{"id":706,"date":"2026-05-20T18:30:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T17:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pomegranatemag.co.uk\/?p=706"},"modified":"2026-05-20T18:30:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T17:30:15","slug":"london-marathon-love-lessons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pomegranatemag.co.uk\/?p=706","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s been a month since the London marathon. Here\u2019s what it taught me about love."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I don’t run. In fact, I tried once after being convinced to download Strava, and I managed one ten-minute stint before quitting. Trust me, living in Sheffield, I won’t be giving it a try anytime soon. Until recently, I also had no personal stake in the London Marathon. I had no friend crossing a finish line, no family member to cheer on. Every year, it would roll around on my Instagram feed: sweaty, beaming people holding medals aloft. I’d just double-tap and scroll on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, over the past year or so, love has quietly moved to the centre of my life. Joining a magazine built around sex and relationships will probably do that in itself, but truly, it’s made me think harder about what love ‘actually’ is, in all its forms. It’s also made me appreciate the relationships in my life far more than I ever did before – the romantic kind, the platonic kind, all of it. Love had stopped being a concept and started feeling real, and I think that’s exactly why a singular TikTok on my FYP had me an absolute mess on a Sunday morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So…here’s everything the London Marathon taught me about love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Love is patient – and it will even stand in the scorching hot sun getting burnt for you<\/mark><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The people who weren’t running taught me just as much as the people who were. They lined every inch of the streets of London, stretching across Zone 1 all the way to Zone 6. A lot of them were there waiting anxiously for their friends, families, mums, dads, uncles, with their phones out, anxiously tracking each and every mile on Strava from the second the horn blows. Some had maps detailed with tube stops and the route between them, planning on running from viewing stop to stop just to catch their person more than once – TFL absolutely rinsing them in the process. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some stand for hours as the British weather lives up to its name – windy, then sunny, and everything in between – for a moment that might last thirty seconds, but will be etched in the runner’s brain for the rest of the race. The hugs imprinted onto their body, the gentle handprints leaving a mark, pushing them to the end. That kind of love doesn’t make the highlight reel very often, but it is the most real, genuine kind – and we truly should not take those small moments for granted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

we all carry things we shouldn’t have to carry alone<\/mark><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There is one moment in particular during that race that really stuck out to me. A man, named Jordan Adams, ran with a 25kg fridge strapped to his back in memory of his mother, who he lost to frontotemporal dementia, with a simple message painted across it: ” We all carry something, you don’t have to carry it alone”. I’ve thought about that every day since, because it’s true, isn’t it? We spend so much of our lives hauling things quietly – whether it be grief, shame, fear, stress, exhaustion, depression – and we convince ourselves that the weight is ours to manage alone. Maybe out of fear of not wanting to burden the ones we love, but if someone loves you, you will never be a burden.<\/strong> Love is precisely the thing that says: let me take some of that.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My mum sent me a video recently – knowing full well I came into this world with anxiety pre-installed – and it showed a professor holding a glass of water. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“How hard do you think it’ll be to hold this glass?” he asked. Hold it for a second: fine. A few minutes: your arm starts to hurt. A few hours: your arm will feel extremely strained. Now think about that in terms of the stresses in your life – a few seconds, you’re fine; a few hours, and you start to overthink; a few days, and you’ll be racked with stress, because you’ve been holding on. So what I’m trying to say is, call that friend, talk to someone, because nobody who ever crossed that finish line did it entirely alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grief is just love that has lost its person<\/mark><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This one is the hardest, and yet the most important. So many people running that race were running for someone no longer here – someone they would give anything to have waiting at the finish line. One runner, named Ben West, was wrapped in a flag with 5,431 names on it – people who had sadly lost their lives, centred around ‘Reasons to Stay’. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I saw that, I understood something I hadn’t before – and I understand it even more now, having recently lost someone close to me and having to return to university so suddenly, when the world just kept moving in the way it cruelly does. Grief doesn’t mean the love has ended; it means the love has nowhere left to land, and even when that’s the hardest thing in the world to sit with, what else do you do with that much love except carry it out into the world the way they would have wanted? So people run 26.2 miles with it – photos pinned to their chests, flags around their necks, little bows in their hair that their loved one once made. Twenty-six point two miles of saying: you were here, you mattered, and I am not done loving you yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More importantly, it shows that love doesn’t go anywhere; instead, it just changes shape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Love is bittersweet, and pretending otherwise does it a disservice<\/mark><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Whilst there was boundless joy in the streets of London, there was also a lot of ache, and the two coexisted. Many people were there because something had led them there: a cause, a loss, a fight still being fought. Charity bibs flooded the race, raising awareness and money for people in more difficult positions, and rather than running away from it, the marathon became a platform for it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amongst the most triumphant moments lies real honesty. Love is not always pretty, and it is not always easy, as we know. However, sometimes, that’s exactly what keeps us upright when everything else has fallen away. If we go in expecting all of it – the beauty, the heartbreak, the difficulty – that’s when we appreciate it most.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friendship is its own extraordinary kind of love<\/mark><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It was so extraordinary to see how many friends ran together that day. Some pairs and groups had trained side by side, some collectively deciding one day to sign up without ever having run before, and refused to cross the finish line without each other. There is a particular kind of love in friendship that says: I will do the hard thing with you.<\/em> I’ll be right here, next to you the whole way, accompanied by a funny placard featuring your worst photo, obviously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We tend to overlook that kind of love because we’re so focused on the romantic kind, but when you think about it, there is<\/em> a romance in having someone who truly appreciates you, who shows up for you through everything. On a sunny Sunday in London, it looks like two people crossing a finish line together, and trekking across six tube stops just to shout your name that<\/em> once more.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Love is the reason we keep going<\/mark><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

At its core, that’s what the marathon is: it’s a celebration of love disguised as a running contest. For the city, for the cause, for the person whose name is on your vest. Twenty-six miles is not a comfortable distance – personally, I couldn’t think of anything worse to sign up for. There’s a point in every runner’s race where the body says stop, where every sensible instinct screams that this is too much, and yet, they don’t stop. Instead, they think of the person they’re running for. Suddenly, they hear a stranger screaming their name over the motivational playlist blaring through their AirPods. At a glance around them, they see a sign that makes them laugh, or cry, or both, and they keep going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Love is not a soft thing. It is relentless and unglamorous, and sometimes it looks like running 26.2 miles in the rain for someone who can’t, but at the same time, it’s the thing that moves you forward when you have nothing left. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s what a simple race taught me about love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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