Sports pyschologist Dr Josephine Perry writes about the courage and mental skill involved in laying it all on the line to chase a big target.

You need a lot of bravery and some valuable mental skills to run a sub-two-hour marathon. The brain’s threat system is constantly scanning for things that might hurt you or your identity. The key “buckets” of threats that can show up and trigger the threat system will be physical, physiological, psychological and social threats.

A marathon, even at 2:50 per km pace, is physically pretty safe. Unlike Pheidippides - considered to be the very first marathon runner, in 5th century BC, who delivered his message to Athens and promptly died - risk of death now is very very low. Physiologically however, when running at sub-two marathon pace, there is a lot of distress going on inside the body and most of us would slow down long before hitting this level of discomfort, if we were even able to get there in the first place.

To enhance the ability to override the threat system triggering when dealing with that level of physiological distress, an athlete needs to be able to notice the discomfort but choose to try anyway. This is bravery.

They will often do this along the lines of the psychobiological theory of sports performance from Professor Sam Marcora. It suggests that in order to be able to push ourselves to this level and override the extensive fatigue that it is likely Sawe would have been feeling, he would first need to max out his motivation and then reduce perception of effort.

The kudos, fame and finances that come with winning the London Marathon would absolutely provide motivation. And not just motivation for himself but others; he said he will use the money to build his parents a house and construct a church for his community.

When you have maxed out your motivation the next step is to reduce your perception of effort. There are lots of tools for this. We all do many of these in advance; training hard at different intensities, fuelling and hydrating well, making our bodies feel bulletproof with strength and conditioning, mobility and prehab work, decent sleep and good recovery. Mentally we might have done some adversity training, reduced mental fatigue and read through our training diary to remind ourselves of all the efforts we have made.

In the race itself some physical elements like knowing you have the super shoes or you are taking caffeine in gels help but then it is all about the mental skills; having visualised those difficult moments, being able to body scan and check you are maintaining your form, chunking the distance into smaller parts and having goals or a focus for each section, knowing what your coach would be reminding you about and, every time the brain worries about something outside of your control, pulling it back to what can be controlled.

And once someone, or two runners in this case, show what is possible then vicarious confidence can kick in for others where they can visually see that the barrier has been broken and that it is possible. This knowledge means we should expect to see others breaking two very soon.

Read the Sub-two special edition of AW magazine, out now