“As strange as it may sound,” Antonia Stelikou says, “my family was not into sports at all.”
Nobody had played a team sport. Or really run, competitively or otherwise. Nobody had considered what it might mean to build a life around pushing your body to the limits. Stelikou grew up expecting a life that had nothing to do with a start line (least of all multiple). She was 30 years old when she decided to take up running, mostly to get out of the house and get some exercise. It was COVID; gyms and public spaces were closed. Seven years later, she has become the fastest Cypriot woman at the Athens Authentic Marathon, a brand ambassador for Under Armour and Ice Power, and a long-distance athlete twice returned from injuries that could easily have put a stop to her ever setting foot on a road at all.
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Antonia Stelikou is an agronomist, a lecturer, and a long-distance athlete. She holds a Master’s degree in Education for the Environment and Sustainability, and is currently pursuing a doctorate in the same field. She teaches at a college, a university, and technical schools in Cyprus, and works on scientific research projects alongside her academic and commercial commitments.
Antonia Stelikou’s beginning is unusual for an athlete now holding top positions in races across Cyprus. She fell in love with running, in her own words, by accident. She had joined a gym in her late twenties, and remembers running for an hour at a time on the treadmill just to tick off the cardio box for the week. Then COVID hit the island. The gyms closed. “During COVID, we had to go outside if we wanted to exercise,” she says. She began running on the road alone. At first it was 10 kilometres, then 15, then 18, then a regular 20. Her first. She was 30 years old.
Then a running coach noticed her running. “He saw that I could progress in the sport, and took me on,” she says. The coach was Giannis Aresti, a name she returns to throughout the interview with visible gratitude. He is, in her words, the person who discovered her talent, who supported her at the start, and who is still supporting her today. Her first race was the Run For Autism 10km in Ayia Napa. She finished first with a time of 40 minutes. It was the day her whole relationship to running changed.
Her family did not, at first, know what to do with any of it.
“At the beginning they had reactions like, ‘you’re too old’ to do this competitively. At 30, my parents had other expectations of me,”
she says.
What convinced them, over time, however, were not the verbal arguments but watching their daughter, day by day, race by race, keep going, even when it was inconvenient, uncomfortable, on some days, near impossible. Watching her win. Watching her finish. “Now that they’ve seen the journey I’ve taken, they see that I try, that it fills me, and that I love it,” she says. “They are proud of me.”
The training required to sustain the running journey Antonia Stelikouis is on is…punishing. Antonia estimates she runs 110 to 120 kilometres a week in the build-up to a marathon, with two interval sessions and a long run that also contains speed work. She trains throughout the year, in the windy winters, in the brutal summer humidity and heat so that she is ready for the Autumn and Spring running seasons. She does long runs of 30 kilometres in temperatures most people would not even walk to the local periptero under.
She does all of this around a professional life that does not stop for training.
“I might be, and I have been for years, living on five hours of sleep. Truly doing it all, every day,”
Antonia says.
She wakes up at 6 am for her session of the day, whether on the road or on the track. Antonia showers in a rush, eats something in a rush, teaches at a local technical school, comes home for half an hour, drives to the college or university (depending on the day) for lectures, fits in gym work if there is time, and shoots commercials for her brand deals on weekends when she can.
“You gain something, you lose something. That’s how it goes. Certainly my free time is what I lose,”
she says.
The 2023 Athens Authentic Marathon was one of her first major races and the one that made her the fastest Cypriot woman at the event. All her previous training came together on 12 November 2023 in Athens. Antonia lined up at the start of the Athens Authentic Marathon, the world’s oldest marathon course, run from the town of Marathon into the Panathenaic Stadium in central Athens along the route Pheidippides is said to have first taken in 490 BC. She finished the 42 kilometres in 3 hours, 15 minutes and 34 seconds. “There is something truly moving about that race,” she muses. “The people who cheer you when you are tired. It gives you chills. Even more so when you finish there at the Panathenaic Stadium.” The scale of what she had done was clearer at home than it had been on the course.
On her return to Larnaca, Antonia was chosen to carry the authentic marathon flame from Athens into her home city, and to deliver it to the Mayor of Larnaca. What had begun on a road outside her house during lockdown had, in three years, made her a public figure at home.
Antonia has, in the past four years, come back from two serious injuries. The first, in 2021, was a torn meniscus that required surgery. It kept her out of any sort of serious training for a long time. The second, last year at the Run for Autism Half-Marathon Race, was a stress fracture. She was 13 kilometres into the 21 km when she felt something snap. “My leg was in pain, but I kept going. There was no other choice. I had to finish.” She ran the final eight kilometres of the race on a stress-fractured leg. “I don’t know why I continued,” she says now. “I could have done worse damage. But thank God it was not worse.” What is even more remarkable is that Stelikou placed second in the women’s category of that race, despite having run almost half of it in excruciating pain. The moment she returns to in her head, whenever a training session or a race becomes difficult, is that one. “You ran eight kilometres with a broken bone. If you are strong, and each of us is strong, you can do anything.”
The comeback from the second injury nearly did not happen.
“At the start, you feel disappointed and question whether you will ever run again. You keep asking yourself, why did this happen to me? For it to happen means I have something serious. I felt I would never reach the level I was at before,”
she says.
She had been active in every aspect of her life, whether work or sport. Suddenly, she was tied to the couch for 24 hours a day. “The mental space I was in at the start was not good. It was heavy.” She started running again slowly, three months in. “What I learnt was that the body doesn’t forget,” she says, “but it needs patience to come back.”
Her first race after the stress fracture was the Grand Prix Road Race in Larnaca, a distance of 10km in January 2026. Two weeks before the race, she nearly quit. “I was very afraid,” she says. What got her through it was her coach. He ran the 10 km alongside her, at her pace, because he knew how mentally fragile she was. She finished third. Her time was at the level she had been running at before the injury. “He was next to me the whole race,” she says. “I kept saying, ‘I can’t, I’m shaking, I want to stop.’ And him saying, ‘You can. You can. Think how strong you are. You ran with a broken bone. It’s not possible that you can’t now.’”
The fear has not yet fully disappeared.
“The slightest thing, and I think, ‘Panagia mou, is it going to break again?’” Antonia says. “But I have learnt that you’re scared because running is a sport where you exhaust your whole body.” She now runs alongside the fear, and will not let it take over her love for running.
What running has done to her, Antonia says, is change her sense of what she is capable of. “It has made me more disciplined. I feel it has made me a stronger woman.” Her message to young Cypriot women watching her career is to not stop pushing forward to achieve their goals, whatever they may be. “Never give up. Whether it’s running or something else that fills you, that makes you feel confidence, that makes you feel happy. Never give up.”
Antonia Stelikou is a guest on The Future Makers: Women Building Cyprus. The full episode, in Greek with English subtitles, includes her reflections on the two injuries that shaped her career, why she believes Cypriot cities need safer training facilities for women, and how she balances a professional life across teaching, research and elite athletics, is available to watch now.
The Future Makers Podcast is a series of in-depth conversations about how future-makers are made, in Cyprus and beyond. Host Annetta Benzar sits down with people who are a leading force in our shared future and looks past the titles. Together, they travel back to the people and moments that shaped them, walk through the choices and challenges they are living through now, and look ahead to the futures they are trying to build.
Women Building Cyprus follows women whose lives and decisions are changing what this island can be.
A production of The Future Media.
