You had to have a sharp eye to spot in the he recent Ellen’s Run’s results the name of Sergey Avramenko, the 40-year-old native of Belarus who has owned that race — and just about any other 5K he entered hereabouts — for the past four years.
But there he was: in 91st place among the 768 finishers, in a time of 24 minutes and 54.36 seconds, about 10 minutes slower than the 15:38.79 he ran at Ellen’s in 2023.
Caught up with last week in Southampton, the Hampton Bays-based Uber driver said that he had experienced “double trouble” of late, in the form of anterior cruciate ligament and meniscus tears. The ACL problem, he said, had been with him since his soccer-playing days, in Belarus and Brooklyn — to which he immigrated as a 19-year-old — but the meniscus tear, which made it painful to run, was the injury that, for the time being at least, had capped his competitive road-racing career.
Given the need to continue making money — though he’d like to make it henceforth as a full-time soccer and running coach rather than as an Uber driver — Avramenko is postponing surgery and its attendant three-month rehabilitation period in favor of fetching back from Belarus his wife, Angelika, and his 8-year-old stepson, Aleksey. He has been able to visit them — along with his family — only sporadically since their marriage in 2022.
“She runs, like me,” he said of his wife, whom he met on a club run in Belarus in 2021, and who, he said, had inspired him, an average runner at the time, to “go faster. . . . I have lots of thankfulness to my wife for that.”
She also introduced him to yoga, which he intends to incorporate into his running and soccer coaching programs hereafter.
Avramenko earned a physical education degree from Brooklyn College, but quickly learned, during a several-week internship in 2018 at a high school in Brooklyn, that he did not take to the constraints that came with public school phys-ed teaching. “I felt like a bird in a cage with all those rules.” Soon after, “I packed my things with the idea of moving to Thailand. I became a part-time English teacher there, in a private school. . . . It went well. I did it only two days a week, and the rest of the time I spent traveling and making friends, doing kickboxing. . . . While I was in Thailand, I visited the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia and its capital, Kuala Lumpur, Laos. . . . But I couldn’t save enough money in Thailand to travel the world, so I came back to the U.S. in the summer of 2019.”
On his return, however, he did not get back into the business of painting houses and apartments, which he had done previously, but lit out for the Hamptons, where he found Uber driving to be more remunerative and also socially appealing.
With the onslaught of the coronavirus pandemic, he was still able to earn money, making “lots of deliveries” that summer, doing so well that he was able to drive cross-country in the fall to San Diego, seeing “beautiful places like the Bonneville Salt Flats and Grand Teton National Park on the way out. I would have seen Yellowstone National Park too, but it was closed because of a huge snowfall.”
In the San Diego area, he rented a room — though he had the run of the house — from “lovely people who had chickens and lived near Mexico. I did deliveries there — they wouldn’t let you drive people unless you had a California license, and I didn’t want to give up my New York license. While I was out there, I drove up U.S. 1 to San Francisco for a week, I flew to Miami for New Year’s Eve with friends, and I flew to Hawaii before driving back across the country to New York.”
When his interviewer said it seemed he’d seen the world, Avramenko said, “I’ve seen a little of it, but there’s a lot more to see.”
He recently began coaching youngsters here. At Ellen’s, he ran along with one of his proteges, Joe Emiddio, the two of them adhering to an 8-minute-per-mile pace.
Avramenko was to have flown to Belarus the day after Labor Day. On their return a week later, he plans to show Angelika and Aleksey some of New York City’s sights before driving them to Tampa, Fla., and a new life, where he intends, with her help, to build the youth soccer and running-coaching business he’s been dreaming of.
“To keep progressing in running,” he said in parting, “you need to invest a lot of time and energy. A meniscus injury led me to set my priorities more wisely, and to slow down in every sense. Yoga helps me stay in good shape, and I can still go for short runs now and then. It’s time to devote more time to my family and to building a future business.”
“When you think of it,” he added, “what seems like a big setback at the time, what might seem like a disaster, can actually lead you forward. If my ACL injury hadn’t led me to stop playing soccer, I wouldn’t have begun running, and running led me to my wife, and my wife, when I could no longer run at a fast pace, led me to yoga. There is wisdom in that. Don’t give up, accept what happens and keep going. Be positive and enjoy the journey.”
