exercises to do,’ she said. ‘She was also going to the gym because she felt like her tummy was getting bigger.’

Isla had also complained of being tired, and was moodier than usual. But as a young teen who had recently started puberty, they were easy symptoms to dismiss.

What did cause Ms Radcliffe concern was when Isla’s menstrual cycle shortened to every two weeks and involved abnormally heavy, dark blood.

A GP said there was nothing to worry about, but by August the teenager was taken to see a paediatrician. From there, the reaction was swift.

‘They felt the lump [in her stomach] and sent us immediately for a scan the next morning,’ Ms Radcliffe recalls. ‘Then they sent us to the hospital in Nice where Isla had all sorts of MRI scans.

‘At that point we knew there was a mass there but we didn’t know what it was.’

Trying to be optimistic, Ms Radcliffe reasoned it could be a dermoid cyst, a fluid-filled sac which can develop when babies are still in the womb and which contains tissue from developing teeth, hair and skin. She herself had had one removed when she was in her 20s.

But the following day, they received the news they had been dreading: Isla had a rare tumour known as a germ cell cancer in one of her ovaries. Her frequent toilet trips on the trampoline were because the tumour was pressing on her bladder when she jumped; the exhaustion also linked to the growing mass in her abdomen.

Recalling that day is hard for Ms Radcliffe, even now.

‘The minute you hear that, everything goes crazy in your mind,’ she says. ‘As a mother you think, ‘Did I do something wrong? Did I sit in the wrong place? Did I use my phone too much when I was pregnant?’ But in reality, it’s just a tiny little defective gene that could be hereditary.’ 

Impacting just 55 children in the UK every year – and making up just 4 per cent of all childhood cancers – the tumours develop in immature cells known as germ cells in the testicles or ovaries which would ordinarily turn into sperm or eggs.

They usually affect people up to the age of 30. The family went to discuss the diagnosis with Isla’s doctor the following day, having agreed not to tell their daughter what was going on until they understood the full picture. ‘The doctor brought me in to explain it,’ Paula says. 

‘Then she brought Isla in – but Isla knew something was wrong because I was in tears. I was trying to be strong for her.

‘As a 13-year-old, she did phenomenally well to process it all. First, the doctor had to explain what the ovaries were. She was actually relieved. She didn’t process the fear part as much as I did but she was like, ‘At least I know I’m not making up these symptoms’.’

The doctors explained that Isla would need chemotherapy to shrink the tumour and kill the cancer cells, and then surgery to remove the affected ovary.

Fortunately, they were assured, the prognosis was good and that the overwhelming likelihood was that the cancer would be cured. ‘The naivety of children is sometimes an advantage,’ Ms Radcliffe says. ‘If you were to ask her what her biggest fear was when she was first diagnosed, it wasn’t that she might die, but that she really didn’t want to lose her hair.’

Isla had seen her grandmother – Ms Radcliffe’s mother, Pat – lose her hair amid a battle with breast cancer. After a mastectomy and chemotherapy, she is still in remission today. ‘Isla asked me later if that made her really shallow, but that was the child in her,’ Ms Radcliffe says. The three rounds of chemotherapy were tough.

Isla would spend a week at a time in hospital for consecutive days of treatment, which each took seven hours. Because of Covid restrictions, her parents were not allowed to be at her bedside at the same time.

Each treatment was then followed by three weeks at home during which she would recover before the next round of chemo began. If her white blood cell count dropped – a sign the immune system is weak, which means the body is at greater risk from an infection – they would have to wait longer until the next treatment. ‘That was really hard,’ 

Ms Radcliffe says. ‘Looking back, Isla dealt with it by basically hiding in a big fluffy pink hoodie someone had given her for the treatment. She would bury herself in it and only talk to her friends when she felt like it.

‘She watched lots of movies, read a lot, and we didn’t push her to do anything. We just let her call the shots. I think that was her way of managing her energy.’

For her parents there was also a ‘huge amount of guilt’ that they had to prioritise Isla over Raphael.

‘He was really young when she was diagnosed, just a couple of weeks short of his tenth birthday,’ says Ms Radcliffe. ‘So he was starting to process it then. It was really hard for him.

‘We had to sit him down and explain that cancer was a big, scary word, but the doctors were telling us she was going to be OK. She just needed a lot of support through it all.’

In fact, their relationship throughout it all was, Ms Radcliffe recalls, hugely touching. ‘One of the nicest things Raphael did was when Isla started losing her hair.

‘She didn’t want to acknowledge it at first, but eventually it started falling out in clumps. It would become matted, and she’d cry about it. On one of those days, we went to pick him up from school, Isla wearing a baseball cap.

‘He looked at her, smiled, and said, ‘I can fix it.’ Little things like that really touched our hearts.

‘He’d also gently comb her hair out when it got matted and say, ‘Just making sure it’s all smooth before I go out.’ It was such a lovely, supportive thing for him to do.’

But the whole family rallied around their little girl. When Isla struggled to enjoy her usual favourite foods, and began to crave kiwi fruit, Ms Radcliffe went out for a run to try to find some.

‘It was a funny moment because I had my credit card in my back pocket and had to carry the kiwis in my T-shirt and tuck them into my shorts to get them back to her.

‘It was all about managing that situation and trying to keep the humour alive.’

An operation to remove the affected ovary in November 2020 was successful and, since then, Isla has had regular scans to make sure the cancer hasn’t returned. In 2021, she needed further exploratory surgery when a shadow was found on her remaining ovary but no further cancer was found.

Although all signs are positive, the implications for her future led Isla to seek therapy, which was provided by Children with Cancer UK. Uncertainties include whether the disease might return again, and also whether Isla will still be able to conceive with one ovary.

But thanks to the charity’s support, Isla is now looking forward to her future. It has also led Ms Radcliffe to become a trustee of the charity – and, she confesses, she is planning to come out of retirement herself to run two marathons this year, in Tokyo and Boston, to raise money for the organisation.

Tomorrow she will also launch a 16-week limited podcast series designed to accompany the London Marathon training plan for competitors, alongside Team GB 10,000m runner Chris Thompson.

It will include lots of hints and tips for budding runners from one of the best in the business – which, no doubt, Isla will take advantage of herself when she limbers up in London.

The only difference today is that neither Isla, nor her mother, will be worrying about their time.

‘She just wants to get round the race to help others,’ said a beaming Ms Radcliffe.

Episode one of Paula’s Marathon Run Club will be released on all podcast platforms tomorrow.