As 2011 gathers pace following a sluggish start - I'm speaking personally here - new concerns are playing on my mind.

For instance, having leafed backwards through my new 2011 diary from Sunday, April 17 – when the Virgin London Marathon takes place - I now have a relevant number which is offering me some comfort - 14. The number of weeks I have left to transform myself into someone capable of finishing that race. Comfort. Fear. It alternates.

Numbers have begun to press in on me – How many miles should I run? How often? At what pace? - as I have started to train for an event with which I am in some ways familiar, and in others not at all.

Having covered around 20 London Marathons as a journalist I am now about to experience the race from the other side by joining the struggling throng upon whom I have been wont to gaze down at idle moments from the vantage point of the press centre at the Tower Hotel, a glass of red wine in my hand.

Not that the event has been easy from the press side over the years. I remember once, when we were all based in the Institute of Contemporary Arts building on The Mall, there was a delay of several minutes before a fresh batch of tuna pasta could be prepared for me in the free press restaurant.

On another occasion I recall having to wait almost quarter of an hour beyond the scheduled time before a race winner had the good grace to get themselves over from the finish line to attend their press conference. How the gathered media managed to remain so professionally focused in such circumstances remains a mystery. Red wine may have helped.

Enough, however, of past struggles. And enough, I perhaps hear you say, of my current and future struggle.

I do of course acknowledge that the route I am taking, from marathon observer to participant, is not original. Okay, so it's been done before. But not by me.

Does anybody recognise those last two sentences? They close the prologue to Cliff Temple's Challenge of the Marathon, A Runner's Guide (Stanley Paul, 1981, £4.95), summarising, with characteristic wit and wisdom, the author's sense of achievement after running his first marathon.

Amid a glut of advice from various sources I am finding inspiration in the wry insights of a former friend and colleague who connected so memorably with the sport as a participant, journalist and coach before his untimely and tragic death 17 years ago this month.

The glut? Well, it's turning out like I always feared. The more information you seek on how to achieve the perfect preparation for the marathon, the more you find. Of various kinds.

And anyway I have already left it way too late to attempt the perfect preparation. Even Cliff thinks so. He recommends a minimum preparation time of at least a year before running your first marathon.

But as he swiftly acknowledges, many people have, and will, take less time than that before seeking to complete the distance that was first established at the 1908 London Olympics, when the Royal children wished to see the marathon started on the private lawns at Windsor Castle and their Royal mother, Queen Alexandra, wished to see it finished directly in front of her Royal Box at the White City stadium.

That offers me hope. As Cliff remarks later: "The marathon runner who started his preparation last year may be ahead of you, but if you start now, you'll be ahead of the runner who is going to start next year."

But the numbers! The numbers!

A selection of running magazines purchased on impulse the other evening offer a cacophony of doubtless sound pointers: "Five sessions to help you run faster." "Twelve easy moves to power up your legs." "Drop 10lb in 30 days." "Marathon training: 12-week plans for every level." "Six steps to stay injury free."

Doubtless there are myriad ways forward to a successful experience in a marathon. I have decided to personalise the experience as much as I can by following the guidance of my old friend. Not just any old friend, it should be added, but one who coached runners to Olympic finals and indeed guided the progress of the young man who won the 1983 London Marathon, Mike Gratton.

There are several suggested training schedules in Cliff's book – information which also has a place in his later publication Marathon, Cross Country and Road Running (Stanley Paul, 1990, £9.99).

I don't exactly fit any of the categories – I'm not a rank beginner, I'm not an active club athlete, and somehow I think I am not an ambitious international runner. The 2011 Virgin London Marathon – I'm not in it to win it.

But there are kernels of good sense lying in so many of the paragraphs as Cliff reiterates the essential formula: hard work plus rest equals success.

The nub of things for me seems to lie in his discussion of an American theory which holds that the point at which a marathon will become massively difficult arrives at three times the daily average mileage a runner has put in over the previous two months.

Which means, essentially, that if one wishes to avoid such a "collapse point" over 26 miles, one needs to be averaging a third of the distance – say nine miles to be safe – per day for the eight weeks preceding.

Nine miles a day. That's 63 miles a week, and way more than I've ever run. It's something to aim at. But then I'm the wrong side of 50. Does that change things? Cliff? Cliff?

We'll have to see. Whatever the weather, I will try and hold to the more general advice offered elsewhere in that particular chapter: "We all have days when we don't feel like training, but the marathoner has to accept that his or her feelings may change maybe three or four times during the course of a single long run, as they might in a race."

The marathoner. That's what I want to be now. I can sense the race ahead of me, exciting and frightening, like an ocean. Please don't let me get injured running down the beach...

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the last five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames