Paul Schmidt-Hellinger: Medicine and Mileage 

In most people’s minds, high-performance sport and hospitals couldn’t be further apart. One is for the world’s fittest, strongest individuals. The other is for those whose bodies are at their weakest. 

Not many people know both worlds intimately – Paul Schmidt-Hellinger is one of the few who do. He’s the Head of the Lung Transplant Program at one of Germany’s premier hospitals, and an extremely accomplished runner – he is a former German national 50K record holder and he has a marathon PR of 2:19.  

Paul combines two worlds: medicine and mileage.

When he compares the two worlds, he sees more similarities than differences.  

“Being transplanted is high performance sports. You have to think in advance, you have to prepare, you have to think long term, you have to plan. So the things we do in high performance sports are adapted, but you need the same setup in a transplant program.”  

In fact, Paul’s familiarity with elite sport was one of the reasons he got the job he has now.  

“That is why my boss wanted to have me,” Paul explains. “You have to show up for your patients and make your patients a plan, not just as a doctor, as a kind of coach, because sometimes they stay for 1, 2, 3, even 10 months in the hospital.” 

Paul’s performance mindset doesn’t just extend to his work and training, it’s built into every facet of his life – it has to be.  

“If I do a full run commute, I have to leave the house at 5:40 am because then I'm here, at the hospital, at 6:55 am. I have a shower for five minutes and have five minutes to prepare, because at 7:15 or 7:10 am, I'm in the intensive care unit and I do bronchoscopy for freshly transplanted patients. So, then I'm in the hospital from 7 am to 4 or 5 pm, mostly till 5 pm. So 10 hours.” 

After his shift, Paul gets the second half of his daily training done on the commute home. The final distance for the day is dictated by what feels like a math equation involving train timings, the distances between stations, and the number of people on the train. 

“Every next station of the train is 10 minutes running away, so if I arrive at the station after 5K, and the train just left two minutes ago, I have 18 minutes until the next train comes, so I’ll run to the next station which is 10 minutes away,” Paul explains. 

Long days. Harsh weather. Demanding miles.

If his work schedule was not already challenging enough to balance with his running goals, he is also the father of two children, aged five and two, so things don’t slow down much once he steps through the door. 

“At around six latest, I am at home and then I have dinner with the kids and if I'm really tired I try to get the kids to sleep and have some rest,” Paul says. “I really want to spend these last hours of the day with my kids.”  

In his mid twenties, before he had kids, Paul completed his doctoral thesis, which also provided an opportunity to see how fast he could get with more rest and less stress.  

“I was part-time in the clinic, part-time writing the thesis in the library and I kind of tried out professional running, 100-mile weeks and even more, 120-mile weeks,” he recounts. “I realized running a hundred miles a week really makes me tired and really makes me more egocentric. I developed a character I didn’t like for myself and I started getting injured.” 

From hospital lights to city nights.

The CEP OMNISPEED BOWTECH - for a quick commute to work.

While all the science might suggest Paul’s environment for performance had improved, one important factor had been ignored – the mind. Now he’s back to full-time work at the hospital, his schedule is far from optimal for performance, but the perspective his work gives him has brought far more joy to his running. 

“Being grateful for the talent, for the heart, for the lungs, for the legs, for the brain, being grateful for this, for being, not having a bad illness, that's what I see every day. People who are not in luck, who have a bad diagnosis, this gratefulness for being what I am.” 

Earlier this year, Paul got to experience life on the other side when he had surgery on a herniated disk, but the surprising outcome of the surgery was that a few injuries he’d been nursing for years – a bad knee and an inflamed heel – finally had time to heal.  

One year post-surgery, he’s actually fitter than he was before.

But despite being back on track health-wise at age 40, Paul’s priorities have shifted away from simply being as fast as he can possibly be.  

“It’s family first and the running should support my work, my mental stability.” 

Paul has realised that whether he’s running 30 minutes for 10K or 35 minutes, he’s still chasing the same feeling.  

“In the end, if you just don't look at the watch and just have this feeling, it's the same feeling. That's actually what I need and that's actually what stabilizes my mind.”

Same commitment, different uniform.

Paul is a performance athlete in the sense that he has, and always will, train to get better, whether that means he’s better than last week or, as it was in his twenties, better than he’s ever been before. But too often we put performance athletes in one category and athletes who run for their mental or physical health in another. 

That thinking is too simple. 

Paul runs for his head, his health, and his patients – it’s only when he treats himself as a high-performance athlete that he can treat his patients like one too.  

“50 miles per week, or 70 to 80 kilometers, this is the baseline dosage of running that I need to be in this cognitive job. I'm a consultant here and I lead the lung transplant program, so this is the mileage I need so that my brain is working for 10 hours.” 

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The contrast between Paul’s challenging work and the freedom and simplicity of running, can be likened to something we can all understand – a day off after a long week, or a cosy bed after a week spent sleeping in a tent. It’s the contrast between his two worlds that makes running such a joy for him.  

“This morning I had one hour, 15K of good normal running and it gave me so much energy. I have a positive mood all day for the round, for the difficult cases in the afternoon. So, the running really gives me energy.”  

Perhaps ironically, it’s not training science or physiology that Paul’s story can teach us, it’s something much more intangible: that purpose and perspective might be more important than perfect training.