Twin Ambitions - My Autobiography

by Mo Farah

  Alan started to see potential in me as a runner. He was convinced that I needed further training, and asked me if I’d like to go along to the local athletics club.

  ‘Borough of Hounslow, it’s a great club,’ Alan said. ‘They’ve coached guys who’ve run for Great Britain. Why don’t you give it a try, Mo? If you don’t like it, you don’t have to go back. But you’re too good to be coached here. There are specialist running coaches at the club. They can give you the training you need to get better.’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I like football.’

  Alan persisted. He was good at that. ‘Look, Mo. You’re the best runner in the school – by a country mile. There’s nothing more for you to learn here. If you want to get better, you owe it to yourself to check out the local club.’

  I nodded. ‘Okay, I’ll go.’

  ‘Great!’ Alan said. ‘Next Tuesday, that’s the next training session. See you then?’

  Honestly, I wasn’t sure about going along to the club. I didn’t know what to expect. But I understood what Alan was saying. I was a decent runner. Training at an athletics club was the logical next step up from competing against the other kids at school. Looking at it from another point of view, Alan, Graham and the school stood to benefit from me training at Borough of Hounslow, since I’d be representing Feltham in the regional athletics championships, which in turn would benefit the profile of the school. I figured going along couldn’t do any harm.

  The following Tuesday, Alan introduced me to the world of the athletics club.

  4

  AN EDUCATION, PART I

  FELTHAM Arena was pretty run-down by the time I joined Borough of Hounslow Athletics Club. The track was badly in need of repairs. There was no grandstand; spectators watched from a grassy bank running along the side of the track, and the officials sat in a glorified Portakabin. In the middle of the track was a muddied football pitch. It wasn’t exactly a glamorous introduction to athletics.

  At that first training session when I was eleven Alan introduced me to Alex McGee, the coach in charge of the junior runners. I had a look around the place, did a few runs around the track with Alex looking on. I exchanged a few words with some of the other runners I recognized from school, though they were not all in the same year as me. Everyone at the club seemed genuinely friendly and welcoming, but I was in two minds as to whether I wanted to go back for another session.

  ‘How did you find it, Mo?’ Alan asked as he drove me home after training.

  I shrugged. ‘It was okay.’

  In truth, I still preferred football.

  I knew I was good at running. The fact I was winning every race going at school told me that I had something in my legs, for sure. But I didn’t know how good I was. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to pursue running, and certainly not as a career. I was more interested in playing football. At the weekends I played Sunday League, turning out at right-back for Bedfont Town in the Surrey Counties Intermediate League against the likes of Cranleigh, Chiddingfold and Farnborough North End. I could sprint up and down that pitch all day. My thing was to reach the by-line, put in a bad cross that some creaking old centre-back would inevitably head clear. Then I’d have to thunder all the way back up the field towards my goal before the opposition could launch a counter-attack. When I wasn’t playing football, I was watching it or thinking about it. Honestly, I never gave a career in athletics a moment’s thought. And if it came down to a choice between playing Sunday League or competing for Borough of Hounslow, there was going to be only one winner.

  The following Tuesday Alan asked me the same question: did I want to go along to the athletics club? This time I hesitated to reply. I was due to play football with some mates on the same night. Instead of telling him the truth, I made up an excuse and muttered something about my family not wanting me to train at the club. ‘My aunt needs me to help out around the house, I can’t get out of it,’ something along those lines. I felt bad about lying to Alan, but my heart was in football.

  Next week, Alan asked me the same question: ‘How about a run at the club, then, Mo?’ I came up with the same excuse about family pressures and went off to play football. For sure, there were times when I went along to train at Feltham Arena, mostly when I wasn’t playing football and didn’t have anything better to do. But my attendance was sporadic at best. Sometimes I went, other times I didn’t. Still, Alan kept on at me. Did I mention that he can be persistent? For weeks on end he tried to convince me that it was worth my time giving athletics a proper chance, that I should commit to regular sessions at the club.

  Everything changed one Tuesday afternoon when I showed up at Alan’s office an hour before training was due to begin at the club. On the days that I trained with Hounslow, I’d leave school at 3.30 p.m., hurry home, grab some food, change into my running gear and head back to the school grounds for around 5–5.15 p.m. and wait to get a lift from Alan to the track. Alan was busy with paperwork and I was kicking my heels sitting on the bench outside his office, looking for something to do – when Alan suddenly chucked me a football and nodded at the hall.

  ‘I’ve got some more work to finish before we can leave,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you have a kick-around in the gym until I’m done, and then I’ll drive you to the club?’

  Brilliant! I took the ball and raced into the gym. For the next thirty minutes I practised keep-uppys, one-twos against the wall, dribbling up and down the flanks. When the half-hour was up, Alan drove me to the club. And, hey, I did a good session on the track.

  ‘Here’s the deal,’ Alan told me on the drive home. ‘How about you show up early at my office before training each week at the club? While you’re waiting, you can play football. You can turn up half an hour early, or even an hour if you like. I’ll be doing work, so it’s no problem for me. Bring Mahad along too. What d’you say, Mo?’

