From Zero to 21km in Under Four Months
By: Esteban Villa-Turek
Tags: Running, Lifestyle, Marathon, Stories, Training

A picture of me achieving what seemed impossible.

From Zero to 21km in Under Four Months

How I quit smoking, started running and finished the famous Berlin half-marathon

Growing up a fat boy

My upbringing was not particularly the most sportive, in any way. That’s not an exaggeration. Growing up in Colombia it is very common for kids to start playing football (soccer) at an early age, be it at school or with other kids in the neighborhood. Not in my case: at home no one liked football, not even one bit. We never watched the matches (except for the World Cup) and neither me nor my siblings were very much incited to practice the sport. And that example is illustrative for every other possible sport there is. Imagine how my teenage years were without any hint of a physical activity looming in: I became what could be better characterized as a nerd, doing well at school but lacking the thrills, discipline and social lubricant that practicing any sport generally offers.

And so high school ended and my college years began with that sportless view of the world. I led a very sedentary life, marked by over-eating, alcohol consumption and tons of smoking, which set the tone of my early adult life. That is also not an exaggeration: I smoked an average of 40 cigarettes (two packs) a day for over eight years total. So much so, that I was the least likely to ever quit smoking among my friends. I tried playing football with friends once or twice during my law school years, but I really sucked at it (probably for lacking years of training, which everyone else had), so I did not pursue it further. I also have to say that smoking a couple of cigarettes during half-time at the side of the court was not very inspiring either.

When I was through with law school I was not sure whether I wanted to become a regular lawyer, working in a firm and doing what can be very accurately described as “glorified paperwork.” So, my obvious decision was to flee to Berlin, Germany, without a plan whatsoever. An adventure! I thought to myself, and bought a one way ticket. Two weeks into it, and I felt the burden of real life upon my shoulders: no money, no plan, no job. I started looking for a job at all costs, which was not as easy as I thought it would be. I ended up landing a job at a burger joint, one of the best in the city.

That was the beginning of my brief professional time as a cook. It was very hard work, very physically and mentally demanding, but very formative. Of course, nutrition was the least of my concerns, so my daily food intake was reduced to the free burger and fries I was entitled to at the restaurant. That was it. Compounded with plenty of alcohol and cigarettes, my physique was far from healthy, let alone fit.

The flip in the story

But this is where the story takes a turn. I started a Master’s degree at a very reputable institution, got back my passion for learning, made peace with my legal background and discovered the world of computational social sciences. Broadly speaking, it merges the analytical power of computer data analytics and the phenomena studied by the social sciences. It was kind of a holy grail for me, as I later found out, but at the moment I was afraid of having to take the mandatory statistics course. But I took it, with a gentle and mindful curiosity and ended up loving it.

A similar thing occurred with sports. I quit smoking by reading a book (a lifesaver, actually, Allen Carr’s Easy Way To Stop Smoking, though the German translation, Endlich nicht Raucher) and suddenly felt as if anything was possible. After all, I had been that one person who was doomed to die a chain smoker. So I started looking at fitness exercises. My ex-boss had suggested I tried a high intensity interval training (HIIT) app a long time ago, and the promise of short intense workouts seemed particularly feasible. I gave it a shot. Luckily for me, I happen to be disciplined with that sort of thing, so in under three months I started noticing the weight loss. After just a couple of months I had shed 20 pounds of extra weight, only by doing 15 minutes of intense workouts a day!

The discovery of running

That really was something. Never in my life had I witnessed the effects of lots of work and dedication being put into something, for me and by me. After a while, the HIIT workouts became somewhat boring (after all it’s just burpees mixed up with planks, push ups and abs), so I decided to take a chance at something I always saw people doing, but never really understood: running. So I put on an old pair of hand-me-down sneakers and off I went, always at night, and ran my first 0.5 km. Nothing more. Baby steps. To my surprise I liked it and I felt good, so I started doing it more often, and always a bit longer. After a couple of weeks, I was already on the 2 km mark, which was a lot of running for me. After all, I was running 2000 meters for fun. Who would’ve thought?

