by Mo Farah
Alan likes to say that I never won a big race the first time I competed in it. He’s got a point. Competing in the borough races was very different from running against twenty-odd kids in my class at Feltham. Not all junior athletics coaches shared Alex McGee’s philosophy of putting long-term development over short-term gain. There were some big kids in the same age category as me and at first I found it hard to win races.
Losing a race was hard to stomach. I hated losing more than anything. In my first year at Feltham I took part in the school relay, running the last leg of the race. I started in lane six. With three legs of the relay done, the race was on a knife-edge. The kid handed me the baton. I snatched it and sprinted away to win the race by a huge margin. Graham and Alan had been watching from the side of the track. I noticed them swapping a look after the race. Alan approached me, shaking his head.
‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to disqualify you,’ he said.
I frowned. ‘What for?’
Alan pointed at my feet. I looked down and realized my mistake. I wasn’t in lane six any more. Somewhere along my mad dash to the finish line I’d accidentally moved out of my lane.
‘You’re in the wrong lane, Mo,’ Alan went on. ‘Sorry, but it’s the rules.’
In the heat of the moment I flipped and launched the baton through the air with this huge throw, furious with myself for making such a simple mistake. The baton landed somewhere on the other side of the track. Losing my temper that day was a mistake. I rarely lose my cool these days, but I hated that feeling of being beaten. When I crossed the finish line in a counties race in second or third place, I might not show it, but I’d be hurting inside for a few days. I’d go away and mull over my defeat, asking myself why I’d lost the race, what I could have done differently, how I could improve. By the time the next race would come around, I’d be even more determined to beat the kids who’d finished ahead of me. You’d find me at Feltham Arena in the evenings doing extra training sessions. Pushing myself harder. Wanting to win.
The second time I ran a race, I usually won.
After a few months I began competing in the county championships for Middlesex Schools. My first race at that level, I got revenge over the kid who’d beaten me near the finish line in the borough race, easily placing ahead of him. I only finished fourth, though. At the start of the race everyone took off in a flurry of colour and excitement, when I felt this blow land on the small of my back, like someone had struck at me with a hammer. The force of the blow knocked me off my feet. In the rush to take the lead, one of the other kids had pushed me over. Whether it was deliberate or not was impossible to tell. Accidents happen in races; there are lots of you running in close proximity and sometimes an arm or a leg catches someone. It was a foul day. The ground was thick with mud, the wind biting and fierce, and I was wearing flat trainers because I didn’t own a pair of spikes. Under the circumstances, I could have been forgiven for throwing in the towel, but I was determined to win that race. I scraped myself off the ground and immediately set about chasing down the lead pack, running through the course as fast as I could. I came close, but not close enough. At the end of the race Alan threw an arm around me.
‘That was a remarkable achievement,’ he told me. ‘To claw your way back to fourth like that. Well done, Mo.’
I smiled. But all I could think was, ‘I didn’t win …’
Alan was a constant source of encouragement. He never gave up on me. He drove me to training. He took time off from his weekends whenever his teaching commitments allowed him to come and watch me compete, travelling up and down the country, cheering me on from the sidelines in the borough and county championships. He’d make sure I stuck to the training programme Alex McGee set for me at the club. Whenever I needed help, Alan was there for me. I remember one time I climbed aboard the club coach on a Saturday morning. We were off to race somewhere in another county. I had no money for lunch and didn’t know what I was going to do for food. Alan must have seen the look of concern on my face because he stopped beside my seat on the coach and asked if I had any money for lunch. I shook my head. Just like that, Alan dug out his wallet and handed me a crisp £5 note. I was touched. Five pounds was a lot of money to me back then. Alan didn’t have to do that. It came out of his own pocket, not the school. But he genuinely believed in my talent. He wanted to see all his students from Feltham succeed to the best of our abilities. And if that meant helping me out with things like lunch money, he was willing to do it. Without Alan, I would never have been able to take those first few steps towards my Olympic dream.