  I nodded. It sounded like a good idea. Winter was drawing near and the weather was turning cold and wet. It was getting dark earlier and earlier, we were running out of places to play football in the evenings, and there was nowhere around where I lived. Playing in a nice, warm gym was just the ticket.

  ‘But,’ Alan warned, ‘I’ll only let you and your mates play on one condition: when your time is up, you’ll promise to come with me to the athletics club for a running session. No ifs or buts.’

  Of all the decisions I’ve had to make in my life, this was an easy one. I’d get to play football and go running at the club. It took me about a second to make up my mind.

  ‘Deal!’ I said.

  Thanks to Alan, I settled into a good routine after that. Each week I’d show up at his office before training to kick a ball around the gym for half an hour or so, often with cousin Mahad and sometimes a few friends in tow. Sometimes Alan would join in too. Mahad loved football, although it’s fair to say he had his limits when it came to the unforgiving English winter. Once, we were playing football during PE in the freezing cold, participating in these little three-a-side games, the idea being that we’d keep moving and keep warm. Much as Mahad loved football, he hated having to run around in the cold, so when the whistle blew, he lashed the ball into the corner of the goal with almost his first kick of the game and promptly wheeled away to celebrate, running all the way back to the changing room to escape the cold. If it had been me, I would’ve kept on playing. Nothing stopped me from a game of footy. But the two of us enjoyed those kick-abouts in the gym.

  At 6 p.m. Alan would call time and drive me across town to Feltham Arena, where I’d join in training with the other kids at Hounslow.

  Training at the club was twice weekly, on Tuesday and Thursday evenings after school. Borough of Hounslow AC had a good reputation for distance running, and by the time I joined, there was a solid core of international competitors based at the club. I was soon making friends. One of the first guys I got to know at Hounslow was Abdi Ali. He also came from Somalia. We’d hang out away from the track too. The two of us would go into town, jump on
the buses and ride around Hanworth and Hounslow, not doing anything, just chilling really, the way kids do. Abdi had potential on the track, but he proved that little bit elusive. From time to time he’d suddenly stop coming to the club. No reason. He just wouldn’t feel like running any more. I wouldn’t see him at the track for ages, then one evening he’d appear out of the blue, grinning at me and taking the mick, like he’d never been away. He once asked Alan Watkinson, ‘Why am I not as fast as Mo? We’re both from the same country!’

  Another early friend at Hounslow was Mohamed Osman. Mohamed was such a talented athlete it was almost ridiculous. He had enormous raw potential. Sadly, he fell in with a bad crowd and never fulfilled his early promise on the track. This is a story I’ve heard more than once – kids I knew growing up who got involved with the wrong type of people. At Feltham there were kids from my year who ended up in gangs, taking drugs, that sort of thing. I wasn’t close to these guys personally, but living in the area, you’d hear the stories from time to time. So-and-so’s in trouble. This person is in prison. I’d hear these stories and think, that could’ve been me slipping between the cracks. Easily. If it hadn’t been for running, who knows where I would’ve ended up? Not somewhere good, I can tell you. Life is tough in Hounslow. Things happen.

  Later on, I’d get to know the senior runners more – the guys who were running for their country, who were being talked about as future hopes on the big stage. But to begin with, I hung out with the likes of Mohamed and Abdi and the other juniors being coached by Alex McGee.

  Alan Watkinson has sometimes mistakenly been referred to as my coach; that’s not true. Alan has been many things to me – mentor, friend, best man at my wedding – but he would be the first to admit that he never actually coached me. My first coach was Alex McGee. He was good to me during my early years at the club – he really looked out for me. I remember meeting him for the first time. He spoke in this slight Scottish accent that I’d never heard before. ‘Where is that accent from?’ I asked myself.

  As a junior coach, Alex took a longer-term view of training. Rather than trying to push us too hard to get the wins and recognition at national level, Alex was more interested in developing us into athletes capable of competing in the senior ranks. Training as a junior is a delicate balancing act. You’re young, you’re still developing physically, and if you put too much pressure on your body too soon, you run the risk of over-training and potentially giving yourself problems when you try to make the step up from the juniors to the senior ranks. If you look at junior athletics records, there’s plenty of kids who’ve won English Schools titles at Under-15 level and then failed to make the grade in the professional ranks. Equally, there are a number of kids whose development is slower and who don’t shine at junior level. Paula Radcliffe, for example, placed 299th when she competed in her first English Schools cross country race. Physically, I was a lot smaller than many of the runners in my age category, and in Alex I was fortunate to have a coach who resisted the temptation to overcook my training programme. He recognized my talent from day one and knew that I needed to be nurtured. Again, it was a case of right time, right place.

  Training was hard but fun. Alex always found a way to keep it interesting. We’d start off with fairly simple stuff, doing repetitions across short distances that are ideal for juniors. Alex also introduced me to the concept of fartlek, a Swedish term meaning literally ‘speed play’, and perhaps better known as interval training. This is where you mix up intense sprint bursts with slower recovery periods so that over time you begin to build up your strength and stamina. On a fartlek session Alex would get us to choose how much effort we were going to put in on the sprints, the idea being that whatever effort we put in would be halved for the recovery period. So, say I did six minutes of intense running, I’d have to do a recovery interval of three minutes at a slower pace.