It did not become much more than that for a while, occasional night escapades of 10 minutes to blow off steam and release endorphins. I had been talking to a fellow grad student about running for a while. It turned out that he was an ultra-marathoner, i.e. a person that runs 80 to 160 km races. While he told me about his day-long running feats, I always thought to myself not that he was crazy, but how amazing it was for a human to run so much. It seemed like a dream, something I could only listen to in stories that sounded more fictional than real.

One day, scrolling through social media, I saw a post about the Berlin half-marathon, the baby sister of one of the most famous running events in the world. It was in early April 2019 and I was there, sitting at my screen, on a cold late November night.

Should I? What if I can’t do it? I have never run that much in my life! 21 km!

Again, I took a chance and bought the ticket and that was it. I knew that four months of training was tight, but started right away, at first with the help of a free training app, and later just on my own, setting myself the goal to run, without stopping, for at least 16 km two weeks prior to the event. During those months I did research, bought a pair of very decent Asics and pushed and pushed. In fact, I pushed so much that I felt invincible about my body. I thought that running was easy and that I could do it all.

The half-marathon

The day came, and I started the half-marathon at the end of the pack, with the rest of amateurs and newbies. I was nervous to death. During the next two hours, I ran in a very focused state of mind, drinking a bit off the cups set out for us at the sides of the street and being careful to eat my gels when I felt I needed them, so as to not hit the wall (the runner’s chimera). It was one of my favorite experiences ever. The sun that day shone fantastic and bright, hundreds of people lined the streets, musicians played amazing music and kids held hand-written signs with witty support messages for us runners passing by. Of course, I can’t do enough justice to the moral boost that seeing someone you love supporting you gives, which my girlfriend did during those infernal last kilometers. Boy, did the ambience and the support of my girlfriend help me get through.

Although my right ankle hurt a bit towards the end of the race, and my mind played tricks on me during the last kilometers, I am happy to report that I finished at a not-so-bad time of 2:10, without stopping once. I cried when I crossed the line, too, and have not an ounce of shame in admitting that. After the emotions passed, a half a banana was eaten, a full plastic cup of alcohol-free beer was drunk, and I managed to find my stuff and headed home. The recovery was brutal. My legs hurt for two days and my ankle for a week. After that, I felt like a true runner.

A red flag

Later that year, I moved back to Colombia and kept training now and then with the goal of running a couple of half marathons the next year. As I said before, I felt invincible in my body. Almost bulletproof. Until the pain happened. Every time I ran, I would have an intense pain in the inner part of my knee’s joint, which, after a while, became crippling. I was mentally destroyed: all I had worked for, the joy I had found in running to push myself to get better was fading away. I went to the doctor, who prescribed an MRI of my right knee to find out that I had a condition called patellar tendon tendinosis.

The treatment: physiotherapy for months and no more running for a while. It was not as bad as it could have been, because there was actually treatment, but it was a red flag. And that is one of the morals from this story. In all the research I had done prior to the half-marathon, the importance of stretching before and after the run, as well as not doing too much too soon was always there, but I never really paid attention to it. I barely stretched (because I felt so invincible all the time) and I pushed too much in a very limited time window, too much especially for someone who had virtually zero fitness.

The moral

The mind is surprisingly powerful, both for good and evil. I almost decided not to take the statistics-heavy part of my Master’s degree, just because I was so afraid of having to learn about numbers (after virtually seeing none in law school). In the end, I took the risk and embarked on an adventure that ultimately changed the course of my life. Similarly, I could’ve just said no to the opportunity to run the Berlin half-marathon, but I did not. I took a chance and proved to myself that I can do anything if I set my mind to it. And you can too.

Don’t forget to always stretch, both before and after and never, ever, do too much too soon. Respect your body, take it easy and you’ll see how the magnificent machine of the human body will reward you with endurance and/or speed achievements.