The deeply personal reason James Norton is running the London Marathon and the ‘grim’ moment he hopes to avoid

Despite being best known as the bad guy in Happy Valley, James Norton is, in fact, very lovely.

The actor joined RW for a special podcast to discuss how he’s preparing for this year’s London Marathon, which will be his marathon debut. We dug into his slightly unorthodox training, why he loves cold water so much, why carb loading as a type 1 diabetic is just everyday life, why being type 1 and doing hard things is very important to him, plus plenty more.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Have you always been a runner?

‘I’ve had it in the background of my life. Back when I was at school, I was a cross-country runner. I actually did run a little bit competitively when I was really young, so I was okay at running. I always did well in the school race, but I was always the kid at the end who’s throwing up at the finish line. Do you know what I mean? I pushed myself too hard, probably beyond my means.

‘I’ve never been an obsessive runner. I’ve never kind of got the proper addiction, but I’m running the London Marathon in three weeks – my first marathon.’

How did that come about?

‘A friend of mine signed me up for the Beachy Head Half Marathon last year as a birthday present. Can you believe that? It’s an aggressive birthday present! So he takes me and a couple of other friends, signs us all up and then gets to sort of trot along in front, being like, “Come on guys!” He knew deep down that I’d like it and he was right. I got a time of 1:45 – and that was the galvanising thing to step up in January and start training.’

What considerations does a type 1 diabetic need to make when marathon training?

‘It is a bit of a picnic being a type 1 diabetic and running a marathon, to be honest. I was worried that it was gonna be a bigger thing to navigate, but actually it has been okay. I think that it’s massively changed now because of the tech. I’ve got a pump and a Dexcom. The pump drips a little bit of insulin into my body every few minutes. The Dexcom is a sensor, which gathers all my data, how my glucose levels are doing and so on – and then it adapts how much insulin to put in. It’s like a mechanical pancreas, really.

‘Only five years ago, I was finger-pricking. I’ve seen type 1 diabetics doing marathons, running along trying to get blood out of their finger and putting it on the test strip, which is what I used to do. So this is a big improvement!

‘Obviously, there is an attritional challenge with the marathon. After you get to that, like, 30km point, your body’s just so deprived of glucose. What I have to be really careful of is not going hypoglycaemic.

‘Having a ‘hypo’ as a diabetic is grim. Your body just shuts down. Your brain is starved of sugar. You get really confused, discombobulated – it’s like a bad psychedelic trip. You’re in a hole and it’s horrible. So it’s very hard to get out of that if you’re running. You have to really slow your pace down, get loads of glucose on board, then kind of start again and get the momentum up, which is the last thing that you want to do in a marathon.

‘The key thing is just constantly being aware of where your glucose levels are at, in the same way that you’d be looking at your watch and checking your time. It’s just another piece of data which you have to be mindful of.

‘It’s all about the prep as well. The last part of my training will be replicating the day exactly as it would be: getting up 5am and doing my insulin, then sorting the big amount of insulin that I need to do for my breakfast, which allows me to get some carbs on board, but making sure that when I run there’s no insulin on board at all. I can put all this [points to insulin pump] in activity mode, so it knows that I’m doing a long distance run and won’t constantly keep giving me insulin.

‘There are things that you can do to limit the risks of the hypo, like carb counting, which is what I do on a daily basis. I look at how much I’m eating and then think, what am I doing immediately after this? Am I gonna go for a run or am I just going to be sitting at a desk? And then I work out how much insulin to put in my body. As I start the race, I want my glucose levels to be between seven and 12 and hopefully kind of on the rise, so that I can just keep hitting the gels. It’s the same thing with anyone. I just have to be really careful that I don’t crash. Because if I crash, it’s gonna be hard to get out of that that hole.’

Runners seem to be fascinated by grams of carbohydrate per hour, but I guess that’s everyday life for you?

‘It is everyday life for me. I’m constantly carb counting. I’m constantly looking at a meal and working out how much insulin I need and also taking into account exercise. As a diabetic, it’s really hard to not run on a fast – the easiest time to run is first thing in the morning before you’ve eaten, because if you’ve got no insulin on board, you naturally release a lot of glucose when you need it. So most of my training has been done on a fast. I can’t do marathon on a fast. I have to have some carbs on board, so it’s all about timing. It’s getting up early, it’s having a big dose of easy carbs and then, hopefully, by the time the race happens, I’m all good.’

How’s the training going?

‘I met a guy, Shane Benzie – he’s an amazing specialist in movement, who works with all the East African runners. He videos you and he breaks down your form and gives you sequencing to be mindful of – where you’re planting your foot, how you’re springing off the leg movement, your chest bow. Basically, everything that you take for granted as a runner. He showed me on my Garmin every piece of data that I could be aware – my stride, contact time – down to milliseconds and my mind was blown. But also, I’m like, dude, I’ve got enough numbers in my life! Do you know what I mean? I can’t be doing with another set of data. I’ve basically been a little bit immune to going too deep into the running thing.

