Jess Warner Judd – 800 to Marathon
When? Jess Warner Judd After finishing the New York City Marathon earlier this month, someone asked a question on social media. How many athletes have run the 800m sub 2 minutes and the marathon sub 2 hours 25?
Jess has long and varied in her first marathon. It 10 site capacity records him running a 5K just before 11th birthday and runs the 1,500, eleven times next year. In 2011, he won IAAF World Youth Championships 800 m bronze. Ran the 800 at the 2013 World Championships in Moscow. By 2017 he was representing GB in the 1500 at the World Championships in London. By the 2019 worlds, she was running the 5K. Her Olympic debut was in the 5K. In 2022, he ran the 5k World Champs and 10K at the Commonwealth Games and European Championships, as well as the Euro Cross and Half Marathon that year.
Half marathons were becoming more and more popular and he told me in early 2024 that his plan was to run his first marathon in 2025 and that he had experimented a bit with higher mileage last winter to see how his body reacted to it and that it was looking positive.
Jess had finished 8thth 10K at the 2023 Budapest World Championships. Then he said: “I just couldn’t believe it. Honestly, I’m just shocked. I never imagined it would be this good.” 2024 was going to be a shocker.
Running in the 10K at the European Championships in June 2024, he was eliminated in the 600m to go to Rome. He spent the night in hospital and was diagnosed with a focal epileptic seizure. He was able to run some cross country in the fall.
Reflecting on the experience a year later, he told me: Budapest, which was probably the best race of my career. I felt great in 2024 and the training was going really well so I was ready to start it and then to have it happen in Rome was just scary and then to hear how serious it was because obviously I had no awareness. Go back it was really hard because you worry it could be life threatening. You kind of wonder if it’s worth it. I love to run, but health comes first. So there’s been a lot of different things going on in the background, like counseling and trying to get over the trauma that happened and just getting back on the treadmill. That was the hardest. And I realized that I can’t do it.
“So I thought, well, let me try going on the roads and see if that helps, and it really does, and now I can’t even remember the hard times. I think you’re kind of forgetting that. I would say over the summer I really thought about stopping running just because it was so annoying and pretty scary and also you know to put yourself back in that environment and I want it to be but I want to run again. I don’t want that to happen in a marathon with epilepsy, it’s very important for me to show “I can do it”. that marathon.”
In parts 2 and 3, Jess shares how she decided to run the New York City Marathon and her experience at that first marathon.
