My First Half Marathon, and What a Year of Running Taught Me

A year ago I was not a runner. This May I finished my first half marathon, 21.1 kilometres through the streets of Milan at the Stramilano, in 1:38:18. The number matters less than the distance between those two facts.

Starting from zero

When I started, a single quiet morning loop felt like a lot. There was no plan to run a race. Running was just a part of the week that had nothing to do with screens, a quiet moment of balance that helped me clear my head and disconnect a bit from the daily rush. I kept showing up, mostly early, before the day could fill itself with everything else.

Consistency does something that intensity cannot. You do not notice it day to day. Then one morning a distance that used to be the whole run is the warm-up, and a race that sounded absurd a year ago sounds merely hard.

The part I did not expect

I assumed the time would cost me. An hour of running in the morning is an hour not spent working, and I went in half-expecting my productivity to take the hit.

The opposite happened. On the days I run, I work better. I focus better. I feel sharper for hours afterwards. The run is not time taken away from the work. It is the thing that makes the work cleaner. I have stopped treating it as a trade-off, because the trade never showed up.

There is a small lesson buried in that, and it generalises past running: the effort of getting up early is always surpassed by how you feel once it is done. The cost is paid loudly and up front; the return is quiet and arrives all day.

The race

A half marathon is long enough that you cannot fake it and short enough that you have to commit early. The first half feels easy and you have to resist spending the budget you will need later. The last few kilometres are where the year of unglamorous mornings either shows up or does not.

Mine ran out for a while. Around kilometre 18, on an uphill stretch, I hit the wall. My legs went heavy, the pace I had held all morning dropped hard, and the comfortable rhythm of the first hour was suddenly gone. That climb is exactly where the photo below was taken, which is why I keep it: it is not the triumphant finish-line shot, it is the honest middle of the hard part.

I got it back enough to finish. I came in 1,207th out of 8,263 overall and 504th of 1,334 in my category, a touch under 4:40 per kilometre. This was my first ever official race, and it came with a small lesson about the numbers. My watch read 1:37:12; the chip recorded 1:38:18. The gap is normal: on a crowded course you always cover more than the nominal 21.1 kilometres, weaving through the field, drifting wide on the turns, never quite holding the perfect racing line. The chip time is the official one, so 1:38:18 is the number I keep. None of these figures is remarkable, and that is exactly why it meant something. A year ago the start line was the unreachable part, not the result.

Crossing the line in Milan was the most concrete proof I have had that small, repeated, boring effort compounds into something you could not do before. It is the same thing I believe about research and about building products. I just got to feel it in my legs this time.

What's next

I am keeping the mornings. There will be another race, probably a longer one, and I will keep tracking everything so I can actually see the progress rather than guess at it. More on the running side of my life lives at /hobbies/running.

If you have a small habit that pays you back more than it costs, running or otherwise, I would genuinely like to hear it.