Copenhagen Half Marathon 2026 review

Copenhagen Half Marathon is a fast race on wide roads, through a city that is consistently pleasant to look at, with far better crowd support than I expected and one of the best finish areas I've experienced. Most of my problems on race day were caused by my own inability to arrive anywhere with enough time to behave calmly.

So, broadly speaking, Denmark did very well.

Copenhagen Half Marathon expo

I went to the Copenhagen Half Marathon expo on Saturday, which we knew would be the busiest day. The queue went around the block, and finding the end of it took me about ten minutes after leaving the station. Thankfully, it looked much worse than it actually was. The queue moved quickly and I was inside the expo within about 20 minutes.

I always arrive at these things expecting some sort of runner's Christmas morning. Free stuff. Exciting new products. Brands throwing running socks at me. Perhaps Janji finally recognising my loyalty and dressing me from head to toe. But that never happens.

Nothing is free, and the things that are free are generally things you don't particularly want. Instead, you try to squeeze through between stands surrounded by thousands of other runners while somebody stops directly in front of you because they've discovered an energy gel.

Copenhagen's expo was at least easy to navigate. There was a clear one-way system and it was mostly obvious where you needed to go. My only real complaint was that some of the booths sat alongside fairly narrow sections of that one-way route, so whenever people stopped to browse, everyone else had to squeeze around them. That's nitpicking, though. It worked. I got my race stuff. Nobody died.

Expo rating: 3/5

Staying in Malmö for Copenhagen Half Marathon

I didn't actually stay in Copenhagen for the race, but across the water in Malmö. Partly because I have friends there, but it's also considerably cheaper and travelling between Malmö and Copenhagen is extremely easy. Direct trains run between the two cities every 15 minutes, so staying on the Swedish side isn't nearly as inconvenient as looking at a map might suggest.

The train into Copenhagen on race morning was straightforward, and after the race the journey back actually became one of the advantages of staying in Sweden, when the metro was completely rammed but the trains were largely empty.

Getting to the Copenhagen Half Marathon start line

My plan was beautifully simple: train from Malmö to Østerport, then Metro towards the start. My plan was to arrive 10 minutes before the official closing of my starting pen. What I hadn't really considered was that tens of thousands of other runners might also want to use Copenhagen's public transport to get to Copenhagen Half Marathon.

The Metro was, unsurprisingly, rammed. Rather than wait, I decided to walk the 20 something minutes from Østerport. Which wouldn't have been much of an issue if I had allowed for a slightly longer travel time and didn't desperately need to pee.

I'd deliberately planned to spend minimal time in the start area because standing around for an hour before a race never feels particularly appealing to me. I pretty much ran through the entire start area trying to reach my pen and arrived about five minutes after it had officially closed.

Thankfully, they were still letting runners through and I was far from the only person arriving late, but I wouldn't recommend making this part of your race strategy.

Copenhagen Half Marathon start pens

I was in the 1:40–1:50 start group, which was a much bigger group than I expected. In my experience, once you get towards the faster end of a mass-participation half marathon, the groups start getting noticeably smaller. Copenhagen apparently hadn't received the memo.

Either the race attracts an unusually quick field or I've wildly overestimated how exclusive running a 1:40-something half marathon makes me. Because I arrived late, I ended up towards the back of the wave, meaning I spent quite a lot of the race overtaking people. Fortunately, Copenhagen is a very good place to do that.

What is the Copenhagen Half Marathon course like?

Glorious. I couldn't tell you much about individual landmarks on the Copenhagen Half Marathon course, which sounds like an insult but isn't. What I remember is that it was consistently pleasant to run through.

There wasn't really a point where I thought Christ, this is a grim bit of dual carriageway. Copenhagen just kept being Copenhagen: attractive streets, interesting buildings, trees, people and enough changing scenery that 21.1km never felt visually tedious.

More importantly for actually racing it, the roads were generally wide.

Despite starting further back than I should have and spending a significant amount of time overtaking, I rarely felt trapped. There was normally enough space to move around people without weaving violently across the road and wasting even more energy.

