High-performance living with Ilya Slepov: triathlon champion, entrepreneur, family man
An Interview with Ilya Slepov By Ollimono Magazine | 7 July 2025
When Ilya Slepov talks about life, there’s no neat division between sport, business, and family. “I don’t separate things,” he says. “In life, almost everything I do, I try to do with love.”
A father of four, former elite orienteer, and a triathlete with multiple wins in world-class championships, Ilya is also the founder of RunLab — an international chain of gait-analysis running stores. But titles don’t really capture what drives him. His journey, like his running routes, has been unconventional, layered, and long, but one thing’s for sure, it’s been filled with BIG energy.
Forest education
Ilya grew up in a working-class part of East Moscow. At age eight, his parents enrolled him in a Soviet-era Olympic Reserve School just a few minutes from home. He wanted to do karate or tennis, something that sounded more tough and impressive, but ended up in orienteering.
Orienteering is not just about physical speed, it’s a mentally demanding sport where athletes must read a detailed forest terrain map on the run. “Try playing chess while sprinting — that’s the level of challenge,” Ilya explains. One wrong turn and you’re out. No second chances.
“At first, it felt random,” he says. “But orienteering stuck with me. It teaches you how to think fast under pressure. You make one wrong turn and you’re out. There’s no margin for error.”
By the age of 15, he had already won national youth titles. He later joined a Swedish club founded in 1897 and even shook hands with the King of Sweden. But orienteering was always more cult than commercial. “Even at the world level, it’s amateur. That’s part of its beauty and its limit.”
In Finland, he recalls running in a night relay with over 1,700 teams. “That’s nearly 12,000 athletes. And 20,000 spectators watching. The President of Finland gives the start signal at night, live on national television. The most unforgettable start I ever experienced.” Fighter jets flew overhead to mark the start. “The whole country watches. It’s cultural. Sacred, even.”
The early spark: biomechanics and sneakers
But let’s take a step back. During his teens, at the same time he was all in orienteering, a new curiosity was forming. Ilya bought his first pair of Asics sneakers, smuggled through a hotel hallway dealer. In the late Soviet Union, foreign gear wasn’t available in stores. “It was illegal, but everyone did it regardless… People were hungry for culture and for performance. We’d trade music, magazines, and sneakers through these informal networks.”
What he noticed shocked him. “Once I got my first Asics, I became sort of an influencer of that age, my whole class soon got the same Asics! All of us had the same model! But we all moved differently. It didn’t make sense. I started thinking: Why isn’t anyone matching shoes to how people move?”
At age 15, he came up with a bold idea: to build software that could analyze individual biomechanics and recommend the right shoes. He did the research. “I realized I’d need millions of dollars, tech I didn’t have, and, well… a computer. I was just a kid in the Soviet space. So I laughed and moved on. But the idea never left me.”
The triathlete in a hockey helmet
In his 30s, Ilya discovered triathlon almost by accident. “My dad called me and said, ‘There’s a race tomorrow, want to do it?’”
“I didn’t want to do it,” Ilya admits. “It was too short of a notice, a totally new sport. I had no interest. I didn’t even own a bike.”
But his father knew him all too well. Ilya can’t resist a challenge. Late that night, through a friend of a friend, he found a DJ across the city who agreed to lend him a bike. We wonder if that DJ knows what he did? That one small gesture helped spark a new passion, and eventually, a whole new athletic career…
He arrived at the race only to realize he didn’t have a helmet — which was mandatory. After all the effort, he felt crushed. Then he spotted a familiar face in the crowd. An old friend, who, unbelievably, had brought two helmets. “Who brings two helmets? And it was a hockey helmet! But a helmet is a helmet.”
He showed up in swim trunks and a hockey helmet. “I looked ridiculous. I didn’t even know how to pace. But I was hooked.”
“This is my sport”
It wasn’t just the complexity of triathlon that attracted him. It was the structure. “If you’re injured in one area, you shift disciplines. It’s built for recovery. That keeps you consistent.”
From there, the results began to speak. In 2021, he won his age group at Ironman 70.3 World Championships in St. George, Utah. Over the next few years, he claimed overall victories in Oman, Rwanda, and Salalah.
And he kept training. Every day. “Even Christmas. The only reason I don’t train is if I’m in surgery.”
