We speak to the Olympic 800m finalist who now has many different targets to aim for.
Not so long ago, Alex Bell’s world revolved around two laps of the track. The 800m was his focus as he reached the final at the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo, clocking 1:57.66 and spent years competing at the very bottom of the British middle distance.
But this month the 32-year-old achieved something completely new, clocking 70:02 over 13.1 miles to win the Amsterdam Half Marathon on her debut distance.
“At first I thought: “What happened?” he says. “But now it’s sunk in that I’m actually a half-marathon runner.”
After retiring from the track last year, Bell has fully immersed himself in road racing, finding both form and fulfillment in a new environment. “It’s like relearning my body,” she said. “How to recover, how to fuel, how to move at a new pace. It was all quite refreshing.”
Amsterdam had been on his calendar for months as his first real test. “That was the main goal of 2025,” he says. “Training was going really well, but I was a little unsure of how I would do.”
A breakthrough in the Vitality 10,000, where she finished 31:31 behind winners Eilish McColgan and Jessica Warner-Judd, showed Bell’s potential. “Before that I had 72 minutes in my head (for the half marathon),” he said. “After 10 kilometers we thought we could aim higher. I wasn’t expecting 70:02 though. I’m a little bummed we didn’t get below 70, but that’s just the athlete in me.”
While the win was welcome, Bell insists it wasn’t the main goal. “I just wanted to take my time and see where my training was at,” he says. “Winning was a bonus. The amount of new training was a lot for me, but my body has adapted really well.”
After years of pressure and expectations in elite athletics, she is candid about road running. “It’s like my eyes have been opened again,” Bell says. “Now standing on all the starting lines, I’ve got that excitement back. That’s the feeling I must have felt probably when I was an 800m runner, something I’ve never felt in my long career. I had the opposite feeling I have on the roads, which makes me think I should have made this decision sooner.”
Making the switch from the 800m to the half marathon was dramatic, physically and mentally, but Bell says the change helped him rediscover the joy of training.
“I had a bit of cross-country experience, but eight kilometers is nothing compared to what I’m doing now,” he adds. “The recovery side has been the biggest change. There are fewer rest days now, my body responds better to easier run days. I had a lot of Achilles problems and lower extremity problems towards the end of my run and it’s crazy to think that I’m doubling up more than I was in the 800m, but my body is adapting to it a lot better.”
The decision to move away from the 800m came from a realistic place. “I squeezed everything I could out of it,” Bell says. “I think I knew after the final in Tokyo that it was probably as good as it’s ever been. After that it was a struggle trying to find motivation and then the politics of the sport made me really hate athletics.”
A new challenge is now firmly on the roads. Bell has more races lined up before the end of the year, another half marathon likely in early 2026 and talk of pacing the London Marathon to gain experience before his eventual full marathon debut.
“I hope one day I can finish off my career by running the London Marathon because one of the first races I was involved in was the London Mini Marathon.”
If you could choose one person to train/compete with, past or present, who would it be and why?
It has to be Kelly Holmes. He was my inspiration for so long when I was growing up, I always looked up to him and he was the person who got me into the sport and has guided and guided me throughout my career ever since.