  I started to get pretty good at running. By the end of a track session, I’d have lapped some of the other athletes a few times. It wasn’t long before I started competing in races.

  My first runs for the club were in cross country because I’d begun training at the club at the end of the track season. I loved running cross country – back then I enjoyed it more than track. The course was usually held in some new and interesting place, and the courses themselves had lots of variations in the hills and dips. I have special memories of some of the courses. Twice a year I competed in the cross-country competition at Parliament Hill, on the fringes of Hampstead Heath. Britain has plenty of good cross country courses but Parliament Hill is right up there as one of my favourites. It’s hosted several English Schools races. It’s a tough, hilly, muddy course, and to win it I had to be at my best.

  Running cross country was a lot less fun when it was cold. In the winter it used to be so chilly that I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes. No matter how fast or hard I ran, how high my pulse rate was, I couldn’t warm up my hands and feet. I tried everything. Hats, gloves, extra pairs of socks. During one race, the cold was brutal. A sharp wind was whipping across the hill, my hands were frozen to the bone and my ears were stinging. It got so bad that I ran the second half of the race with my hands tucked under my armpits in a desperate effort to warm them up.

  Running for the club had an unexpected benefit: it helped me at school. Word got around that I was a star at running. Suddenly the other kids in class had this respect for me. I’d always been a popular kid at Feltham because I was warm-hearted and made people laugh, and I wasn’t afraid of having a go. But doing well at athletics made me something of a local hero at Feltham. Alan likes to tell this story of how, a couple of years after I’d joined the school, our class was taking part in an endurance lesson: two laps of the field, with a few twists and turns to make it interesting. The best kids could finish the course in around nine minutes. I sailed around the course, did it in maybe six or seven minutes. Graham Potter, the head of PE, happened to be observing the class. When the last kid had completed the second lap, Graham called everyone together in a big group.

  ‘Right, you lot,’ he said to the other kids. ‘Get your diaries out. Not you, Mo.’

  Everyone did as they were told. I stood there scratching the back of my head, no idea what was going on. Then Graham pointed to me and said to the others, ‘Mo is going to sign all your diaries. Keep them safe because they’ll be worth something in the future. Mo is going to be a star.’

  Having to sign my classmates’ diaries was slightly weird. There are some people who’d let that kind of stuff go to their heads, but I didn’t think too much of it. That was one of the reasons I had so much love at Feltham. I didn’t go around acting like I was better than anyone else. That’s never been my style. Whatever I’ve done, I’ve always tried to follow the example of my family and be kind and humble. I mean, how hard is that?

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays I trained. At the weekends I raced.

  The way it works in athletics is this: first you win your school races; then you represent your school in the district competitions, racing against other schools from the same borough. When you win those, you get to race for your school in borough events. Win the boroughs and you get the chance to run in the county schools competitions. If you finish in the top eight in the county event, you’re selected to race in English Schools for your county, competing against all the other counties from across England.

  When I was a kid, English Schools was like a mini-Olympics. You had all the best runners from across the country competing in the same race. The field of runners at English Schools was usually strong, and one or two were marked out as the Next Big Thing in British athletics. You’d hear people talking about the times some of these guys were posting at races around the country and you’d think, ‘That guy is looking good. I’m gonna have to watch out for him at the Schools.’

  Having breezed through the school cross country trials, I was entered into the Hounslow Borough Championships, competing for Feltham. Sadly, my English still wasn’t up to scratch and I
had great difficulty understanding the course route. Early on in the race I moved to the front of the lead group and took a wrong turn. By the time I looked over my shoulder and saw the rest of the pack heading in a completely different direction, I’d lost a lot of time on the leaders. I frantically spun around and gave chase to the other kids, clawing back on them metre by metre, fighting my way to the front of the group as we bulleted towards the finish line. A hundred metres to go, I’d managed to push my way to the front of the pack. All of a sudden, this huge kid sprinted away from me to leave me trailing in his wake in second place. I was pretty beat up about it at the time, although Alan told me I’d done brilliantly just to catch up with the others after going the wrong way. For me, I felt I should have done better.

  I told myself, ‘No way am I gonna lose to that kid again.’

  In the classroom I continued to struggle, but when it came to running, I was proving to be a quick learner. I’ve got what they call a good athletics brain. Simply by observing other people in training sessions at the club and trying out different things, I began to build up an idea of how to run a race, which tactics to use in which situations. I had this compulsive desire to improve – this determination to win. There are some extremely talented people who fall into a trap of believing that because they have talent, they don’t have to work hard. I was never fooled by that. I took the toughness and the work ethic that I’d learnt as a child in Gebilay and Djibouti and carried it with me into competitive running. The pain was no big deal. I could handle the pain. If it hurt, it didn’t really matter to me. I would keep on running, no matter what.