Kartik Karker was 15 when he was first asked the question: do you want to focus on your studies or do you want to become a runner? Coming from a middle-class family in Mumbai, Kartik knew the question was rhetorical. What is often presented as a choice in India usually has a very clear answer.
Studies, said the bright 15-year-old Kartik as he put away several medals he had won in school competitions in Mumbai. Like most middle-class kids, he chose certainty. He kept his head down, cleared his exams and went to Russia in 2016 to study MBBS.
However, running never completely left him.
Kartik lived in Russia for seven years, where he completed his MBBS and post-graduate studies in Orthopedics and Traumatology. He had passed his foreign medical postgraduate examination in January 2024 to be eligible to practice in India when the same question came back for the second time in his life.
What did he really want? Did he want to become a doctor, or did he want to pursue his passion of becoming a runner?
Only this time the answer has not yet been decided for him.
While working as a resident at Dr Vasantrao Pawar Medical College and Hospital in Nashik, he began to fulfill his long-held dream of becoming a professional athlete. The work was relentless. Hospital shifts stretched endlessly, workouts had to be squeezed into the cracks of the day, and sleep often became a matter of negotiation.
But despite the impossible grind, the results soon came.
THE INDIAN MARATHON AWAKENS FROM SLEEP
Running in only his third ever event, the 28-year-old defeated Olympian T Gopi and 2024 Asian Marathon winner Man Singh to book the Delhi Marathon in April. More importantly, Kartik clocked his personal best of 2:13:10, faster than the Athletics Federation of India (AFI) qualifying standard of 2:15:04 for the Asian Games.
What Kartik did was sudden, almost disruptive. From being an unknown in Indian athletics circles, Kartik suddenly became one of the fastest marathon runners in Indian history.
Just days after winning the Delhi Marathon, Sawan Barwal broke Shivnath Singh’s 48-year-old national record by clocking 2:11:58 in Rotterdam. This meant that within days, T Gopi and Man Singh were no longer the automatic favorites for the Asian Games. Kartik and Sawan entered the conversation.
India’s stagnant marathon scene has reawakened from its slumber.
Speaking to India Today from Nashik, Kartik laughed at the idea of becoming an overnight sensation after his flings in Delhi.
“People call me an overnight success. They don’t see the 10 years of hard work I put behind it,” Kartik said.
“He doesn’t see the days when I cried and said to my dad, OK, I think I need to let go of one thing. I need to stop. Maybe I need to become a doctor or a runner.”
RUNNING AFTER 36 HOUR SHIFTS OF THE HOSPITAL
Kartík Karkera is an anomaly. And it doesn’t take long to understand.
Sustaining a career in medicine is quite difficult in a challenging ecosystem like India. Doing that while training as a professional marathon runner is quite another, especially in a sport that offers very little financial security.
If balancing the two was hard enough, Karkera says that when he returned to India and started working in a hospital, many of his fellow senior doctors were not on board with him. They simply refused to believe that he would want to train as a professional athlete while continuing to work as a doctor.
“I still remember doing a 36-hour shift in the hospital, from 8 in the morning until 8 in the evening the next day. In the hospital, you can’t say no, you shouldn’t say no. You have to see patients, OTs are scheduled. It’s very hectic.”
“But even before I started my shift, I was like, OK, I have to work out in the morning. I’d rather get a good night’s sleep and then leave, but I worked out.”
In the inhuman grind that resident doctors often face in India, he somehow managed to keep running.
Kartik ran at 4 in the morning, ran at 11 at night, sometimes slipping it into hours that were already too full to fit anything else in. There were times he wondered if it was doing his body more harm than good, but he also knew what it was giving him, a kind of silence that nothing else did.
For Kartik, running was not an escape. It became a form of silence, almost meditative in the way it cut through the chaos of everything else.
HOW COVID-19 HELPED KARTIK TURN PRO
The bug of becoming a professional athlete did not bite Kartik in India. The roots of this madness were sown in Russia itself.
“In my second year, I was a little bit stable. Then I decided, okay, every day I have to do 30 minutes for any sport, whether it’s running, swimming. I also shot, a little bit of rifle shooting. I went to the gym,” Kartik said.
At first it was just that, 30 minutes to myself.
