Ekaterina Ryazantseva

Happy birthday to Russia’s Ekaterina Ryazantseva, a sprinter from Oryol who is building a coaching business while she races.

Ekaterina carries the Russian classification of Candidate Master of Sport and competes out of Oryol oblast, where she races the regional indoor circuit at the UOR arena. Alongside that, she coaches, online and in person, and takes new athletes through her Instagram.

The business is the interesting part, and it is real. She is behind @refit.club, an online training community that publishes full workout programmes with sets, repetitions and technique coaching for beginners, alongside nutrition guides. One of their posts puts the whole philosophy in a sentence: at refit.club we don’t just train the body, we teach people to eat with their heads. Train online, eat properly, stay in shape.

That is a more unusual thing for a twenty-three-year-old sprinter to be doing than it sounds. Most athletes who move into coaching do it at the end, when the racing has finished and the knowledge has nowhere else to go. Doing it in parallel means every session she writes for somebody else is being tested against a body she is still competing in, and it means that by the time she does stop racing she will have years of coaching behind her rather than a standing start. It is also a genuinely hard thing to build. Online coaching lives or dies on whether ordinary people who will never race actually stick with the programme, which requires a completely different skill from being fast.

С днём рождения, Екатерина! Желаю здоровья и счастья на долгие годы, и успехов и на дорожке, и в клубе. 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇷🇺