We talk to the Olympic 800m finalist who now has very different targets to aim for.

Not so long ago, Alex Bell’s world revolved around two laps of the track. The 800m was her focus as she reached the 2021 Olympic final in Tokyo, ran 1:57.66, and spent years competing at the very top of British middle-distance running.

But, this month, the 32-year-old achieved something entirely new: 70:02 for 13.1 miles, winning the Amsterdam Half Marathon on her debut at the distance.

“At first I was like: ‘What just happened?’” she says. “But now it’s sunk in that I’m actually a half-marathon runner.”

Since stepping away from the track last year, Bell has thrown herself fully into road racing, finding both form and fulfilment in a new environment. “It’s been like learning my body all over again,” she said. “How to recover, how to fuel, how to handle new paces. It’s all been quite refreshing.”

Amsterdam had been circled on her calendar for months as her first real test. “It was the main goal for 2025,” she says. “Training had been going really well, but I was a bit unknown as to what the outcome would be.”

A breakthrough run at the Vitality 10,000, where she clocked 31:31 behind winner Eilish McColgan and Jessica Warner-Judd, offered a glimpse of Bell’s potential. “Before that, I had 72 minutes in my head [for the half marathon],” she said. “After the 10km, we thought maybe we could aim higher. Still, I didn’t expect 70:02. I’m a bit gutted that we didn't dip under 70, but that’s just the athlete in me.”

While victory was welcome, Bell insists it wasn’t the main goal. “I just wanted to lay down a time and see where my training was at,” she says. “Winning was a bonus. The new training volume has been massive for me, but my body’s adapted really well.”

After years of pressure and expectation in elite track athletics, she speaks about road running with genuine ease. “It’s like my eyes have been opened again,” says Bell. “Standing on all these start lines now, I have that excitement back. This is the feeling I should have probably been feeling when I was an 800m runner, which for a long period of my career, I never felt. I was having the opposite feeling that I have on the roads, which makes me think I should have made this decision a lot sooner.”

The shift from 800m to the half-marathon has been a dramatic one, physically and mentally, but Bell says the change has helped her rediscover the joy in training. 

“I had a bit of experience from cross country, but eight kilometres is nothing compared to what I’m doing now,” she adds. “The recovery side has been the biggest adjustment. There’s little rest days now, my body responds better to easier running days. I had a lot of Achilles issues and lower limb issues towards the back end of my track career and it’s mad to think that I am doubling more than I was as an 800m runner but my body is adapting so much better to it.”  

The decision to move away from the 800m came from a place of realism. “I’d squeezed everything I could out of it,” says Bell. “I think I knew in Tokyo after the final that it was probably as good as it was ever going to get. It was a battle after that to try and find motivation and then the politics of the sport made me get really sick of athletics.”

The new challenge now lies firmly on the roads. Bell has more races lined up before the end of the year, with another half-marathon likely in early 2026 and talk of pacemaking at the London Marathon to gain experience ahead of an eventual full-marathon debut.

“Hopefully one day I can finish my career doing the London Marathon because one of my very first races I was involved with 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. She was my inspiration for such a long time when I was growing up, I always looked up to her and she was the person who got me into the sport and has since guided and directed me through my career.