On 1 January 2025 Svetlana Volozhanina met the New Year with a run — and from that day she has not stopped in the URX league. A year and a half later she has 993 kilometres and 167 runs on the board, and the same address keeps showing up again and again: Mikhailovskaya Embankment, the start of the city’s 5 verst community. While the league rolled out new seasons, new races, and new faces, Svetlana stayed put — in the most literal sense: the same embankment, the same club, the same city she keeps carrying into the protocol year after year.
In league numbers
From January 2025 through August 2026 Svetlana’s URX tally is 993 kilometres, 167 runs, more than 123 hours on her feet, and 21 different races — rare depth for the league: she has been on the board almost from the start. She has no half marathons in her tally, and that is not an accident but a choice of route: density of outings matters more than the length of any single one. Her longest is a 12 km recovery the day after a night start in Nairobi.
In a year and a half she has exactly one absolute win — at Unfrozen 2024, in February 2025, near the beginning of her league path. Since then she has held a different rhythm: 38 runs and 231 kilometres in Nairobi alone, fifth in her group — not a sprint for a ranking line, but long, even work. June 2026 was the highest-volume month in her whole tally: 16 outings, almost 109 km.
5 verst — home address
If Svetlana has a home course, this is it: Mikhailovskaya Embankment, the 5 verst movement she returns to again and again — the 200th jubilee start, the community’s fourth birthday, a “pyjama” August outing, a slippery February start in the wind. “I love my city and I’m glad to share Novosibirsk runners’ favourite places with other athletes,” she says, and that is exactly what her outings show: not an abstract love of “her streets,” but coordinates repeated dozens of times.
The dendropark is her winter lab, with a range of feel from “warm but windy” to −27, when “it still feels comfortable to run.” The brightest episode is a fun cross from SportSoyuz, “New Year Trail”: “A lot of snow had fallen the day before, and on race day the frost hit −20. It turned into an extreme cross. At the finish — hot tea, dryers, and tangerines.” Nearby — Zaeltsovsky Park, the zoo surroundings, the biathlon complex, SGUPS stadium. She marks the opening of the summer season with a run along the embankment; long runs in the heat come with mosquitoes she admits she “couldn’t outrun.”
The club that trains at −40
“My running started with 5 verst, then came park runs in the fresh air, and with the club we do interval sessions. Gradually it settled into a system — regularity appeared.” Her system is concrete: the Spartak stadium manege in winter, sometimes at −40 outside by her own note; Dinamo and Spartak again in spring and summer, already under open sky.
What company gives her, she puts without romance: “With other runners you run faster and do more than you would alone. With colleagues we push each other toward more effective training and share experience.” She doesn’t lock herself into one format either: “I like running alone and in company, depending on the task I set myself.”
The city in the protocol
Part of her calendar is offline starts that simply landed in the league tally without asking anyone. 10 km at the Kazan Marathon — a personal best of 59:05. The spring half marathon in Novosibirsk’s Akademgorodok — her five-kilometre piece. A corporate relay and a “ten” at the A. Raevich Memorial Half Marathon. And on 2 August 2026 — the charity race “Reaching the Goal” for Russian Railways Day, only 1,520 metres, which she calls not an episode but a zero point: “‘Reaching the Goal’ 1,520 m is my first race, a symbol of the start of my running path. Every year I run exactly that distance and measure the next stretch of my running life.” In 2026 that ritual was in the URX protocol again — like everything else Novosibirsk does on weekends.
Who is beside her
“We run together with my husband, even with different fitness levels and distances. We combine holidays with running events around the country and support each other on the courses.” That explains why her calendar has held for a year and a half straight: a holiday here can turn into a start, and support on the course is an ordinary part of the week, not a special exception.
In Spotlight
Svetlana Volozhanina is here not for records or a place in the absolute — but for what URX becomes if you stay in it not for a week or a season, but for a year and a half: not an abstract ranking, but Novosibirsk whole — embankment, dendropark, manege at −40, family, and an annual 1,520-metre race — laid into one protocol. “I want to discipline myself, improve my results, and share them with athletes in the running league,” she says of her plans for the season. A simple formula she has followed since the first day of her league log — and, by the look of it, does not plan to stop.
