If you’ve ever popped into IKEA for “one thing” and emerged three hours later with a lamp, 40 tea lights and no idea where you parked, you’ll know it already has something of an endurance element.

Now they’re making it official.

This December, 80 runners will take on a full 26.2-mile marathon inside IKEA Croydon in London.

Yes. Inside IKEA.

The route will take runners through the showroom, Market Hall and warehouse for 17 laps of the store. There’s a six-hour cut-off, partly because this is still, technically, a shop and the staff would quite like it back at some point.

There’s talk of Swedish meatballs at the aid stations. Finishers may get a medal they have to assemble themselves. And the store’s famous arrows on the floor mean the organisers barely need to mark the course.

From retail space to running track

The idea came from race director Jay McCardle, co-founder of Sussex Trail Events, who has previously staged races in slightly unconventional locations including a multi-storey car park, a pier and a prison.

IKEA, though, feels almost suspiciously well designed for it.

The bit I love isn’t really the marathon.

It’s what IKEA has done with the store.

Retailers spend a lot of time asking how to get more people into physical spaces. New formats. New tech. New services. More screens. More reasons to visit.

Sometimes the better question is:

What else could this space be?

IKEA hasn’t built an event venue.

It has looked at the thing it already owns, its enormous, maze-like, highly recognisable store experience, and turned that into the idea.

The very thing we joke about IKEA for, the endless route through bedrooms, kitchens, lamps, rugs and flat-pack furniture, becomes the entertainment.

That’s what makes it so good.

The brand isn’t bolted onto the experience. The brand is the experience.

You couldn’t move this marathon into a supermarket or shopping centre and get the same effect. Seventeen laps of IKEA is funny because we all already understand what walking one lap of IKEA feels like.

And that, for me, is the interesting bit.

There’s so much talk about making stores more experiential, but that doesn’t always have to mean building something new.

Sometimes the best ideas are already sitting in the store.

The layout. The rituals. The quirks. The things customers know you for, even the things they joke about.

IKEA has taken one of its most infamous quirks and turned it into an event people actually want to sign up for.

No reinvention required.

Just a different way of looking at what was already there.

Although 17 laps without accidentally leaving with a new set of wine glasses?

That might be the real challenge.