Briton Paula Radcliffe is expecting a second child at the end of September.

Great Britain's world Marathon record holder Paula Radcliffe has announced that she is expecting her second child at the end of September.

Radcliffe and her husband, the former British international middle distance runner Gary Lough, already have a daughter Isla who was born in January 2007.

The 36-year-old runner, who won the 2005 World Championships Marathon gold medal and who has also won world titles at the Half Marathon and Cross Country, has always said that she planned on having another child before the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

"We're very pleased," said Radcliffe. "We are very lucky that everything so far has worked out as we had hoped. As always when nature is involved it's very hard to plan, but the idea was that I could get pregnant this year and have 2011 to comfortably come back to racing.

"I plan to run through as before but to come back a bit slower than last time when I was back a bit too quickly. (The Olympics in) 2012 is the big goal and we think this works out perfectly for that," she added.

Radcliffe also has three European titles to her name, winning at the SPAR European Cross Country Championships in 1999 and 2003 and also over 10,000m on the track at the 2002 European Athletics Championships.

However, she has never won an Olympic medal, a situation she remains determined to rectify in two years time.

She finished fifth over 5000m in 1996, fourth over 10,000m in 2000 and then failed to finish the Marathon, which she started as the favourite, at the 2004 Olympic Games.

Radcliffe has not competed since finishing fourth in last November's New York Marathon and will miss the 2010 European Athletics Championships but plans to return to competition next year. She is still in full-time training and recently returned from a camp in Portland, Oregon.

She has run the three fastest times by a woman over the classic distance of 26.2 miles, topped by her world record of 2:15:25 in 2003, and is nearly four minutes faster than any other European female runner.

Radcliffe is also currently the third fastest European woman ever over 3000m and 5000m and the second fastest over 10,000m, and held the European record over the latter distance from 2002 until 2008 with the time 30:01.09 that she ran when famously winning her European title in Munich with a devastating piece of front-running from the gun.

Turkey´s Elvan Abeylegesse only supplanted her in the rankings two years ago when she ran 29:56.34 for the 2008 Olympic silver medal in Beijing.