What's your time?
I fuckin' hate it when people ask me what's my time.
First of all, which time do you even mean? A marathon, a half-marathon, another distance? The last official race, the last unofficial race, personal best, expected time, something else?
If we're talking personal best, at a marathon that would be 4:10, and it was in Paris in 2018. It was actually my first marathon, I've never run this long before, and I wasn't sure I'd even be able to finish it. So I prepared rigorously. Almost religiously, even, for the stretch of time between December 2017 and April 2018, the marathon training plan was my Gospel of Saint Kipchoge, and my whole life was structured around it.
I'm pretty certain this will remain my lifetime achievement. I don't think I'll ever find this much commitment to training, and I'm also not getting younger or less overweight.
If we're talking the latest official event, as of August 2026 when I'm writing this rant, that would be 2:06 at Halve van Egmond in 2024. It was my third time there, and the race itself was lovely... I mean, not everyone would see running twenty kilometres of a North Sea beach in the coldest and the windiest time of the year as "lovely," but it was good, I enjoyed it a lot.
The organisation around it, though, was a tad underwhelming, especially when it came to logistics of getting people in and out of Egmond aan Zee, and that kinda discouraged me from organised events for some time now. But I'm pretty sure it won't be my last ever, I just need to find a nice race to sign up for.
Oh, and if we're talking about that time when I ran along the canal from Amsterdam Noord to Alkmaar expecting to make a full marathon distance, but then my headphones ran out of juice just two kilometres short of target, and it happened right in front of a KFC, and that's where I called it a day? I've literally no idea. There were many things on my mind that day, but beating the timer wasn't one of them. We can try to find it on my Strava if you're really curious.
Second of all, even if we've established the genre, what exactly do you want to know? Finishing time is a combination of many factors. Genetic lottery is a big one. If someone is born with a leaner build and more haemoglobin in their blood, that's an advantage already.
Preparation matters a whole lot too. If you're, like, "I'll do my best to pack three runs in a week," that should suffice to get you over the finish line eventually. If you're obsessed enough to get a personal trainer and a nutritionist, that's another level.
Finally, luck also has a say here. You might be peak conditioned, and perfectly geared up, and ready to score your personal best. And then the day is ten degrees hotter than the forecast, and you must slow down because heatstroke is not worth it.
A 2:30 marathon can be a bitter disappointment for one runner and a pie in the sky for another. So can be a 5:00 marathon.
Finally, it's so obnoxious how you're focusing on a single number and how you're steering the conversation safely away from what was my experience of it all.
It's a bit like when someone says they went hiking in the Himalayas, and the only question you've got is, how much did it cost?
You could've asked, how does it feel when strangers shout your name to cheer you up, and you wave back at them. You could've asked, how does it feel when at the thirty-fourth kilometre the doors of perception crack open and you see that the world is so much more beautiful than you used to think. You could've asked, how does it feel to sit on the pavement, and to chew a merguez sausage and to realise this is the food of gods, and fellow finishers are nodding approvingly at the medal I'm proudly wearing, and I nod back.
But you asked what's my time, so I can tell a number, you can say "ah, m-hm," and then we move on to discussing something that matters a lot for you, like mortgage rates.
I fuckin' hate it when people ask me what's my time.