My first half marathon

I am not a runner. If you'd asked me a few years ago to name my least favorite way to exercise, running would have been near the top of the list.

But my husband loves it. Really loves it, the way I love tennis. So somewhere along the way running became our thing, the same way he shows up for my tennis matches even though he'd rather be doing almost anything else with that hour. It felt only fair to meet him halfway. And I've genuinely come to like how little running asks of you: no court to book, no gear beyond a decent pair of shoes, nothing standing between deciding to go and actually going.

When we moved to London, running became one of the few constants we carried with us. A new city, a new job, a new everything, but lacing up and heading out together, just the two of us, never changed. It turned into one of our main ways of bonding, actually, those quiet miles where neither of us has to say much.

So when my husband signed us up for our first big half marathon, I wasn't shocked. Of course he did.

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We'd been training since January. Two to three runs a week, tracked religiously on our training app, building up the distance a little at a time. By the time race day came, I told myself something simple: whatever the result, I was going to enjoy it. We'd already done the hardest part, which wasn't the 21 kilometers ahead of us. It was signing up in the first place, and showing up for every one of those training runs on the days we didn't feel like it.

The first 10km felt fine. Almost easy, in a way that made me suspicious of myself.

Then came 15km, and my legs started arguing with me. By the last 2km, it wasn't arguing anymore, it was pain, sharp and insistent in a way that made walking look very reasonable. My husband kept telling me it was okay, we could walk the rest of the way to the finish line, nobody would know or care.

But I didn't want to walk it. I wanted to run it.

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I think that's the part that's stuck with me since. Not the finishing, exactly, but the deciding to keep running when walking was right there, available, painless.

It reminded me of how I try to handle the harder stretches in life generally: the pain is real, but it's also temporary, and it passes faster than it feels like it will in the middle of it. And there was something else the race taught me that I didn't expect to learn from running, of all things. At the start line, everyone takes off like it's a sprint, adrenaline doing all the talking. It's tempting to match that energy, to check how fast the person next to you is going and feel like you're falling behind if you're not keeping up.

But that's not the race. The race is your own pace, held steady, for as long as it takes. Nobody hands out medals for how fast you started.

We crossed the finish line in 3 hours, exactly the time we'd trained for. Still running, both of us, all the way through.

I don't think I'll ever call myself a runner. But I finished it, on my own legs, at my own pace, and that's a version of me I didn't know I had in me before this year.

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I'm glad he signed us up. I'm glad we did it.

He already asked, medal still warm around his neck, if I'd do a full marathon next. I told him I'd think about it. Which, if you know me, you know exactly what that means: ask me again in a year, and I'll pretend I never said anything close to yes.

So if there's something you've been putting off because you've already decided you're not the type, the sport, the hobby, the thing your partner or your friend keeps inviting you into, this is me telling you to just show up for it once. You don't have to be good at it. You don't even have to like it at first. You just have to start, and hold your own pace, and see how far that gets you.

And one more thing I don't want to gloss over: what a privilege it was for this to be our first big race here, in London, of all the cities we could have ended up calling home. Running over Tower Bridge, in the middle of a route I used to only walk as a tourist, is the kind of thing I don't ever want to take for granted, hard day or not.

And here's my result: race certificate ⭐