I keep my old race medals in a jar tucked away in a cupboard. From small local races to marathons that's where they stay. To the causal observer they are nothing more than a tacky souvenir. The running equivalent of taking a trip to London and coming back with a small plastic figure dressed up as a guard of Buckingham Palace.

However each piece of metal has its own story. Whether its a new personal best, a new distance attempted for the first time or the time that everything that could have gone wrong did. Contained in that jar is a timeline of my progress. There are times when I start to take the medals for granted but when my wife starts showing them to guest with pride I remember why I have keep them.

Recently I have been looking on ebay to see if I could pick up one of the rain jackets sent to those unlucky in the ballot. So far There hasn't been one of the right size for me but if I had so wished my medal collection could have grown dramatically. It doesn't surprise me that people might want to sell their old medals, I haven't so many at present so each one has quite a high value to me personally, but after a long running career who knows?

But who buys these medals? There doesn't seem to be a shortage of bidders. Maybe a few are collectors of marathon memorabilia? Are there such people? Or are these people who want to say they have run the marathon and blag about it without having to run a single mile? I wonder what times they say they finished in. What stories of pain they come up with. Do they say they had to put month upon month of training in or do they pretend that they were so super human and did it on next to no training what so ever and still made it around all the same. Who knows, but at the end of the day its still them that are missing out.