The weather helped enormously. We had almost perfect running conditions, although there was a fair amount of wind in places.

The crowd was also much better than I expected.Copenhagen isn't an enormous city, so I wasn't expecting huge support around the course. Obviously it wasn't the relentless chaos of the New York City Marathon, but very few races are. There were still plenty of people out, plenty of noise and enough atmosphere that the quieter sections never seemed to last very long.

Copenhagen Half Marathon water stations

The water stations were... fine. Water existed. I successfully acquired it. Which is fundamentally what you want from a water station.

The only slight annoyance was the amount of cups in the middle of the road rather than towards the sides. I didn't see many obvious bins encouraging runners to throw their cups sideways after drinking, so people naturally seemed to drop them wherever they happened to finish with them, which created stretches of road covered in slightly crushed, slightly wet cups. My brain immediately decided this was how I was going to die.

In reality, I didn't fall over and I didn't see anyone else fall over either, so perhaps this was just something new for me to worry about while running hard. Still, a few strategically placed bins wouldn't hurt.

My Copenhagen Half Marathon result

My goal going into Copenhagen was sub-1:45 and managed a respectable 1:41:03, and it felt great the entire way.

I'd deliberately started conservatively. After some disrupted training (thanks, covid), I didn't want to launch myself at an ambitious pace in the opening kilometres and discover at 15km that I'd made a terrible mistake. As the race went on, I gradually started increasing the pace and felt increasingly confident through the second half, kept overtaking people and still had enough left to run the final kilometre at around 4:25/km.

Finishing nearly four minutes inside my target should have been enough, But the moment I realised how strongly I'd finished, I obviously started thinking I'd started too conservatively. Could I have gone out harder? Probably. Could I have broken 1:40? Maybe.

The Copenhagen Half Marathon finish line

The actual finish was one of my favourite parts of the race. Copenhagen gives you a long, straight run towards the finish line, and you can see the actual finish gantry from what felt like at least 500 metres away. That is infinitely better than a sign saying 400M TO GO.

Seeing the finish line itself gives you something tangible to run towards. The crowds were packed along both sides of the road and making plenty of noise, I'd realised by this point that I was comfortably under 1:45, and I still had enough left in my legs to do a full on sprint finish.

The Copenhagen Half Marathon finisher area

If the expo gets 3/5, the finisher area gets 10/10.

Apparently Copenhagen simply waits until you've run 21.1km before giving you the good stuff. I've never seen so many food and drink stands in a race finisher area. Better still, the queues seemed perfectly reasonable at almost all of them.

I ended up with a very nice poke bowl, which is far better than the usual post-race experience of being handed a banana, an energy bar and some object sponsored by a company you've never heard of, to then have to walk another 5k out of the finisher area before you can find an establishment that serves food.

Getting away after Copenhagen Half Marathon

Getting away from the race was probably the least convenient part of the day. Trianglen Metro station was absolutely heaving, so we abandoned that idea and walked back towards Østerport instead.

And this is where staying in Malmö suddenly became rather useful: the train heading across to Sweden was largely empty. While everyone else was fighting their way deeper into Copenhagen, I got a seat and disappeared across the bridge.

If you're travelling specifically for the race, I wouldn't rule Malmö out as somewhere to stay. It's cheaper, the journey is easy and, based on my experience, getting back there after the race may actually be less stressful than trying to move around central Copenhagen.

Just make sure to allow more time on race morning than I did.

Is Copenhagen Half Marathon worth running?

Absolutely. Copenhagen Half Marathon gave me pretty much everything I want from a race: wide roads, a fast course, good weather, surprisingly strong crowds, an excellent finish and enough actual food afterwards to constitute lunch.

I went to Copenhagen hoping to break 1:45 and came home with 1:41:03, a poke bowl and the deeply irritating knowledge that sub-1:40 might have been somewhere in there. Which means I achieved the traditional outcome of a successful race: being pleased with myself for approximately ten minutes before setting a more difficult goal.