1 hour 57 minutes. Half marathon. Done.

I posted a short version of this on LinkedIn on the day, still running on adrenaline and barely able to walk down stairs. But I promised a proper write-up, and here it is. If you read my earlier post about why I signed up, you'll know what this race meant. If you haven't, the short version is: I'm running a half and full marathon in 2026 for Alzheimer's Research UK, I'd never run more than a few miles before January, and it's been a lot harder than I expected.

This is the race day piece. The full, honest version.

The nerves on the train

I've played football my whole life. Cup finals, promotion deciders, games that mattered. I'm used to pre-match nerves. But I cannot remember being as genuinely, uncomfortably nervous as I was on that train from Leeds to Burley Park on Sunday morning.

Part of it was the unknown. I'd trained hard — cold January mornings, rain sideways, shin splints that wouldn't leave me alone — but I'd never actually run 13.1 miles. Not once in the training block. The longest I'd done was 11 miles, about three weeks out. You do the long runs, you trust the process, and then race day comes and you realise you're about to find out whether any of it actually worked.

The other part was accountability. When you raise money for a cause, when people have donated, when you've written about it publicly — the idea of not finishing isn't just personal disappointment anymore. It carries weight. Good weight, the kind that keeps your legs moving when everything else says stop, but weight nonetheless.

I sat on that train, number pinned to my chest, gel in each pocket, and told myself to calm down. Mostly unsuccessfully.

The headphones

Before I'd even crossed the start line, they died.

I want to be clear about how significant this felt in the moment. I have never, not once during the entire training block, run without music. Not a single session. Every long run, every dark Tuesday morning before work, every Sunday slog in the February rain — headphones in, head down, get it done. Music was load-bearing infrastructure for me. It set the pace, it kept me going, it filled the silence.

I had The Square Ball queued up. Propaganda. A whole playlist I'd built specifically for this. And for those who don't know The Square Ball — it's a Leeds United podcast, it's brilliant, go and find it immediately.

Gone. Stone dead. I did the thing where you press the button twelve times as if that's going to help. It wasn't going to help. I stood there at the start line with 8,000 other runners, in absolute silence, and had a mild internal crisis.

Two choices: spiral, or adapt. I chose to adapt. After about three minutes of spiralling.

It wasn't silence

Here's the thing nobody tells you when you're training alone on empty roads at 6am: running a big city race without headphones isn't quiet. It's the opposite of quiet.

The crowds in Leeds were extraordinary. Not just big — extraordinary. From virtually the first mile, people lined the streets. Families, groups of mates, kids with homemade signs, strangers with cowbells and drums and noisemakers. And they were reading the names off bibs. Your actual name. Not "go on runner" or "well done everyone" — your name, from someone who has never met you and probably never will.

There's something about that which is hard to explain unless you've experienced it. It bypasses the rational part of your brain completely and goes straight somewhere else. Every time I heard my name called out I felt it physically — a genuine jolt, a lightness in the legs, ten or fifteen seconds of feeling like it was completely fine and that I absolutely had this.

A stranger shouting your name from the pavement, willing you on — it bypasses the rational part of your brain and goes straight somewhere else.

And the sweets. I wasn't prepared for the sweets. Jelly babies, wine gums, kids holding out handfuls of whatever they'd brought. I took all of them. Every single one. I have no regrets about this and I would do it again.

By mile three I had completely stopped thinking about the headphones.

Mile 8. Leeds Road and Otley Road.

I need to address this directly.

Whoever designed this route and decided that the logical place for a sustained uphill stretch was mile 8 — I want you to know that I thought about you specifically at the time, and the thoughts were not warm.

Mile 8 is a psychologically delicate place. You're past halfway, which sounds like good news until you realise your legs have been running for 8 miles and have formed their own opinions about how things are going. And then the road just goes up. Not a gentle incline. Up.

I shortened my stride, lowered my head, kept moving. There's not much else you can do. The crowds thinned slightly through that section, which felt like the universe making a specific point. I muttered some things I won't repeat here. I got up it.

Looking back — and I mean genuinely looking back, not just saying this — I'm glad it was there. There's something satisfying about hitting the hardest section of a race and coming out the other side. It confirms something about yourself that you weren't entirely sure of before you tried it.

The last two miles

I will not forget the last two miles of this race for as long as I live.

The streets were packed. Not busy — packed. Both sides, from pavement edge to the barriers, leaving runners maybe ten yards of space to get through. The noise from that point was unlike anything I've ever experienced during exercise. You couldn't hear yourself think. You couldn't hear the person next to you. You could only move forward into this wall of noise that seemed to be physically pushing you toward the finish.

I went from 8:50 minute miles to 7:20 without consciously deciding to speed up. My legs just responded to the environment. I've heard people describe being "carried" by a crowd and I always thought it was a nice way of putting something that was really just motivation. It's not a metaphor. It's a real physical thing that happens to your body when 8,000 people are screaming at you to keep going.

By the time I hit the finish line I was in a full sprint. After 13 miles. In hindsight, not the most sensible decision I've ever made. In the moment, the only possible decision.

The finish line

I was emotional. I'm not going to dress that up or apologise for it.

When you stop — when you actually stop after months of early mornings and painful shins and dark wet roads and alarm clocks going off before the sun is up — it catches you all at once. Everything you banked to get there comes out when you cross that line. The training, the doubt, the days you nearly didn't go out, the ones where you did go out and it was awful — all of it. Done. It catches up with you.

When you actually stop, everything you banked to get there comes out at once. The training, the doubt, the days you nearly didn't go out. All of it. Done.

The 400 metre sprint finish probably made it worse, physically speaking. I don't recommend that either. But I'd do it again.

What this was actually about

Beyond the personal challenge, this race was always about something bigger. I'm running for Alzheimer's Research UK. I wrote about why in my earlier post — about a video I stumbled across, about thinking of the people I love, about the 55 million people worldwide living with dementia and the fact that someone develops it every three seconds.

Crossing that finish line made all of that feel more real, not less. The community that showed up — thousands of people running for causes that matter to them, thousands more giving up a Sunday morning to stand in the street and cheer them on — felt like evidence of something. In a world that can feel pretty fractured at the minute, a day like that is proof that there's still genuine good in people. There's still hope for us.

If you'd like to donate, the link is still open: you can donate here. Every penny goes directly to Alzheimer's Research UK.

To everyone who donated, everyone who shared the link, everyone who sent a message — thank you. Genuinely. That's what got me round.

What's next

York Marathon. October 2026. 26.2 miles.

Right now my legs have strong feelings about stairs and I'm going to respect that for a few days. But the York training block starts soon, and that race terrifies me significantly more than this one did. 26.2 miles is a different thing entirely. I know that now.

I'll be writing about the build-up here as it happens. If you want to follow along or just want to say hello, you can find me on LinkedIn.

For now though, I'm going to sit down for a very long time.