Amber Heard Runs Her First Half-Marathon in San Sebastián

Amber Heard has gone from her first 10K to her first half-marathon in a little over three months. The 40-year-old actor ran the Medio Maratón Donostia San Sebastián Rural Kutxa on Sunday, Oct. 4, and finished in 1:39:54, placing 95th of the 1,396 women who completed the race in the Basque city. Marathon Handbook covered her racing debut in June, when she ran 44:15 for 10K in Madrid, where she lives.

That 1:39:54 is her net time from the start mat, the figure she gave as 1:39 on Instagram; her gun time in the official results is 1:40:49. She was 830th of 3,801 finishers overall. The median woman in San Sebastián finished in 2:05:19, which put Heard a little over 25 minutes clear of the middle of the women’s field and inside its top 7 percent, a result that holds up well against what counts as a good half-marathon time for a woman over 40.

An opening 5K of 22:14 worked out to 4:27 per kilometer, almost exactly the pace she held for the whole of her Madrid 10K. She reached 10K in 45:05, just 50 seconds outside her best for the distance, with more than half the race still to run. The 10 kilometers from there to 20K took 49:32, close to 4:57 per kilometer in damp conditions, and she picked it back up over the final 1.1K to finish at 4:49 pace. Across the full distance she averaged 4:44 per kilometer, or 7:37 per mile.

Plenty of first-time half-marathoners start the same way, on fresh legs and race-day adrenaline, and find out about the second half as it happens. Learning to run negative splits usually takes a few races. The numbers suggest Heard has more in her already: Peter Riegel’s formula, the basis for many race time predictors, turns a 44:15 10K into a half-marathon of about 1:37:40, a little over two minutes quicker than she ran on Sunday.

She was one of a record 5,200 entrants for this year’s race, which starts and finishes on the Boulevard and runs on a flat course certified by Spain’s athletics federation. At the front, Mark Kiptoo of Kenya, who turned 50 in June, won in 1:03:57, a time Donostitik reported as a new world best for men aged 50 and over. Iraitz Arrospide was second in 1:04:51. Maitane Melero won the women’s race in 1:15:44, ahead of Janice Studler (1:18:19) and María Lázaro (1:18:27).

Her Instagram post afterward carried photos from the finish area and a thank-you to the city in Basque. “First half marathon, eskerrik asko Donosti,” she wrote.