You might wonder why my mum, or my Aunt Kinsi, didn’t watch me race. The truth is, in Somali culture people don’t really view running in the same light as we do here. If you go out for a run in Somalia, people think there’s something wrong with you. To them, running is a crazy man’s sport. You should only be running if there’s a good reason – fetching water, perhaps, or escaping danger. In their eyes, the idea of someone running in a pure race format is puzzling. I think Mum viewed my running in this way. As a sort of hobby – something I did in my spare time to burn off energy. She didn’t attend my races because it never occurred to her that running was something to be taken seriously. The same was true for Aunt Kinsi. As it would be for most Somalis.
One Thursday after training at the club Alan reminded me that I had an event at St Albans on the Sunday. He wanted to know how I intended to get there. ‘Are you going to go on the coach with the other runners, Mo?’
‘Coach?’ I repeated, nodding. ‘Yeah. Cool.’
In those days, although I’d been in England a couple of years, my English was still rough around the edges. I could have a conversation, but there were gaps in my vocabulary and sometimes I didn’t understand what people were saying. Instead of admitting that I was confused, I’d simply smile and nod and pretend that I understood. If that drew a puzzled response from the other person, I figured I’d given them the wrong answer, so I’d change my ‘yes’ to a ‘no’, quickly shaking my head. In my mind, it was preferable to owning up that I didn’t know what the other person was saying.
On the Sunday morning I got up and waited for the coach to arrive. No sign of it. An hour passed. Still nothing. It was getting dangerously close to the start of the race and I was starting to think that the driver had forgotten to pick me up and gone without me. Just then I gazed out of the window and saw a car pull up outside our house. Alan bolted out of the car.
‘Mo, what’s happened?’ he exclaimed breathlessly. ‘Why didn’t you get on the coach?’
Alan had gone to watch the race, arrived at St Albans and waited for me to get off the coach. When I had failed to emerge, he’d driven to my house to come looking for me. As he explained all this, I scratched my head.
‘I thought you meant the coach was going to pick me up from my house,’ I said.
There was no time to lose. I grabbed my stuff and hurried into the car with Alan. We raced north to St Albans on the M25 and made it to the course in the nick of time. I won easily, having almost missed the race.
My cousin Mahad used to come with us on the trips. I’d ride up front with Alan, while Mahad sat in the back seat singing or making jokes. It was nice to have him tag along. He was the more vocal of the two of us. When we weren’t taking the mick, I’d take the opportunity to brush up on my English, pointing to things in the fields at the side of the road and saying the English words to Alan. ‘Cow.’ ‘Sheep.’ ‘Tree.’ Alan just nodded. I don’t think he realized how poor my English was back then.
We had some great fun at the club. One night, close to Christmas, we went out for a run along a regular route through Feltham. As we set off, someone decided we should go carol singing instead. We went from house to house and knocked on each front door. I’d never sung Christmas carols before. As soon as the owners answered, everyone began singing. In return, they gave us sweets. It was the weirdest thing I’d ever seen.
I soon progressed from the county championsh
ips to English Schools, representing Middlesex. At the same time, I was competing for the Borough of Hounslow in the athletics league. But there were still times when I was reluctant to go training or wanted to hang out with my friends and play football. As any athletics coach will tell you, football and training don’t go well together. The kicks to the legs take the speed out of you; the general wear and tear of running up and down on the pitch, striking a ball – it impacts on your running ability. But I can be stubborn, and at that age I just wanted to play. As I progressed through the junior ranks, from school races to borough, then county and finally English Schools, it soon became obvious that I couldn’t keep up both running and football. One or the other had to go.
By the age of twelve, I’d reached English Schools level and was close to achieving something special. The top eight runners in English Schools events got to wear an England vest and had the chance to compete against Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in the National Championships. Whoever won those races was then selected to represent Great Britain in the junior European Championships. The thought of representing my country in athletics was a huge motivation for me. Britain was my home now. It’s the place where I first went to school, where I made friends and learnt to become a runner.
For me, competing for my country was the ultimate goal.
5
AN ARSENAL KIT
IN 1996, when I was twelve years old, I was selected to run in the annual English Schools Cross Country Championships in Weymouth, Dorset as a reward for finishing second in the counties race. It was my first race at national level.