Becoming a professional athlete was not even a thought. MBBS was still the main route. Running was a sideline, a passion, a hobby.
Then Covid arrived.
“In 2020, when Covid came, my university was down. So I thought, OK, now I have a lot of time. Let’s run.”
“Also, there were no exams. Most things were online. So I had a lot of time on my hands and just stayed near our university’s 400m track.”
“So one year I did all my runs there. I did 20km around the track, 25km, and then every day, morning, night, all the training. I was there by myself and put in a lot of miles.”
That empty 400m track changed everything.
There were no crowds, no races, no audience. Just miles, repetitions and a growing belief that maybe it’s not just a hobby anymore.
“Then that year actually helped me progress a lot. Then that year I was like, OK, I think I’m talented. I think this is my thing. I can be very, very good at this. I just need to be very consistent.”
It was there, in that lonely beat, that Kartik stopped being a doctor who liked to run and started becoming a runner who happened to be a doctor.
In 2021 and 2022, he became the Russian university champion in the 1500 meters.
Success brought attention. Kartika Karkery’s coach Yury Borzakovskiy (Photo Instagram/@yury_borzakovskiy)
He was noticed by a sponsor from Moscow, Denis Nikiforov, and introduced to him the Olympic winner from Athens 2004 Yuriy Borzakovsky. Under Borzakovsky, says Kartik, his proper professional path began. He learned to train like an elite athlete. He learned how to use professional equipment. More importantly, he learned just how far he could really go.
Medicine also helped.
Kartik completed postgraduate studies in orthopedics and traumatology on a university scholarship and worked with the Olympic Committee in Moscow. He spent time with doctors treating professional athletes, understanding recovery, injuries, workload and how the body breaks down and repairs itself.
“Knowledge is power,” he said.
“I studied a lot and then I took it upon myself. Finally, I have results.”
In 2023, he was already making noise on the Moscow running scene.
“In 2023, I was sixth overall at the Moscow Half Marathon. It was a very good result for me. I ran 1:05:52. I still remember it.”
“They had 1st to 6th place on the podium and then I got on the podium with the best athletes in Russia in the country.
“There was a half-marathon in Moscow just as I was leaving and I won it just before I left the country.”
RETURN TO INDIA AND THE ASIAN GAME DREAM
It is ironic that Kartik left India for Russia to bury his dreams of becoming a professional athlete and that Russia eventually honed that dream.
But returning to India meant starting all over again.
Nobody here knew him. The Moscow events meant little in Indian athletics circles. There were no guarantees, no instant support and no certainty that the gamble would work. But he came back anyway because he wanted to do something for his country, for himself.
Ever since Kartik completed his mandatory year in the hospital, he has created the same buzz in India as well.
This year alone, he won the Tata Mumbai Marathon in 2:19:55 and then the Delhi Marathon in 2:13:10, leaving behind some of the best marathon runners in the country.
In the previous edition of the Asian Games, the gold, silver and bronze medals were won in 2:13:02 and 2:13:39, which already makes Kartik a real contender for medals.
The 28-year-old believes he can shave another two minutes off his timing in good conditions. That would make him a serious contender for the Asian Games gold, a medal that has eluded India since 1951.
So how ready and eager is he for the Asian Games?
Sitting in Nashik consulting patients online between training sessions, Karkera says he still doesn’t know if he will be selected for the Games. No official communication has reached him yet and the final selection list is expected by the end of May.
For now, the marathon doctor remains in Nashik, rising before sunrise and training on roads that are now more familiar to him than hospital corridors. His mornings start with coffee, bananas and beetroot juice; his afternoons are spent consulting with patients; his evenings go back to training again. Much of what he earns still goes back into funding the dream.
The Asian Games are still uncertain. The official notification has not yet arrived and the final shortlist is still awaited. For now, all he has to do is train, wait and believe that the work already done will pay off.
But he also knows what it took to get here, years in Russia, an empty 400m track during Covid, 36-hour shifts in hospital, nights calling home and wondering if he might have to give up one of his lives.
At 15, India asked him to decide between studies and running. Like most middle-class kids, he chose certainty.
More than a decade later, he’s trying to prove that the question itself was wrong.
He didn’t have to choose. He could have been both.
– The end
Published on:
19 Apr 2026 10:59 IST
