I guess I always thought that to run a half marathon, you had to be entered into some kind of race. That you had to ask people to sponsor you. That you had to be training hard, working towards your goal distance, and ultimately had to be part of something “organised” in order to run it.

As daft as this sounds – it never really occurred to me that one could simply just run a half marathon.

Now, I know what you’re thinking :

But what if, one decides simply to run 5km, then 10km, then 15 or 16km? What about that? And, once one has simply run 16km, then it’s not that much of a stretch of the imagination to run 5.1km more, thus running a half marathon.

So that’s what I decided to do. I went out to run 16km, but was secretly harbouring desires to run further. Actually, further than I’ve run before. Well, I’ve run a half marathon distance trail running, but that doesn’t really count, does it?

Not wanting to appear to be totally stupid, I prepared, a little bit. A soft flask of water, a gel and a small packet of energy gummies from High5. Mmmm delicious.

And off I went. To run 16km.

I live near the sea. I’m very lucky. It’s really nice. I like running on or by the beach when the tide is out. I know the area very well. I know it so well, and have run here so often, that there is a 3km loop, taking in the hustle and bustle of a high street on one hand, and the beach and sea on the other.

As crazy as it sounds, my plan was to go and run multiple loops of my 3km high street/beach loop. My thinking was :

  • I can run here safely as it’s close to home. If I tank and need to evac quickly, that’s going to be possible
  • I know this loop well, I’ve run it many times, and it’s a known quantity
  • Nobody else knows I’m doing this, if I fail it will be silent and fine
  • Think of the people sitting having coffee by the beach thinking to themselves “there goes that guy running round again…”

After five loops of my course, giving me just over 15km in the bag, I thought, fuck it, let’s take a shot at this. So I kept going.

Now I was into uncharted territory – both mentally and physically. I was certain that my body could endure what I was doing to it, that it would be able to keep going, that depite my brain’s best efforts to tell it to stop that it wouldn’t, and in actual fact, that it had the capacity to manage the task. My brain on the other hand was starting to unravel a bit. Not in terms of – stop, you can’t do this, it’s too much, you’re not capable of this. More in terms of just becoming a bit doo-lally for a while.

I saw a guy that I knew whilst I was somewhere around the 19km mark. I waved at him, he waved back. For some unknown reason, when I opened my mouth to say something like ‘hey man, how you doing?’, the words that came out were ‘big ones’. Yup. For no reason at all, I just said – ‘big ones’ – to a guy I know. He’s a very fit guy, so hopefully he recognised the look on my face and understood what I meant.

Food. I was dumb and didn’t listen to my body. I had the gel at around one hour, when in fact I think I should’ve had it at about 45mins. The gummies were great though, I just snacked on those during the last hour. Water, I sipped at.

Generally, when I’m doing long bike rides, I’ll want to eat every 40 mins and drink every 30 mins. I think this routine would work well for me running too.

My time for my first half marathon? Just a touch over 2 hours. Which I’m very pleased with. Would I do it again? It’s highly likely.

Oh, and to the guy who served me Lucozade and Wheat Crunchies in the tiny little shop when I had finished – you were exactly what I needed, thank you dude. Or as they say, big ones.

An update – 13/12/24

So, I did it. I ran a sub 2 hour Half Marathon. There. There you go. What does this mean? Well, for me it means that I can close off this year with a nice feeling of accomplishment.

I’m actually happier about this than I thought I would be, in fact, running it made some emotions bubble up at the end, which I wasn’t expecting. I am utterly dumbfounded that I can run that far, for that long, at that pace. It astonishes me that my body can do this, and that my brain doesn’t nag me to pack it in, slow down, stop and have an ice cream instead,

Honestly – if you’re reading this thinking about running this kind of distance – if I can do it, so can you. Now, get to it.

Peace.