A conversation between me and Zornitsa, early 2020:
(A bit of context: she has formally invited me to lunch via LinkedIn, without us really knowing each other. I, as excited as if I were having lunch with Elon Musk, have put on my best dress for the occasion, and my heart rate while I wait for her at Largo for lunch is 120 at rest.)
You'll say, what's all this fuss – dresses, restaurants, heart rates… Well, because everything I knew about her reinforced my impression that she was some kind of beast of a machine. At that point her marathon time was 3:11; today it's much faster. And in the hierarchy of amateur runners, we slower ones look up to the faster ones and get all excited when someone “fast” smiles at us, even condescendingly.
(It's another matter that “fast” among us is a relative concept and usually just means “faster than me”.)
Contrary to my expectations, Zori's smile at me wasn't condescending. Her perfect teeth flashed at me again and again, but I'd say – encouragingly.
Little by little, as the conversation went on, she encouraged me to put in an application for FrontRunner. For me it was unthinkable to be in the same circle as luminaries like her and other stars like Viki Danova and Sasheto Dimov. The very idea of being on the same team as them implied some kind of comparison between us – something for which there wasn't even a point of reference.
So, back to the conversation from the first paragraph. I told Zori that I didn't feel confident in my abilities, so I probably wouldn't apply.
“I can't even imagine running a marathon, let alone doing it in 3:11.”
“Oh, Niyka, everyone has their strong distances and their weak ones. Take me, for example – the marathon is my strong one, but the ones where you need to put in a bit of speed, I'm really bad at.”
Apparently I still looked unconvinced of my own abilities, because Zori, bless her, decided to give me a bit of self-confidence with the following:
“Let's say my 5 km time is really weak, 20:05, and even that I only managed with a huge struggle! Whereas you – I've just remembered you were bragging somewhere that you run 5Ks really strongly!”
“WHO, NIYO, WHOOOOO made you shout it from the rooftops when you set your PB at 5kmrun and posted a status on Facebook as if you'd won the 5000 m at the Olympic Games.” –
But apart from scolding myself silently in my head, I was also relieved. Because I realised that from that particular triumphant Facebook post of mine, Zori had remembered only the description “a very strong result” (in my own words) – but not the numbers with which I had proudly backed it up at the time, namely – 21:37.
I nodded in agreement, meaning – “yes, I'm very fast over 5”, and steered the conversation away from any further possible mention of my peak achievement.
So, to sum up – my strongest discipline, at 21:37, turns out to be her weakest, at 20:05.
How could you not be nervous about being on a team with her?
Things, however, fell into place and developed in exactly such a way that I've now been nervous on a team with her for the 5th year running. Partly fuelled by nerves, partly out of a pure desire to get better, in that time I've improved my results at every distance. Along with the improving, I've had to grow up a little emotionally and a little spiritually too – I've fallen into every trap of the amateur runner's ego.
Like, for example, I've picked races where, according to the start list, I'd have no competition. I've also excused my poor runs with “an injury that unexpectedly flared up during the run – I took 2 Nurofen to finish, cross my heart”. Of course, after the finish, the injury magically subsided.
Whatever you can think of, I've done it. The only thing I haven't done is stop my watch between the intervals of a hard session, or while setting a “PB” all by myself, with no witnesses and no official timing. But that's ONLY because very early on Nakov showed me how to catch people like that – you open the run and compare Moving time with Elapsed time. If they don't match, and a screenshot of the moving time has been spread across all of the individual's socials – apparently someone has once again been trying to convince others of something untrue, but, to make up for it, dearly wished for.
But as they say – everyone walks the path towards the best version of themselves, and that path is long and winding.
With Zornitsa, though, I've never spotted any such little tricks for chasing cheap glory. Probably because she has genuinely strong results and simply doesn't need to resort to gimmicks. Her best result (so far) remains 3:03 at the London Marathon.
I remember that on the day Zori was running in London, Ani and I were following her splits online.
Zornitsa went through halfway in 1:31 and some seconds. At that pace, she set a personal best for the half marathon. For those who don't know anything about running but have somehow managed to put up with this blog so far – when she took part in another race that was half this distance, she gave it absolutely everything. She finished breathless and utterly exhausted. And she ran that distance a bit slower. In moments like that, every metre to the finish is extremely painful and you ration out what's left of your “fuel”, along with what's left of your tolerance for pain, metre by metre to the finish line. With every remaining metre the pain escalates to unbearable, and you can barely hold on to cross the finish line so you can give yourself over to rolling on the ground, cramping and throwing up. The body is on the verge of falling apart.
