It was just before the start of last year’s edition that Ian Allerton, long-time organiser of the Hackney Half, realised quite how much the race had grown.
“I think we knew we’d made it when what felt like every Lime bike in London turned up,” says the event director, who has been involved in every Hackney Half since it launched in 2014. “Mabley Green is just next to the Hackney Marshes, about 400 metres from the start, and it’s about as far as the geofence would allow you to go. So, we ended up with a sea of Lime bikes strewn there. It was like, wow, this is big.”
Allerton is happy to report that there is now a “Lime bike plan” in place, which is just as well since Sunday’s renewal promises to once again set a new record for participants, at somewhere around 25,000. Throw in the 6,000 runners taking part in a community 5km on Saturday, another 1,500 children entered in the primary schools’ challenge and the thousands who sample the food, drink, music and free activities inside the event village and he is “pretty confident we’ve got over 60,000 people there on event weekend, which is amazing to see”.
“It gives the opportunity for people from the community that aren’t half-marathon runners to be part of the event,” says Katie Fried, who leads that side of the operation. "It makes it more accessible to everybody within Hackney and wider London.”
Hackney Half weekend has become something of a flagship for the boom in the sport’s popularity in recent years, not just for its growth in numbers, but also as a showcase for the extent to which running has become - for want of a better word - cool. New clubs and crews with a social focus have been established all over the capital, young people are entering the London Marathon ballot in record numbers and running has an increasing presence in vibrant industries beyond sport, such as music, arts and fashion, which are synonymous with the modern east London.
“Hackney is just this kind of special, weird little creative hub of activity,” Allerton says. “The London Marathon will always be the flagship event for participation and global reputation, but Hackney does seem to have transcended into this kind of level of awareness now.”
That, even beyond Lime bike overload, presents challenges, with supply now comfortably outstripped by demand. The 16,000 general sale entries (the rest are reserved for groups such as charities) sold out within days for this year’s renewal and runners are already being asked to register interest for 2026.
“I’d love to sit here and say we could do 40,000 or 50,000 but Hackney’s road and transport network probably wouldn’t support that,” Allerton says.
“Delivering a safe event is paramount for us but so is the event experience. We don’t want the journey there to be a complete headache because we’ve put 45,000 there instead of 25,000.”
Allerton hopes a capacity of between 28,000 and 30,000 will be possible in the coming years and does not rule out the event shifting to the kind of ballot format used by the London Marathon, which has attracted more than a million applicants to run next year’s race.
"At some point when demand is such, you might have to explore that,” he says. “Is that the fairest way of giving out places? If we have 15,000 general tickets and 200,000 people all trying to buy at the same time, quite possibly that is the fairest way.”
Toeing the start line this year will be 36 members of the new Hackney Academy, a training group set up by the organisers for local residents who are either new to the sport or returning from long, often enforced lay-offs.
They include Nuray Temiz, who became a keen runner after taking up the sport in her late-thirties, but was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2022 and left “wiped out” by the subsequent surgeries and treatment.
“Some days I couldn’t even get out of bed, it was that bad,” she says. “I was quite determined to to get back to some normality and running has always been my ‘me time’.
“For me, it’s been basically like coming to the end of the tunnel and seeing the light. When I first started my treatment, I never thought that I’d be back to where I am now.”
The Academy members have been training together for 12 weeks in the build-up, sharing tips and encouragement in a WhatsApp group. Temiz, though, will be particularly relying on the support of her two sons, aged 12 and 16, on race day: they have been tasked with handing out jelly babies outside their house, which is on the race route.
“You can never get through something like this on your own and having a strong community means a lot,” she adds.
“It's made me realise how important it is to have positive people around you to get through something like this and Hackney Academy just arrived at the right time for me.”
