What No One Tells You About Running Your First Half-Marathon
There’s no shortage of advice out there when you sign up for your first half-marathon. Pace charts, shoe reviews, what to eat, what not to eat, how to taper, how to breathe — the internet has something to say about it all. But there’s a certain type of insight you only get from actually doing it. The kind of thing no one really warns you about because you’re just meant to figure it out along the way. So here it is, a few things I wish someone had told me before I lined up at the start line for 21.1 kilometres of chaos and clarity.
Taper week will mess with your head.
You’d think the easiest part of training would be the week where you do less. Wrong. Taper week is a head trip. After weeks of long runs and carefully logged mileage, you suddenly have all this extra time and energy... and a rising sense of panic. Phantom aches appear out of nowhere. You convince yourself you’re undertrained. You’re one Google search away from rewriting your entire race plan. It’s a strange kind of restlessness, because your body’s winding down while your brain is spiralling. The truth is, tapering works, but trusting it is an entirely different challenge.
You can plan your paces, but your race will probably ignore them.
I had a plan. I really did. But then I waited 30 minutes for the toilet and ended up sprinting to the start, slipping into a corral that was definitely faster than what I’d trained for. Still, I stuck to my strategy at first: start slow, stay steady. That lasted until about the 5k mark, when the 2-hour pacer passed me. I’d set an audacious goal of 2:00, the “if everything goes perfectly” finish time. So naturally, I panicked and sped up. Hard.
I locked in behind him and held on through 10k, running faster than I should have, fuelled purely by pride and adrenaline. At 15k, I made the smart call to ease off and run my own race. It was the best decision I could’ve made. I chose happiness. I finished strong, not wrecked, and learned that no matter how pretty your pace plan is, the real test is knowing when to adjust.
Fueling will either save you or sabotage you.
Let’s start with carb loading. It sounds like a dream doesn’t it. All the pasta you want in the name of performance. But in reality, it’s not as fun as it sounds. I wasn’t hungry, but I had to eat. The only thing that helped was going out for Italian food the night before. Having a proper meal to look forward to made it feel more like a ritual and less like a chore.
Race morning was a different story. I could barely get one bagel down. Maybe it was nerves, maybe it was just the overload of carbs from the past few days, but I wasn’t prepared for how hard it would be to eat, and it genuinely worried me as I headed to the start line.
The good news? My race fueling went exactly to plan. I took a gel every 5K, just like I’d practiced, and each one gave me the boost I needed. No gut issues, no crash, just steady energy. If I learned anything, it’s that training your stomach is just as important as training your legs. And while I mastered my gel timing, I’m still mentally recovering from that bagel.
Final thought: your body runs, but your mind finishes the race.
At some point between start and finish, your mind will drift. You’ll start overthinking, then underthinking. You’ll second-guess your pace, your playlist, your life choices. You’ll count steps, read signs, calculate how far is left about ten different ways. The trick is to notice when your thoughts wander and bring them back to your breath, your rhythm, the people cheering, and the reason you signed up in the first place. The finish line isn’t just about getting there. It’s about being there when it happens.
