Looking back at autumn 2025's half marathon now, about ten months on, it's the one I actually think about more often than the first one, mostly because it's the one where I finally didn't sabotage myself in the first ten kilometers.
the lead-up, five months after the first one
Same distance, five months later (another trip off the island, another training block squeezed around work), and this time the one goal I set myself was boringly specific: don't repeat the pacing mistake from spring. Training looked about the same as before on paper, three runs a week, one longer each week, but this time I actually picked a target pace beforehand based on those training runs, not race-day optimism, instead of just showing up and seeing what happened.
race morning, and the deliberate slow start
Cooler morning than spring's race, actual autumn weather instead of the in-between cold of a spring start line. I made myself hold back on the first few kilometers even though it felt slower than it should have, which is a strange sensation to sit with on purpose, every instinct at a start line pushing toward "go out with the crowd" and me actively overriding it. That feeling, like you're running too conservatively in the opening kilometers of a race, turns out to be exactly the correct feeling to have, which took me an entire failed first attempt to actually believe.
how the first half actually felt this time
The first half held together almost exactly the way I'd planned, which was a genuinely new experience. Spring's race had already started falling apart mentally by this point, and this time I still felt like I had something left in reserve, not coasting exactly, but not the borrowed-energy feeling from spring either. Kilometers six through ten passed in that specific quiet headspace where you're working but not straining, the version of a race I'd read about and never actually experienced myself until this one.
the middle third, where spring had collapsed and this one didn't
The middle third is where spring's blow-up had happened, and this time it just... didn't. Same course, roughly the same fitness too. The only real difference was not spending all my energy in the first third. Kilometer twelve came and went without the switch-flip feeling from spring, which felt almost anticlimactic after building up so much dread about that specific stretch of the course based on how badly it had gone the first time.
The line on this chart is almost boringly flat compared to spring's. That flatness is the entire improvement. I didn't get meaningfully fitter in five months, I got meaningfully better at not sabotaging myself in the first 10km.
the last stretch
The last few kilometers were still hard, in the way a half marathon should probably always be hard at the end. But it was manageable hard instead of spring's barely-holding-together hard, and I actually had something left to push with in the final kilometer instead of just surviving it. There's a specific feeling in the last 500 meters of a race where you can actually choose to speed up rather than just hang on, and this was the first time I'd ever had that choice available to me instead of it being made for me by exhaustion.
the finish
1:56:40, about four and a half minutes faster than spring, and the splits actually show a race I ran on purpose instead of one that happened to me. Less dramatic crossing the line than spring's collapse-with-relief finish, more of a quiet, earned tiredness. I'll take that trade every time.
what's next
I'd like to actually train with a real plan next time instead of "three runs a week, one of them longer," and see what a properly structured block does compared to the informal version that got me this far. No specific next race booked yet, but the deadline-shaped motivation clearly works for me, so there probably will be one before too long.
Photos and course notes to come once I sort through what I actually took that day. Writing this down now mostly to lock in the story before it turns into a blur the way spring almost did before I finally got around to writing that one up too.
Looking at both races side by side now, the thing that surprises me most isn't the finish time gap, it's how similar the two courses actually felt physically and how different they felt mentally. Same legs, roughly the same training volume, five months apart. The only variable that actually moved was whether I trusted a pace plan over how good the first ten kilometers happened to feel in the moment. That's a smaller, more boring lesson than I expected a half marathon to teach me, and also apparently the only one that mattered.
