From Couch to IronMan: How X-Team Engineer Jedrzej Kurylo Made Endurance Sports His Second Career

He started running to lose weight. Now he runs 60 to 75 km a week, trains with an Olympic-level coaching formula and has completed a 70.3 IronMan — 1.9 km of swimming, 90 km of cycling and 21.1 km of running — in Gdynia, Poland.

That shift didn't happen overnight. For Jedrzej Kurylo, a software engineer at X-Team based in Poland, the transformation from casual jogger to competitive endurance athlete tracks closely with a simple realization: without regular exercise, he gets sad. "If I don't exercise frequently, I get sad and grumpy," he says. "I feel bad, both in my body and mind."

In this story, Kurylo explains how a wide-ranging sports habit — running, triathlon, scuba diving, bouldering and more — became a cornerstone of his life, how a structured training approach transformed his running, and what advice he'd give to anyone who keeps finding reasons not to start.

The Race That Changed Everything

Kurylo's sports life is broad by design. He dives when he travels to good diving areas — he completed a scuba diving course in Thailand during an X-Team trip — and he's done weight training, CrossFit, bouldering and mountainboarding. When he travels, he hunts for outdoor activities wherever he lands.

But running is where his heart is. It started simply: he wanted to get in shape. What happened instead was a deepening addiction. "I'm addicted to being physically tired," he says. "It might sound strange, but it's a great feeling." The endorphin loop took hold, and running became the axis around which everything else orbited.

Triathlon arrived as a natural extension of that hunger for challenge. What attracted Kurylo to the format was its complexity — three disciplines, three sets of logistics, one race strategy that has to account for all of them. "I love triathlon because it combines three different sports, which makes it really challenging," he says. "Complicated logistics and the need to actually plan the race and have a strategy make it an even bigger challenge."

His biggest achievement to date was completing the 70.3 IronMan triathlon in Gdynia, Poland. The 70.3 designation refers to the total distance in miles: a 1.9 km swim, a 90 km cycle and a 21.1 km run. Crossing that finish line, he says, delivered the feeling he chases in every race.

There was also the marathon he ran in 2018 — the original course from Marathon to Athens, Greece. He had planned to do it once, just to check it off. The course is notoriously hard, climbing slowly uphill for most of its distance. It took longer than he had hoped. He enjoyed it anyway and promptly committed to running one marathon a year. The Budapest marathon was next on his calendar, followed by the IronMan 70.3 in New Zealand later that year.

Structure, Science and the Warsaw Triathlon Club

For most of the years he ran, Kurylo kept things loose. He went out, ran at a comfortable pace and covered whatever distance felt right. It worked well enough — until he decided to prepare properly for the 70.3 IronMan and realized that comfortable pacing wasn't going to get him there.

The tool he turned to was the Daniels running formula, a training methodology developed by Jack Daniels, a legendary running coach and coach of Olympic athletes. The approach prescribes specific workouts — long runs at an easy pace, interval sessions, sprints — each calibrated to a runner's current fitness level. The results were immediate. "I've started making a lot more progress," Kurylo says.

Most of his structured runs he does alone. But the training environment that shifted his motivation the most was a community one: the Warsaw International Triathlon Club, or WITC. He joined WITC after deciding to take triathlon seriously, and the effect went beyond shared track sessions. "Joining WITC has really helped me find more motivation to train," he says. "We train together, we go to races together, and we hang out together. I got to know a lot of great people through the club."

His cycling improved alongside his running. He does a longer ride — typically 50 to 70 km — with WITC once a week and uses his bike for daily transport when the weather cooperates. Swimming, by his own admission, remained his weakest discipline. During triathlons he was usually one of the few competitors still doing breaststroke while the field swam front crawl. He had recently started taking swimming classes, with front crawl the target skill.

X-Team's Unleash+ budget has played a supporting role in all of this: Kurylo used it to cover race entry fees and to fund the audiobooks he listens to on long runs. The community bounties offered through XHQ, he says, motivated others around him and gave him extra reason to keep showing up.

Goals, Milestones and Advice for Anyone Not Yet Running

Kurylo's near-term targets are precise. He wants to finish a marathon in under four hours and complete the 70.3 IronMan in under six — goals he was chasing within the same year. Looking further out, he has his sights on running 5 km in under 20 minutes, and in 2020 or 2021, completing a full IronMan.

For anyone who keeps delaying the start — who finds reasons to skip the run or never signs up for the race — his advice comes in two parts.

The first is social: find a training partner or join a club. "Having people around you to train with helps a lot," he says. "Training is more fun and long runs feel shorter when you have someone to talk to." A club also raises the stakes in a useful way — when someone is waiting for you to show up, the excuses lose their grip.

The second part is about patience. Start slow. Run often before you run far. Rest without guilt. "Train on a regular basis and the results will come," he says. "Celebrate even the smallest races, the smallest wins, and the smallest improvements. And never compare yourself against others, as there will always be people around that will be better than you. Only compare yourself against your former self."

It's the same discipline-over-intensity logic that underpins good software engineering — build the habit, measure your own progress, iterate. For Kurylo, the finish line is always the next one.

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