But that time the race ended at the 21st km, whereas now she still had another 21 kilometres to go. That is, the chance of her slowing down significantly was huge. There's no way you can hold a pace when you're “on your last legs”.
Ani and I kept following with our hearts in our mouths. We were happy, but only half happy. At halfway her pace was 4:17. We're afraid that anything too good is never a good sign.
She still had as much again to go. More often than not, the second half of the marathon, and especially the stretch from the 35th to the 42nd kilometre, is marked by a sharp drop in pace. From 4:17 per kilometre it can easily drop below 6:00 if a person, under the influence of adrenaline or through their own misjudgement, has set off faster than they're really capable of.
The online results from the London Marathon were updated every 5 km, with the pace for everything run up to that point recalculated as an average based on the last 5 km. In Zori's case, the splits looked like this:
21 km – 4:17 mins/km
25 km – 4:17 mins/km
30 km – 4:17 mins/km
35 km – 4:17 mins/km
40 km – 4:17 mins/km
42 km – 4:16 mins/km
As if it had been run not by a human, but by a robot.
When I run, I try to fool myself by repeating a mantra from Murakami – a kindred spirit of mine, since he both writes and runs – from his book “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”. Namely – “I'm not a human, I'm a robot, and I don't feel any pain”. And despite all my robotic self-suggestion, I rarely have such even splits.
After everything written so far, it's clear that I found Zori a specimen worthy of being included in my MILF calendar of women runners. During the calendar shoot we found out that her beastly 3:03 (and 2:59 according to Strava) from London had qualified her to take part in the World Masters Marathon Championship, to be held on 15th Sept 2024 in Sydney.
Sydney is a city where I lived for 6 years and where at least once a month I dream that for some reason I'm going back (but in my dreams it never becomes clear what that reason is). So just the mention of it sends electricity down my spine and gives me goosebumps. Combine that with taking part in a world championship… where only the best from the whole world qualify… true, in the 40+ category, but still – the best! – for me that's a prize from life given only to a chosen handful.
So I decided to use a percentage of the sales of my calendar to support 2 causes – that of 5kmrun, an organisation that transformed my life for ever. My second cause was to help, to some degree, however small, with Zori's costs for Sydney.
I won't lie, lots of people bought the calendar for Zornitsa's cause. Her fan base at the RunLife Nutrition bar got especially stuck in – I often popped over there to restock on “merch”. Oh yes, in the meantime she quit her secure job to devote herself to her other great passion besides marathons – healthy food. But I won't dwell on that story here, as it needs a whole separate blog.
While the calendar was selling, I set a personal best of my own at the Valencia Marathon. 2 days before my 44th birthday I ran 3:13. Some time after that I got an email from the organisers of the Sydney Marathon – that thanks to my run in Valencia, I too had qualified for the World Championship in Sydney. My time is exactly 10 minutes slower than Zornitsa's, though.
The two of us started wondering how I'd qualified at all, since the official cut-off for qualifying for the World Championship in our age group is 3:05. Eight minutes faster than my personal best.
It turned out that because not enough women had met the real standard, the organisers had widened the entry criterion to 3:15, and that's how I managed to sneak into this incredible adventure. A bit by luck, a bit by mercy, but still, I'm on the list of those invited.
Zori chose not to go to Sydney – her schedule with the RunLife Nutrition bar is so packed that she decided she wouldn't be able to prepare properly for a World Championship. As compensation for her tough decision, Fate rewarded her: she and Vancheva were drawn in a lottery to run the mass-participation race of the Olympic Marathon in Paris.
When someone is destined to run a big marathon, the marathon comes to them, however much they run away from it. Whether it's the Olympic one in Paris or the World Championship in Sydney.
And how does it happen that someone who met the standard doesn't go to an event, while someone who didn't meet it goes there “by mercy”?
It happens very often, even more often than the cases where the truly deserving one goes. Mainly because people with strong results know these chances will come back to them, since they're tied to specific, measurable criteria.
Those like me, on the other hand, realising that a given opportunity has come their way thanks to a lucky turn of circumstances, grab that chance and make the most of it. It's very likely it'll never happen to us again. There's no way we wouldn't seize the opportunity with both hands!
Which of Zornitsa's traits do I admire, you ask (since that's the theme of this series of blogs about the women in my MILF Calendar)?
I admire her for not crushing others with her superiority over them, but on the contrary – motivating them through it.
That's it. Other than that – this summer there'll be ASICS MILFs marathoning across three seas. All right, not exactly three seas, but more precisely one river – the Seine – and one ocean – the Pacific.
But, God willing, there'll be 3 marathons run, and not just any old ones – two Olympic and one World Championship!
Photos: @KrisoK Photography
@Andy Astfalck
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