Weymouth was a 4.5 kilometre race. I’d started out running 3 kilometre races and worked my way up to the longer distance from there, with the length of the races increasing year by year. But this was my first race at 4.5 kilometres, and on top of that, the race was open to both Year Eight and Year Nine students. I was competing against 300 kids, about half of whom were older than me, some as old as fourteen, and I was smaller than most of the other Year Eights. Before the start of the race, Alan had given me a pep talk.
‘Look, Mo,’ he said. ‘You’ve done really well just to get here. If you come in the top fifty, you’ll have done an amazing job. Even top hundred would be a good result.’
Alan was careful to manage my expectations. For sure, there’s a danger in telling someone they can win a race because if it doesn’t happen for whatever reason, they’re crushed with disappointment. Psychologically, losing when you expect to win is harder to process than winning when you don’t expect to place that high. No doubt Alan saw the size of the field, realized that many of the other runners were physically more developed than me, and wanted to make sure I didn’t feel under any pressure to win as easily as I’d done at the borough and school competitions. But I saw things differently. This was my first English Schools run. I wanted to win.
The race started. The pace was ridiculous. I focused on my own race and didn’t worry too much about what the guys in front were doing. I tore round the first bend in the middle of this huge pack of runners, most of whom were twice the size of me. At that point I was down in a hundredth place and quite a way back from the front. As we started making our way round the various loops of the track, the thought suddenly hit me: ‘I’m faster than most of these guys.’ Slowly but surely, I began overtaking kids in the chasing pack. After 1 kilometre I was somewhere in the top fifty. After 2 kilometres I’d made it into the top thirty. By the time we clocked up 3 kilometres, with 1.5 left, I had managed to catch up with the lead group of nine runners, with the top eight automatically selected to represent England in the Nationals. The chance to represent my country was in my grasp.
As we scudded round the final bend I nudged ahead of the eighth-placed runner. Now I was top eight. I sprinted towards the finish line with a couple of hundred metres to go. But as I closed in, the kid immediately behind me, the one I’d overtaken, kicked on and caught up with me. We were neck and neck. I was so close to that England top. I kicked again, pushing fiercely, giving it everything as I fought to cling on to eighth place and the England spot. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the strength in my legs. With less than 50 metres to go, my rival surged ahead of me. I crossed the finish line in ninth place.
I was bitterly disappointed. I remembered what Alan had said about top fifty being a great result, but to come so close to a qualification place only to lose it at the very last moment was gut-wrenching. Alan was waiting for me at the finish line. He came over, put an arm round my shoulder and said, ‘You did really well, Mo. Don’t forget that. Ninth place is a fantastic result, you know.’
I forced a smile. Alan was right. I had no right to expect to be anywhere near the front of the pack, considering my disadvantage in age and size. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the end of the race. I’d given it everything and come up short.
‘Run like that again and I reckon you’ll come back next year and win it,’ Alan added. ‘Tell you what. If you win the next English Schools Cross Country, I’ll buy you a football kit. Can’t say fairer than that, can I?’
My eyes went wide. ‘For real?’
Alan nodded. ‘Any kit you want.’
‘Arsenal,’ I replied instantly.
Arsenal were my team. As a young kid, I sort of followed Manchester United. When I first moved to Britain, lots of the kids at school supported the Gunners, and after a while I started looking out for their results. They had top-class players like Tony Adams, Ray Parlour, Ian Wright, Dennis Bergkamp, and they had just appointed Arsène Wenger as manager. He was in the process of revolutionizing football in England. Suddenly, they were my team. Now I had the chance to wear their shirt. That was all the motivation I needed to win.
