25 Half Marathons in 5 Years: What Running Taught Me About Showing Up

This past weekend in Durham, I crossed the finish line of my 25th half-marathon.

Five years of running. Twenty-five races. A goal I’d been chipping away at for a long time.

I expected it to feel bigger. Something closer to a peak. Instead, it was quieter. I grabbed the medal, a bottle of water, and a banana, stepped off the course, and stood there for some time. Not overwhelmed, not emotional, just aware.

Because the finish line isn’t the story.

The story is everything it took to get there. The early alarms. The missed runs. The races that fell apart in mile eleven or twelve. Injuries or occasional falls sometimes made it almost impossible to run. The decision, over and over again, to keep showing up.

Here’s what those miles taught me.

1. Motivation is unreliable. Discipline is not.

Most race mornings start the same way: an early alarm, cold air, and a brief negotiation with yourself about whether any of this is necessary. Training runs are harder. No crowd. No bib. No one waiting at the finish. Just you, running, and the constant option to stop.

That dynamic doesn’t change just because something matters. It shows up at work, too. In the conversation you’ve been avoiding, the meeting where you have to deliver bad news, the moment where you’re expected to project clarity you don’t fully feel.

Motivation depends on conditions. Discipline doesn’t. Over time, that distinction matters more than anything else.

2. Consistency compounds. Intensity fades.

There’s nothing remarkable about most training weeks. Some are strong. Some fall apart. A few feel like setbacks. The week you nail every running workout looks identical on paper to the week you skip half and call it recovery. What separates them is continuity.

Not perfect execution. Just enough consistency to keep moving forward.

I’ve seen the same pattern in every team I’ve been part of. Progress rarely comes from heroic sprints. It comes from steady motion: ship, learn, adjust, repeat. Teams that move every week eventually outperform teams waiting for the perfect launch window.

Consistency isn’t exciting. It’s effective.

3. You don’t get ideal conditions. You get real ones.

Not every race goes well. Some feel strong from the gun (hello, Delhi Half Marathon 2025 and 2026). Others fall apart in the last two to three miles (San Jose Half and the Bay Bridge Half). Running most of them lands somewhere in between — a tailwind here, a cramp there, a stretch where your legs forget what they’re doing and you just hold on.

At some point, you stop expecting ideal conditions and start working with what’s in front of you. That shift matters more than any training plan.

Most meaningful work happens the same way: under constraints, with limited time, incomplete information, and momentum that won’t cooperate. You can wait for better conditions, or you can adapt and keep going. The latter is what moves things forward.

4. Progress is invisible until it isn’t.

From one race to the next, the change is barely noticeable. The splits look familiar. The effort feels familiar. There’s no obvious signal you’re getting better. And then, at some point, you look back and realize the version of you who ran race number three could not have run race number twenty.

That’s how most progress works. It’s gradual. It’s quiet. It doesn’t announce itself. Until one day it does.

5. There’s no such thing as a solo finish.

Running looks individual. It isn’t.

My wife, Rani, and my kids absorbed the cost of every early morning, every weekend, and every long training block. Running friends who ran those slow and long distances with me, or track workouts, cheering for each other. That support made the difference on days when I wouldn’t have made it out the door on my own.

The same pattern shows up everywhere else. No meaningful outcome is purely individual. There’s always a system of support behind it, sometimes visible, sometimes not. Once you start seeing it, it changes how you show up for the people working on their own version of the same thing.

The takeaway

Everyone has a version of this. A long-term goal. A quiet commitment. Something that asks for more persistence than excitement.

The path isn’t easy, but rarely complex:
– Show up when it’s inconvenient.
– Keep the bar for consistency realistic.
– Work with the conditions you have.
– Trust the accumulation.
– Rely on people, and be reliable in return.

The outcome takes care of itself.

Twenty-five races didn’t happen because any single one mattered that much. They happened because I kept starting. Onward…