‘Similarly, with nutrition, my attitude to diabetes has always been, there’s always more that I could be doing in terms of researching and I could be weighing out every bowl of porridge, but I just don’t do that. And similarly with the running, my nutrition strategy is if I can survive a 30km run, my sugars are somewhere between seven and 12 and I’m finishing, I’m good.’

Have you tried anything else?

‘I’ve started doing reformer Pilates, which I really, really love. I’ve got a great studio near me and I try to get at least one of those in a week because of various hip stuff. I’ve got terrible flexibility in my hips, but a great physio called Rob Madden, who I’ve worked with for a long time, has been giving me a lot of conditioning work to protect my hips and build core strength. It’s great but it adds a lot of time! Every run now is coupled with an hour of conditioning in the morning, activating all the hip muscles – so it’s lots of band work and a lot of core work, just to get it all activated, then a lot of stretching afterwards to sort of calm it down.

‘I’m also a real advocate of cold water. I do that every day. I like saunas, too – cold and sauna. I’m trying to do that most days. The sauna I’ve got addicted to, but balancing the cold, which is something that I do each day with running, has been interesting, because I assumed that cold immediately after a run was going to be brilliant every time and that’s actually not the case. You can’t go cold before a run because it tightens everything up, so I’ve had to slightly shift my routine and not do cold as much because, you know, on those tempo days, you’re meant to just let your body sit in that inflammation for a little bit.’

After you finish the race, are you getting into the cold?

‘I can’t wait! Yeah, that’ll make the whole thing worthwhile. It’s weird because you know you’re putting yourself through pain and you know that it’s gonna be uncomfortable in that moment, but I’ve done it for so long and so regularly now that my body is so tuned to the benefits.’

Your training hasn’t necessarily been textbook marathon training, then. Is that because you know what works for you in terms of managing diabetes and how to find the sweet spot in not getting overwhelmed by too much?

‘I’ve tried to keep to sort of traditional training, to a point. I think that it’s not so much the diabetes that’s got in the way – it’s just life. Getting that mileage in each week is really hard and at the very beginning, I was really ambitious on time. I then spoke to a coach and he said, “If you have a time in mind, don’t tell anyone” – which I’d already done loads. So I had to stop talking about the time, then I had a couple of injuries early on. I think I went out of the gate a little too fast in terms of the training and I just pushed myself a bit too much. That again is in line with my character and temperament. I was like, come on, here we go! I did my hip and lower back and had to take a couple of weeks off with each injury.

‘I’m also balancing a filming schedule, shooting these Beatles films right now, and it’s tough. You’re up at five in the morning and if you’ve got a couple of weeks of shooting with one day off a week, it’s really hard to find the time. Then you’re up at like three in the morning and it’s just grim and it was winter and everything else. So along with that and the injury and stuff, I took my foot off the pedal a little bit, but I spoke to a coach and he was like, “For your first marathon, just look up. Don’t be looking at your watch. I wouldn’t even have a time. Just go and enjoy it.” And that’s kind of where I’ve settled – I’m gonna enjoy this one.’

What do you enjoy most about running? Does it bring you calmness or clarity in life?

‘The end bit where I get to take the shoes off! No, I mean, there’s that hump at the beginning and then when you get into that grind, you surprise yourself that you’ve got this resilience and this strength. Those first couple of weeks were just hell. I was like, “How the hell am I gonna get through months of this?” Then you do, you surprise yourself and you’re like, no, I can – I’m capable.

‘And you feel the gains and the results shifting and you literally see your time chipping away, which is really pleasing. And there is something meditative, I think – there’s something about shaking the body as well. A friend of mine’s very into Tai Chi, banging all the lymph nodes, and he spends every morning slapping himself. I feel like it has a similar quality where it sort of shakes everything through and provides a kind of movement through the body.

‘I thought that I was gonna get really tired and injured with the attritional wearing down, you know. I turned 40 last year and I thought that maybe I wouldn’t survive the training as well as I have. And actually it has been really encouraging, so that’s been pleasing.’

How much has running helped your mental health, getting out of your head?

‘There’s nothing better. When you wake up and your mind’s churning and you are overthinking, whatever it might be. I find the same thing with cold water – manufacturing that stress and proving to yourself that you are able to navigate that and be calm and collected through it. I think that running has proven to be the same for me. I’m gearing up for my longest run – it’s like 34km and I’m looking at it going, there’s no way in hell that I’m gonna do this. And of course you prove that you can.

‘I’ve definitely really appreciated that mental health aspect of it. I’ve got to that point in my life where, because of my age, everyone’s spiritual journey is being talked about a lot more and people are talking about meditation and talking about how one deals with stress in a less medicated or scientific/clinical way. I’ve started going to a Buddhist retreat in the south of France. I’m going next week and it has been an incredible life-changing experience. I don’t know where I fit yet with [Buddism], but I go twice a year and I’m embedded in that community now and I’m so grateful to them because of the stasis and calm and stillness, which I’m not used to. I’ve always been a bit frantic, you know, filling my life to the brim all the time. Similarly, with running, if you asked me five or 10 years ago, I’d have been getting out there, getting a sweat on. Now I’m able to go, no, there’s another aspect to it, which is a more meditative, to really kind of cultivate and benefit from.’