Half Marathons

For a first half, weight three things. A flat or gently rolling course, which at this distance is usually anything under about 700ft of total ascent. A spring or autumn date, so you are neither training through the worst of winter nor racing in July heat. And a field large enough to have people around you at your pace — a lot of the difficulty of a first half is mental, and running the last three miles alone is a different experience to running them in a crowd.

For a personal best, add one more consideration: how much of the course is genuinely closed road. A half run largely on shared pavement with corners, kerbs and pedestrians rarely produces a fast time regardless of how flat it is. The big city halves are fast partly because of the profile and partly because you can run the racing line for 13 miles without ever breaking stride.

Elevation matters less here than at ultra distance but is not nothing. 700ft across 13.1 miles will cost most runners several minutes against a flat course, and a single steep climb late on costs more than the same ascent spread evenly.

10 to 14 weeks is a solid window for a first half marathon, and 8 to 10 is enough if you already run consistently. That is short enough that a half fits into a year in a way a marathon does not, which is part of why the distance is so popular.

Build the long run gradually rather than jumping to race distance. A common and sensible structure takes the long run to somewhere between 10 and 12 miles before race day — you do not need to have covered 13.1 in training, because the taper and race-day adrenaline reliably cover the gap.

Keep one quality session in most weeks: a threshold run, or intervals. A half marathon is run close enough to threshold pace that time spent there in training transfers directly, and this is the distance where a single weekly hard session moves a time more than extra easy mileage does.

The single most common way to have a bad half marathon is to run the first three miles too fast. It is also the easiest to avoid and the hardest to actually avoid, because the first miles feel easy, the crowd is loudest, and everyone around you is doing the same thing.

The practical fix is to decide your target pace beforehand, write it on a pace band or set it on your watch, and treat the first three miles as a discipline exercise rather than a race. Twenty seconds a mile too fast early costs far more than twenty seconds a mile in the closing miles gains.

Every half marathon page on Verus carries a splits calculator that will produce mile-by-mile targets for your goal time, plus a finish-time estimator if you would rather work back from a recent race.

A half marathon is the standard bridge between a 10K and a marathon, and it is a genuinely useful one: the training block introduces the long run without demanding the twenty-mile weekends a marathon does, and a half marathon time is a reasonable predictor of marathon pace.

But treating it only as a stepping stone undersells it. Plenty of runners race halves for years without ever entering a marathon, because it is the longest distance you can race hard, recover from in a week or so, and repeat several times a season. That is not a lesser goal — it is a different one, and arguably a more sustainable one.

If you are using a half to prepare for a marathon, racing one four to eight weeks out is the standard approach. It gives a realistic pace target without eating into the marathon block.

13.1 miles sits right at the boundary where on-course fuelling starts to matter. Most runners get through a half on water and whatever they ate for breakfast; runners going beyond about two hours generally benefit from a gel or two.

Eat a carbohydrate breakfast two to three hours before the start, and eat something you have already used before a long run. The carbohydrate loading that a marathon warrants is unnecessary here — a normal couple of days of eating, with a slightly larger dinner the night before, covers it.

Check the water station positions on the race page before you go. Knowing there is a station at mile 3, 6 and 9 changes how much you carry and whether you carry anything at all.

A half marathon rewards even pacing more than any other mass-participation distance. It is short enough that you cannot afford a slow patch, and long enough that going out hard is punished properly rather than survivable.

The other thing worth planning is the finish. Halves in the big series often finish some distance from the start, and a 13-mile race followed by a two-mile walk to a car park is an avoidable end to a good morning. Each race page here lists start and finish locations separately, along with transport and where to meet people afterwards.