It's been over a year now since my first half marathon, spring 2025, and I'm only just getting around to actually writing it up properly. Long enough that I can look at the splits without the sting of race day still fresh, which is probably the right amount of distance for being honest about how badly I paced the middle of it.
the lead-up
I signed up mostly to have a deadline, since I know myself well enough to know that "train for a race eventually" without an actual date on a calendar just doesn't happen. There's nothing like this within a ferry ride of Lovund, so signing up also meant booking travel, which is its own kind of commitment device, harder to quietly back out of once flights and a hotel are already paid for.
Nothing structured or scientific for training, just three runs a week for about four months (fit around shifts at Monter, so some weeks it was two), one of them longer each week, building up from barely able to do 5km without stopping to comfortably doing 16-17km by the final few weeks before the race. I did not follow a real training plan, which in hindsight probably explains most of what went wrong on race day.
race morning
Cold enough at the start line that I was still deciding whether to keep the extra layer on right up until the gun went off, which in hindsight I should have taken off ten minutes earlier, since I was sweating through it by kilometer three anyway. Nerves mixed with actual excitement in a way training runs never quite replicate, standing in a crowd of people all about to do the same distance at wildly different paces.
how the first stretch actually felt
The first 8-9km felt genuinely easy, almost suspiciously easy, which in hindsight was the actual warning sign and not a good omen. Legs fresh, crowd energy still doing a lot of the work, that first hour where a half marathon still feels like something you could keep doing forever. I remember specifically thinking, somewhere around 6km, that the pace felt sustainable, comfortable even, and not once questioning why it felt so much easier than any training run at a similar pace ever had.
I was running noticeably faster than my training pace because the adrenaline of an actual race with actual other people around you does something training runs alone never quite replicate. Nobody warns you how much of that first third is borrowed energy you haven't actually earned yet.
the wall, somewhere around 12km
That borrowed energy ran out all at once, not gradually, more like a switch. One kilometer I was cruising, the next my legs had a completely different opinion about the pace I'd apparently decided was normal. The back third of the race became a slow, honest negotiation with my own legs to just keep the pace from falling apart completely, one kilometer at a time instead of thinking about the distance still left, because thinking about the distance still left was its own kind of demoralizing at that point.
The split chart makes it obvious in a way that the race itself didn't, in the moment: I ran the first third notably faster than I should have, and paid for exactly that in the last third. It's such a common beginner mistake that I'd read about it beforehand and did it anyway.
the finish
Crossing the line at 2:01:14 felt better than the actual number probably deserves, honestly. It was slower than I'd hoped for in my more optimistic training-run daydreams, but given the pacing mistake in the middle, it also could have gone a lot worse. Legs were completely done, the specific kind of done where sitting down feels dangerous because standing back up seems unlikely. Genuinely happy regardless, once the immediate relief of stopping wore off enough to actually feel anything else.
what I took into the next one
- Start slower than feels right, on purpose, even though the first kilometer always feels like it wants more
- Actual pacing data during the race, not just vibes and adrenaline
- Trust the training pace over race-day adrenaline, because apparently my body cannot tell the difference between "feels good" and "sustainable" until it's already too late to fix
Writing this a year on, most of what actually changed for the next race came directly out of that middle-third collapse. Sometimes the most useful data point is just watching yourself do the obvious beginner mistake in real time and having the split chart to prove it afterward.
I'd also add, with a year of distance, that I underrated how much the travel itself took out of me before the race even started. Flying somewhere, sleeping in an unfamiliar bed, and standing at a start line the next morning is a different experience than racing somewhere I could have walked to from home, and I don't think I accounted for that at all in how I judged my own energy that first hour.
