Charlie Marshall will line up for this year’s Cheltenham Half Marathon in the knowledge that he’ll be back home well in time for Sunday lunch.

The 40-year-old married dad-of-two lives in the heart of the town and he told The Local Answer: “It’s great, I’ll be back before midday.”

Sunday’s race gets under way at 9am – it starts and finishes at Cheltenham Racecourse – and Marshall, who has lived in Cheltenham since 2007, is a big fan of the event.

“It’s one of the best supported half marathons,” he said. “It gets really good crowds. I’ve run the Stroud and Bath half marathons, Cheltenham is really well supported.”

This will be the third time he has taken part in the event and the Western Tempo runner is hoping to go close to his best time over 13.1 miles.

“I’d like to run sub 85 minutes,” he said. “My best at Cheltenham is around 87 but my PB for the distance of under 85 was set at Stroud.

“Cheltenham isn’t the quickest course but I ran the London Marathon this year and I feel in good form, I did a lot of training for that race.”

That was the first, and so far only, time that he has run a marathon and he finished in the excellent time of three hours, four minutes, 54 seconds.

“I was quite keen to go under three hours but I was quite happy, it was a good for age time,” he said. “Running the London Marathon was always on the bucket list.”

So did he enjoy it?

“I don’t know if I enjoyed it,” he laughed. “I enjoyed the first half and the atmosphere was amazing. So many people come out to support the race.”

Marshall says he “probably will” run another marathon, although he readily admits that his preferred distance is 5K.

“I like it because it’s a short race and you have to push hard from the start,” he said.

He likes half marathons too but isn’t such a fan of the 10K.

“I can never seem to get the pace right for a 10K,” he admitted. “I either go off too fast at 5K pace or too slow at half marathon pace.”

He still has a PB for the distance of 38.45 and his best over 5K is 18.06, which is pretty good going, especially when you consider that he has only been a club runner for the past four years or so.

“I was a good cross-country runner when I was at primary school,” said the former Wycliffe College pupil. “But when I went to Wycliffe in year 9, cross-country clashed with football and I chose football even though I wasn’t very good at it.”

So what got him back into running?

“I took it up when my daughter Elodie was born,” he said.

“I hadn’t done much exercise since leaving Wycliffe. I needed to do something and I wanted my kids to see me doing something.”

He ran a handful of parkruns and then joined Cheltenham Harriers, explaining: “I wanted to beat 20 minutes in the 5K.”

That was ticked off a long time ago, of course, and now Elodie, her three-year-old brother Felix, and their mum Anna will be hoping that dad can tick off another milestone by setting a PB on Sunday.

Anna is decent at sport herself and will compete in the Cheltenham Triathlon on Sunday 17th September.

“She’s run the Cheltenham Half in the past. She ran one hour, 45 which at the time was a better time than I had,” her husband laughed. “She said that it was one of the reasons I was motivated to run the race!”