Sometime in 2020, a chat between me and Sasho Nakov:
Me: Hey, who is this Zlatka Karadzhova? It really gets on my nerves the way she shows off in the Running for Health group.
Nakov: Oh, some random from Plovdiv that Mitakisa has taken under his wing. She’s not even that fast. (The subsistence minimum for female attractiveness in Sasho’s head is a woman who runs 5 km under 20:00.) I suspect that almost everyone who doesn’t meet this BASIC criterion exists for him as blurry moving smudges.
Me: I don’t know, I get the feeling she’s really started believing her own hype. Why should we all care that her watch told her she’d run a half in 1:45, but she didn’t believe it, because by HER OWN ESTIMATE she’d run it faster…..
Then in a separate post she bores us with how she took her pulse by hand, supposedly while running. But to take it, she had to stop, and all of this culminates in the most important circumstance, the real subject of the post, namely that her heart rate strap was too tight under her boobs. Doesn’t she see that I can see that where her heart rate strap is tight is a strategic move, so that all the male mugs in the group can chime in manfully on the subject of her chest measurement?
Tut, tut, honestly, they’re crawling out of the woodwork! I sigh, and with a feeling of cosmic superiority I close the laptop…. good grief, if that one runs a half under 1:45, my name’s not Nia.
It doesn’t work just by fishing for attention from the mugs in the groups, you need actual training. As the poet said: “this is not serious”!
4 years later, the Zlatka in question has gone back to her maiden name, Valcheva. Other radical changes around her concern precisely my predictions about her half. Contrary to them, she has run it in 1:29. She is also my friend and teammate on the FrontRunner team.
She is one of the examples that the gap between the impression a person creates online and the one they leave in person can be enormous.
She is an example of something else too, something that has been on my mind a lot lately: that respect is earned!
I can’t even remember how Zlati and I met in person or how we started talking. I remember that just as I had branded her a stray electron whose main quality was talking tall tales, she went and proved me wrong by running some really good 10 km at the Sofia Marathon. After I had calculated that with it she would have beaten me if I had entered the same race, a respect for her was born in me.
Then came her marathon debut in 3:15, which confirmed my belief that this girl, besides talking, can also train seriously. An extra bonus to her performances were her Strava activities, free of any comments about the mitigating circumstances for a “weak” run.
These days, strong runs that aren’t crowned by their owner with a title along the lines of “Sleep-deprived, injured and completely unprepared!” or “Easy long run, just for fun” clearly just aren’t the done thing, because they’re a great rarity. I, however, although I love calculating what out-of-this-world results we’d have as an amateur community if people ran healthy and prepared, still prefer the more modest Strava titles.
Last autumn at the Sofia Marathon, Zlati and I ran together. At the start she had armed herself with a half-litre bottle of water.
“Come on, drink it, chuck the bottle and let’s line up so we’re nearer the front,” I nudge her.
Zlati was going to run with the bottle.
I couldn’t think of anything less productive. There’s water at every station, so why weigh yourself down with extra load? People lose weight specially for a race, and our donkey had voluntarily loaded up her saddlebags with an extra half litre…
For all 21 km Zlati trotted along next to me with the bottle, letting me drink from hers and then carrying on with it. That way she saved me precious seconds stopping at every water station, but not only that.
Because the last few stations didn’t even have water, it turned out that she might well have saved my whole race, in which I set my PB at the time. In that race each of us was running her own run without racing each other. But I’m sure that even if we had been fighting for the podium, she would still have given me the water she was carrying.
And speaking of adverse circumstances that hinder or stop our performance, in Zlatka’s life they are so abundant that perhaps that is precisely why she has learnt not to let them get in her way.
In 2022, during her divorce, because of the high stress levels, she developed an illness she didn’t even suspect she had. At a routine check-up, with no complaints, they found an early stage of cervical cancer.
A biopsy and an operation followed. After the operation she had complications, the consequences of which she is still fighting today. So far there have been three unsuccessful attempts to deal with the health problem.
I’ve noticed how, for my psyche, a raised pulse from my body fighting an ordinary flu usually leads to a depressed-zombie state. It shows itself as a 24-hour glassy stare at my watch, along with tightening and loosening the strap, in the hope that the pulse might just settle down, because with a high resting heart rate there’s no way I can run well, and with a shattered psyche, even less so.
Against the background of these petty worries of mine, I can’t even imagine how she not only trains but also races with the health problems she is fighting. If she hadn’t told me about them, I would never have guessed they existed. She is always smiling and in a good mood, always up for a bit of banter.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone more dedicated and disciplined than her, not only in running but also in swimming and cycling, which she took up only very recently. Her weekly volume is something like 90 km of running, 8 km of swimming, 140 km on the bike, not counting things like yoga and strength training.
I compare myself.
For no other reason than that, to understand what someone else does and achieves, you have to see it and compare it through the perspective of your own actions.
My running, although a smaller volume than hers, has long been part of my daily routine. It isn’t something I “think about”, I just do it; the whole process is automated. And it’s automated because my motivation to run is high, both for keeping my mental balance and because I want to improve my results.
With swimming, though, my motivation is lower. I swim once a week, on Monday, when I’ve given myself a rest from running. Every time I finish swimming, I pat myself on the back with the feeling that I’ve ticked off an extremely resource-intensive task. For the rest of the day I feel exhausted. Not physically, but mentally, because of the impossibly heavy mission, “Swimming”, that I’ve ticked off.
And it’s perfectly clear to me that swimming once a week leads solely and exclusively to mediocrity. But the excuses “work”, “time”, “hungry teenagers at home” and so on give me a convenient wall to hide behind.
As for the bike, don’t even ask.
When I ask Zlatka when she finds time to swim (she swims 3–4 times a week), she tells me: in her lunch break. So there you go: some people have time for everything.
The unmotivated part of me, the one shaped over the years, has been taught to think that anything outside the ordinary daily routine that society permits a woman, namely from home to the office and back, and housework at the weekend, is a waste of time at best. And often something to be condemned, too.
Just recently I came across a video that was a satire on the philosophy of self-improvement. Yes, there really are loads of coaches and pseudo-coaches about, cashing in on our naivety. But even so, the video in question, which had racked up a huge number of positive reactions online, remained completely incomprehensible to me, let alone funny.
In it, a character parodied to a deliberate level of grotesque, made up beyond recognition to look like Quasimodo (warts, missing teeth and so on), stammers out the following phrase in the style of Yuli Tonkin:
“Anything is possible when you believe in yourself! Take me, for example: every morning I get up, run 5 km, go to work, and right now I’m publishing my third book. And all this while managing to make time for my family and friends.”
The grotesque figure ended his plea with the punchline: “As you can see, anything is possible WHEN YOU LIE.”
The comments and reactions underneath roundly condemned the repulsive types who lie shamelessly about how “successful” they are.
And what was so “successful” about it??? That stammering ugly mug was describing exactly my life, with the one difference that instead of 5 km, I run 10 or 12 km a day.
I couldn’t help myself and commented under the post, knowing what I was letting myself in for. The most civilised response, apart from angry faces as reactions under my comment, was “and who’s chasing you that you have to RUN”.
If the statistically average person has limited themselves so far as to think it’s impossible to work, run 5 km a day and write books while having time for family and friends, what would they think of Zlati with her monster volumes in 3 sports, a corporate job and raising her son with no outside help?
I wish with all my heart that she gives them a REAL reason to think.
