The boy with the beard
His appearance as a lumberjack, a Viking or a poet could be misleading as a cover for what it contains. Because the hairy jaw gave him the name by which almost everyone knows him, many of whom do not even know that the person called Barbas is called Felipe Posada Restrepo.
Behind this nickname is an office worker whose profession is engineering and who works in technological matters for the sake of being an adult. And behind him is the boy from San Carlos School who signed up for every basketball, football, volleyball or handball game there was and who one day, in his early years, discovered athletics as the sport he would eventually sign up for for life.
But that little boy, infatuated to the core with the game, came up against the barriers that adults sometimes put in the way of dreams and did not let him run the distances he dreamed of running. Either because they were too long for his age, or because he was perhaps too young for that. It was then that that piece of childhood was saved until 2013 for the Olympic Day Race that took place in Medellín that Sunday. Five kilometers that brought little Felipe back to life and reminded the now adult that what he liked was running between hurdles and on asphalt. From then on, a child, already a barbet, did not stop adding meters and crossing finish lines.
Adulthood, with its studies, bills, trips, languages, love for beer, girlfriends and jobs, came with its share; but childhood reserved that obstinacy for the game without pause, without mind, for the game itself. That was when one day, without the preparation that the manuals dictate, he did his first marathon, and his second and a few more on the streets and in the mountains. Maybe that was when the injuries appeared that also knew how to put up barriers to say “that’s it.” But that running beard continued forward, a little wiser now, and found where to give maturity to his passion. He trained with the Terret athletics team, crossed paths with cycling and swimming and handed his process, as a responsible adult would do, over to the hands of Felipe González, his coach. The “profe” promised him to walk again without pain and gave him direction to the dream of the big boy that Barbas has: to qualify for the Boston Marathon. To do so, he will have the task of stopping the clock in less than three hours in the Berlin Marathon. Today, his best record is around 3 hours and 45 minutes.
Felipe Posada, the boy who played at playing and who is now dedicated to being an engineer, has 42,195 meters ahead of him in a land where his appearance will confuse him with some Bavarian beer drinker from the landscape, but if you look closely, you will clearly see a dream that traveled from Medellín to Berlin and that seems ambitious in times of so much training, postponements, early mornings, diets and resignations: to run one more marathon, or as he would say in other times, to spend 5 more minutes in the park.
Cristian Marín - Alternating Current