“There’s a loop I’ll never forget”
He speaks fondly of the 7 km loop where he set his best time at 15. Years later, after several surgeries and time off, he returned to that same loop, determined to beat his teenage record. “I was 2.5 minutes slower. But I kept going back. I trained. I recovered.”
Eventually, he beat it by 11 seconds. “In the middle of the empty park, I shouted out loud, like I’d won the Olympics. Because that moment was everything. Nobody else knew. But I knew. I’d pushed my limit further. That’s what it’s all about.”
“In business, sometimes you can get ahead with a shortcut — make a call, ask a friend. But in sport, who can you call to get you 30 pull-ups? Who can you pay to make you faster? No one! It’s all on you.”
“That’s why it’s the most honest thing there is. That’s why people love it. It’s the ultimate challenge: Who are you, really? Because on Instagram you can say you’re a billionaire or world champion. You can drive a Bentley, but who gave it to you? In sport, there’s only one way to get to the top: you outwork everyone else.”
A new chapter: Cyprus
Before the pandemic, Ilya and his family would train in Cyprus during the off-season. Then the borders closed. “We had the option to fly back, but I looked around and thought — why?”
They extended their stay, one month at a time. They bought a house just above Limassol. “It used to belong to a very well-known architect in Cyprus. We kept it mostly as-is. Old wood, antique furniture. Beautiful spaces matter. They reset your energy.”
Ilya’s day starts with training. Then breakfast. Then coffee with his wife. “After that, I’m ready to work. The rhythm of energy is everything!”
Launching RunLab — finally!
The dream from age 15 became reality in 2012, when Ilya Slepov opened the first RunLab store. It combined gait analysis, sports science, and premium gear. “We were much more than just a shop. We were a place for runners. We gave out water. Had showers. Free coffee. It was a meeting point. A community.”
After expanding to St. Petersburg, he decided to bring RunLab to Cyprus. “It was a test — high costs, tiny market. But if it works here, it can work anywhere.”
He paid commercial rent for 18 months before the store even get to open, despite all the obstacles of that time. “Everyone told me to drop it. But I don’t let go of things easily. I believed in it, and so I persevered.”
Today, the RunLab Cyprus store has reached break-even, and that’s even without launching e-commerce yet.
From biomechanics to burrata
Ilya Slepov also bought a culturally relevant café for cyclists recently, Bike & Bean, with even bigger hospitality plans in Cyprus. And they are all interconnected with sport. “Great coffee. Clean food. Group runs. A tribe. You walk in tired, you walk out better off: refreshed, refilled with good energy. This is how I live personally and this is the mantra behind all my projects.”
Ilya’s building toward a bigger goal: raising €70 million to scale RunLab globally. “No one’s built the world’s #1 running brand yet. But someone will. Why not us?”
High-performance living with Ilya Slepov: What does it mean?
And then we asked Ilya the most important question: What does high-performance living mean to you?
“It means living with high quality and high energy. Those two things are inseparable. High energy is when you have enough to give to others. If you can’t share your energy, then you don’t have enough of it.
Energy is what transforms the world. It transforms people, projects, teams. That spark: ‘Hey, let’s do something!’ Boom! Ideas start moving. You rearrange tables, build something, launch a team or business. That’s energy!
And you can generate it with really simple things. Take this morning, for example. I had a packed schedule: meetings, this interview, and tomorrow I fly to Shanghai. I needed energy. So here’s what I did: I woke up without checking my phone. I drank a glass of water. Took a slow walk around the pool. Went to a café in the mountains with my wife, had coffee, we talked. Nothing major, just quality moments.
That was my initial charge. Then I used that energy and re-invested into a training session. Seven hundred meters of warm-up. Then a 200-meter sprint at max effort. For two and a half minutes, I was in hell. Especially the last 40–50 seconds — it felt endless. But I finished. Hung off the edge of the pool. Recovered. Did 400 more meters with paddles. Boom! Now I had real energy.
You can probably tell, I’m talking to you now with high energy. I didn’t plan it. I just have it. That’s what high-performance living is.”
Final note
“It’s not about going hard. It’s about going well,” Ilya says. “You wake up. You do something good for yourself — a walk, sunlight, espresso. That creates momentum. And if you have momentum, you can share it with others.”
“Energy multiplies,” he adds. “That’s real leadership. You don’t push people. You pull them in.”
“I don’t do this because I have to. I do it because I love it. That’s the only engine I trust.”