Are you suffering from trouble sleeping, phantom leg pains and reoccurring dreams? Then you too may be suffering from taper madness. Don’t worry though, it’s 100% curable with just one dose of running a marathon. I’m booked in for treatment on Sunday and I’m told it will take about 4 hours.

It can’t come soon enough. Last night, in my dream, I was struggling to put on my running shoes so I could run away from the T-Rex that was about to crash through the roof of my parents’ house. For some reason dream me had decided that Vibrams would be best for running away from a dinosaur, which meant a 10 minute delay as I tried to get my toes into their specific compartments. This, in retrospect, was not the best decision I’ve made in a dream. It doesn’t take Frasier Crane to decipher the meaning here: scary dinosaur = the marathon.

But at least I am managing to sleep, which is good because between not running and not drinking I’m at a loss for things to do. Last night I managed a good nine hours sleep – go me! That will soon stop as we get closer to Sunday, so I’m soaking up every available bit of sleep I can get. Leg pains have been a problem though. This week alone I’ve self diagnosed myself with everything from a ruptured achilles to gangrene – top tip: don’t do that image search if you want to hold on to your breakfast.

As I enter the final stage of taper madness I can look forward to one last symptom: the urge to run 26.2 miles. I’m expecting that to arrive sometime on Friday lunchtime but to have conveniently disappeared by Sunday morning. There’s also carb loading to get through – which, I found last year, isn’t as fun as you might think. To make it even less fun I’m be repeating my photo food diary this week so you can see every last Jaffa Cake.