It turns out Jakob Ingebrigtsen doesn’t just build world-class fitness, he also builds one of the more impressive Pokémon collections you’ll see in your life.
The Olympic 5000m champion recently gave fans a tour of his home office, revealing shelves packed with sealed booster packs, graded cards, binders organized by era, and a level of detail that suggests this isn’t a casual hobby.
It’s something he’s poured (almost) the same focus into that he brings to training.
Ingebrigtsen explained that he started collecting again a few months ago, after originally getting into Pokémon as a kid. He says he tried to find his childhood collection years back, but they never turned up, which put a bit of a pause on his interest for a while.
The spark returned during a rehab trip to Italy, where a stretch of unexpected downtime led him into several local card shops. From there, the collection grew quickly, and, by his own admission, a bit obsessively.
Today he’s collected more than 1,800 individual cards, 130 sealed products, and 75 graded cards, though he jokes that plenty of the “less important” cards aren’t entered into his system at all.
The office space is a mix of museum display and working archive: binders sorted by set, vintage bulk stacked neatly, and rare packs from the earliest releases, including base set, Jungle, Fossil, and high-value EX-era packs he picked up in bulk deals.
Some pieces clearly mean more than others, and Charizard, unsurprisingly, features more than once: base set versions, gold stars, reverses, and multiple graded copies. “If I like a card, I tend to want more than one,” he said, holding a page containing six near-identical Charizards.
His wife, he admits, may not share the same enthusiasm for the organization system, but she does enjoy opening packs with him. “It’s a human thing,” he said. “You hope for something good, and when it happens, it feels great.”
With racing commitments, travel, and an Olympic-level training schedule, few fans would expect Ingebrigtsen to devote this much time to a hobby, but it fits neatly into the rhythm of his life. When injuries pop up or training eases, sorting cards offers structure. When he’s competing well, the hobby’s still there waiting in the background. And unlike racing, this collection will last.
