Jakob Ingebrigtsen, Norway’s Olympic 5,000m champ, had a rough time during his first-ever half-marathon in Copenhagen. After coming in with high hopes to dominate every distance from 1,500m to the marathon, he ended up flat on his back, finishing 34th and calling it the “worst run” of his life.
Ingebrigtsen completely hit a wall after the 10km mark, leaving spectators and fellow runners thinking he’d quit.
Spoiler: he didn’t.
Instead, he walked for a bit, threw in some stop-start running, and eventually finished the race in 63:13 – quite a ways behind winner Sebastian Sawe, who crossed the line in 58:05.
“I ran until I was about to die, and stopped, ran until I was about to die again and stopped,” he said. “It’s probably not a very smart or clever way to run a half-marathon.”
“This is the worst run I have ever had. The worst before was the cross-country race in Aarhus in 2019 [when he was 12th]. It’s an insane mental and physical strain,” he continued
This half-marathon attempt came just two days after he won the 1,500m at the Diamond League in Brussels, so to be fair, his legs probably weren’t thrilled about the 13.1-mile grind. Without training specifically for the distance, he went out fast and even set a Norwegian 10k record at 27:27, but then the wheels came off, taking him 16 minutes to cover the next 5k, which is pretty fast for us mere mortals, but a turtles pace for an elite like Ingebrigtsen.
Ingebrigtsen admitted he overestimated what he could pull off: “I’m definitely not going to try again for a couple of years.” He acknowledged that in the end, only the crowd’s support got him across the finish line.
For a bit of context, Ingebrigtsen’s long-time rival, Britain’s Josh Kerr, ran his first half-marathon in 62:45 back in 2022 and shaved that time down a bit since. Meanwhile, Mo Farah clocked 60:59 in his half debut and eventually hit 59:07.
Looks like Ingebrigtsen’s got some work to do if he wants to rule the road races too.
