I Ran the Athens Half Marathon. Here's What Nobody Tells You.

I was not prepared.

I mean — I had done some training. I had run regularly for a few months, got a long run or two in, felt reasonably confident. But the specific combination of life, work, and the general chaos of living meant that my preparation was, let's say, optimistic rather than rigorous.

And then race morning arrived and I was standing on Vasilissis Amalias Avenue at eight in the morning with my friends, watching the city wake up around us, and I thought: we're doing this anyway.

We were absolutely doing this anyway.

The start line

There is something genuinely electric about a race start in Athens.

The avenue is closed to traffic, which in itself feels extraordinary — this city is not a city that closes its roads lightly. Thousands of runners from all over Greece and all over the world, packed together, music playing, the early morning light doing that thing Athens light does.

We started at eight. I told myself: just run. Don't think about stopping. Don't negotiate with yourself at kilometre twelve. Just run.

The route

The course is mostly flat. Genuinely, blessedly, mostly flat — which if you know Athens at all you'll understand is something of a miracle, because Athens is emphatically not a flat city.

But the race route runs through the wide avenues of the centre, and whoever designed it clearly understood that making 21 kilometres feel manageable requires not adding hills to the equation.

What it does add, instead, is the city.

You run through Panepistimiou — one of Athens' great neoclassical avenues, lined with the old university buildings and the Academy, the kind of architecture that makes you feel like the city is showing off a little. On a normal day you'd walk past these buildings without stopping. Running past them at pace, with the streets empty of traffic, you see them completely differently.

You run alongside Syntagma Square, past the parliament building, past the Evzones standing guard in the early morning. Past the National Garden, that unexpected green space in the middle of the city that always surprises people who haven't found it yet.

The Zappeion — the grand neoclassical exhibition hall set in its gardens — appears at one point and I remember thinking, not for the first time in Athens, that this city is absolutely extraordinary and I am lucky to live in it.

The weather

Spring in Athens is one of life's genuine gifts.

Not too hot, not cold, that particular clarity the air has before the summer heat settles in. The morning of the race was perfect — cool enough at the start that you're grateful for it, warming up gradually as the kilometres pass so that by the end you're exactly the right temperature.

The wall, and what happened after it

Around kilometre fourteen I had a conversation with myself that I won't repeat in full.

The short version is: my legs were making certain suggestions about what we should do next, and those suggestions did not involve continuing to run.

I kept running.

This is the part nobody tells you about half marathons — the last five kilometres are a completely different event from the first sixteen. Everything that was fine is now not fine. Every small discomfort becomes very loud. The finish line, which felt achievable an hour ago, now seems to exist in a theoretical dimension.

My friends were still there. We'd spread out a little but were still in sight of each other, which helped more than I expected. There's something about not being alone in the suffering that makes the suffering manageable.

I thought about the city. About the fact that I was running through Athens, this place I chose to live in, on a spring morning, doing something I'd never fully done before. I thought about how this would feel on the other side of the finish line.

I kept running.

The finish

I crossed the line still running. Not fast — let's be completely clear about that — but running. On my feet, moving forward, not walking.

I didn't get a personal best. I wasn't expecting to, given everything.

But I ran the whole thing. Every kilometre. No stopping, no walking breaks, no negotiating with myself at the side of the road.

For me, on that day, that was everything.

The medal is heavier than you expect. I stood there holding it, slightly unable to believe it was over, and my friend found me and we stood together in that particular post-race state where you're simultaneously exhausted and euphoric and a little bit emotional and already, somehow, thinking about the next one.

Why you should do it

If you've ever thought about running a half marathon — or if you've run one elsewhere and want to do it somewhere extraordinary — put the Athens Half Marathon on your list.

Not because it's the easiest course. Not because of the organisation, though it's excellent. But because running through this city, on closed roads, past its monuments and through its avenues, cheered on by the people who live here — it's one of those experiences that stays with you.

Athens has a way of making things feel significant. Even a half marathon run by someone who was not quite as prepared as she should have been.

Especially that, actually.