I trained all-out for the next English Schools Cross Country Championships. The 1997 championships were going to be held in Newark and I had my eye on that Arsenal kit. First up, though, I had the English Schools Track & Field Championships, due to take place in Sheffield in July (the Cross Country Championships take place early in the year, with the Track & Field Championships held in the summer). In order to qualify for the finals, I had to post a top-eight finish for Feltham in the Middlesex Schools Athletics Championship. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t have been a problem. Then, one week before the regionals, disaster struck. I was playing football in the field with Mahad before athletics training. It was a warm afternoon, the sun was out and we thought we’d kick the ball around outside rather than play inside the stuffy sports hall. I booted the ball really hard. It soared through the air and landed on top of the sports hall roof.
I’d kicked the ball over, so it was my job to fetch it. Grabbing hold of the gutter, I boosted myself onto the roof, scooped up the ball and threw it back down to Mahad. As I lowered myself from the roof, however, I slipped and felt this intense burning pain as something sharp scraped against my right leg. I stacked it, hit the ground and looked down at my leg. There was blood everywhere. The sharp edge of the gutter had ripped a gash from the top of my thigh all the way down to the back of my knee. I clamped my hand over the wound to stop the blood gushing out.
My immediate thought was, ‘I can’t let Alan find out.’ I wasn’t even thinking about the county championships at that moment. All I cared about was not getting Alan in trouble. He’d been kind enough to let Mahad and me kick the ball and I worried that he might get the blame for letting us play unsupervised. A few moments later he came rushing out of his office. He must have heard the noise from me falling off the roof. Alan asked me what was going on. I mumbled something about falling over whilst going for the ball. After he helped me clean up the wound, Alan drove me to A&E at West Middlesex Hospital, where I had several stitches in my leg. Once I got the all-clear from the doctor, Alan took me to the athletics club for a meeting with Alex McGee. The look on Alex’s face told me it wasn’t good news.
‘No Middlesex Schools for you this weekend,’ he said. ‘You can’t run carrying an injury like that. Out of the question.’
I
was gutted. Missing the Middlesex county championship meant that I wouldn’t make the cut for the English Schools Track & Field that summer in Sheffield. I was doubly determined to win the next English Schools Cross Country race the following March at the County Showground in Newark, a few days before my fourteenth birthday. I gave maximum effort in the build-up and didn’t miss a training session that season. I ran well all year and felt in great shape going into the competition.
Then I got off to the worst possible start. Someone clipped my heel at the beginning of the race. I tripped, lost my footing, stumbled to the ground. The leading pack took off ahead of me while I scraped myself off the ground. No big deal. I just had to run even faster. There was no way I wasn’t going to win that race. Not after having put so much effort into training.
At the 1 kilometre mark I was down in twentieth place. I steadily worked my way up the group, picking off the other runners one by one. Winding it up. With less than 1 kilometre left of the course, I caught up with the ten guys leading the race. This time I had learnt my lesson from Weymouth the year before. Instead of kicking on early and wearing myself out, I just kept pace with them. Pushing and pushing, burning off my opponents. I had to fight hard to keep the pace. It was really windy that day and I was running into a hard breeze. But, with 500 metres to go I drew level with the race leader. At 400 metres to go I left him in my shadow and broke clear of the chasing pack. First place was up for grabs. I dug deep, concentrated on holding my position and maintaining my pace. All I had to do now was hold it for another 200 metres, kick on for the last 100, and then the English Schools title was mine.
All of a sudden, this kid flew past me, going crazy fast. He was wearing the Durham colours. I recognized him immediately. He was a friend of mine, Malcolm Hassan. A Sunderland kid, born and bred. Talked in a northern accent so thick you could almost stir it. There was still 300 metres to the finish line. My first instinct was to kick on and match Malcolm before he won the race, but then I thought, ‘There’s no way he can sustain this all the way to the finish. Don’t panic. Just keep your stride. He’ll burn out.’ I held back, kept my stride and stuck to my race strategy. Two hundred metres to go, and sure enough, Malcolm started losing speed. He’d made the same mistake I did in Weymouth and gone too early. Finally, with less than 100 metres to go, I pulled clear of Malcolm and swept ahead to cross the line. I’d done it. I’d won. I had the English Schools Cross Country title. Then it sank in: I’d be competing for England in the Schools International. I was on a high after that race, absolutely buzzing. This was what it was all about. Alan came over to congratulate me.
