Run Forest Run: A Running Story

Hello everyone. My name is Oktay and I work here at Binalyze as part of the Operations team. In this article I will not make you update your Mac to the latest version :) but rather I will tell you about my favorite hobby and a big part of my life which is running. 

I started running when I was in secondary school. I kept doing it for a very long time. It was like once a week for years. I also started cycling in 2016. And I thought that I was very involved in sports until I decided to run a marathon in Istanbul in 2017. I started training two times a week and then three times a week. I also started looking for someone who could run the marathon (42,2 km) with me. I failed to find someone, and since I didn’t want to do it alone, I started searching for other races. I found a trail race in Cappadocia which was called Cappadocia Short Trail (35 km). Actually, it wasn’t a short race for me at that moment :) But I registered. I ran that distance in 4 hours and 15 minutes. After that race, even though I couldn’t move my knees for two days, I enjoyed the feeling of being successful in such a challenge. 

By the way, after the race, I learned that some people ran 63 km and 114 km courses :) I didn’t know that ordinary people could run such distances (they are called ultra-marathons). At that moment, I understood that I wasn’t very involved in sports. And I decided to run the longest distance in Cappadocia in the future. After many hours of training and thousands of kilometers, I did it the following year (2018) :) I finished the 119,8 km course in 19 hours and 15 minutes. 

Since then, I have run more than 10.000 km in training and I have run many races without any serious injury. Half of them were longer than 50 km. I ran races on mountains, trails and roads in extreme weather conditions.

Also, I have won some overall and age-group awards in these races. But I think the most exciting part is not the races, the most exciting part is the training process. 

I like running because it helps me relax. Staying away from everything for a couple of hours, having some time just for myself, and in the end achieving a real challenge makes me feel very good. And it is not a team sport, I do not need anyone to run. I can do it independently.

Every year, I choose a race challenge for myself and train for it. After finishing many races on trails and mountains, I want to run a road race this year. The challenge of 2022 will be finishing a marathon within 3 hours in Antalya on the 6th of March. It is an easy job for a professional, but a real challenge for an amateur. You can think of it as “running on a treadmill at 14,10 km/h speed for 3 hours”. 

Hope you enjoyed it. Looking forward to reading about all your adventures.