Twin Ambitions - My Autobiography

by Mo Farah

  The problem I faced was the same one that had affected any aspiring British or European distance runner over the past several years. From early on in my athletics career there was this general belief that the Kenyans were so far ahead of the rest of the competition that they couldn’t be beaten. None of my coaches ever told me this. It’s just something you absorb from a young age. The mentality at the time sort of said, ‘The Kenyans are too good and you’ll never beat them. The best you can do is finish fourth and just enjoy yourself.’ It’s the equivalent of a football team entering the World Cup and on the eve of their first game the coach telling the players: ‘We’ll never beat Brazil, so let’s just beat the teams below us and hope for the best.’ Then they meet Brazil in the quarter-final and they lose – because they expect to lose.

  I started thinking to myself, ‘How do I beat these guys?’

  At the same time, I was ready to move out of St Mary’s campus. I’d given up my studies at the college in Richmond and enrolled on a sports massage therapy course at the university. I figured that it was at least related to my career. Once I finished that course, I was ready for a change of scenery. Some of the lads had moved on. Lee had gone home to Burnley. I was sad to see him go. At the time I didn’t think he was leaving for good. I thought, ‘Yeah, he’ll come back.’ He never did, which was a shame. Lee had the talent to be a major force in cross country running, but a career in athletics isn’t for everyone. You have to make a lot of sacrifices. The training is hard, painful and often boring. You miss your friends. You miss your family. At the lower end of the scale, the money isn’t great. You can get injured, and even if you’re supremely talented and hard-working, it doesn’t always pan out. Malcolm Hassan had gone to do a sports scholarship at Utah Valley University in the US. For whatever reason, it didn’t quite happen for him out there. James McIlroy fared better. He clocked 1:44.65 in the 800 metres in Rieti, Italy, after leaving St Mary’s, finished fourth in the European Championships and competed for Britain in the Olympic Games, World Championships and three Commonwealth Games.

  With guys like Lee and James leaving, a new intake of athletes arrived to take their places at the centre. Suddenly, I was one of the older guys. The new kids were doing the things that I’d already done when I first started at St Mary’s: going on nights out to Kingston, staying up all night, going to fancy-dress parties. I felt I’d done all that stuff already, and the thought of doing it all over again didn’t really appeal to me. Most of all, I was beginning to understand that I needed to calm down if I was serious about competing at the highest level. With that in mind, I took the decision to leave the campus and live somewhere else. I felt that a change of environment would be good for me. The only problem I had now was: where am I going to live?

  I mentioned to my agent Ricky that I was looking for somewhere to live. ‘Well, Mo,’ he said after he’d given it some thought. ‘Why don’t you try living with the Kenyans?’

  I should explain. PACE represented numerous Kenyan athletes. Whenever they were competing in Europe, they would stay two to six weeks at a time in a house on a leafy road in Teddington. The idea of living there had never occurred to me before, but the more I started to think about it, the more it made sense. I had always been curious about what the Kenyans were doing differently that made them so much faster in competition.

  ‘There’s a room free at the house,’ Ricky explained. ‘The rent is cheap. It’ll be a great chance for you to see how the Kenyans live and train. It might open up your eyes a little, Mo.’

  The truth of it is, I wasn’t fulfilling my potential on the track. And it wasn’t down to my coaching or my race tactics. It was down to me not training to the same high standards as the Kenyans. Staying there was a chance for me to live like them, to do the same things. I didn’t need any more convincing.

  I said, ‘When can I move in?’

  It would turn out to be a life-changing decision.

  9

  EAT, SLEEP, TRAIN, REST

  FROM the outside, the house where the Kenyans stay isn’t much to look at. It’s set on a leafy, tree-lined street in Teddington and looks like every other house in the road. Inside, though, it was a different story: it was home to some of the most talented Kenyan athletes in the world, and they had very clear ideas about how to eat, sleep, train and rest. From late 2005 for the best part of eighteen months, I lived and trained at the Kenyan house. It’s a special place for me because it’s where the Kenyans showed me how to live like a professional athlete. How to dedicate myself fully to athletics.

  The list of people who stayed at the house throughout the year reads like a who’s-who of Kenyan distance runners: Olympic Champions Noah Ngeny, William Tanui, Joseph Keter; World Champions and World record holders like Moses Kiptanui, Daniel Komen, Benjamin Limo, John Kibowen, Saif Saaeed Shaheen, Jackline Maranga, Sally Barsosio and Sammy Kipketer; Commonwealth Champions like Laban Rotich. The list goes on and on. In my first year I would see Colin Jackson, Kelly Holmes and Paula Radcliffe popping in to get treatment from the physio, Gerard Hartmann, who worked from the house during the summer. Living among these guys was an eye-opening experience, and it took some getting used to.

  The first evening after I moved in, I remember getting ready to head out to the cinema with some mates. I went downstairs to see if any of the Kenyans wanted to come along. To my surprise, they were getting ready to go to bed. I looked at my watch. It was half past eight. I was like, ‘No way can they be calling it a night already! It’s still very early.’ I left, met up with my friends. Came home about midnight. The lights were out. Everyone was asleep.

  I was woken up at 6 a.m. by the sound of church music. Now, I’m not a morning guy at the best of times. Rolling out of bed at 9.30 or 10.00 a.m. – that was more my thing. Imagine my surprise when I cracked open my eyes, saw that it was still dark outside and the house was filled with the sound of a choir singing hymns to a blaring organ accompaniment. It was like waking up on the set of Songs of Praise.

  The Kenyans went out for their first run early. They’d be up, dressed and out the front door no later than 7 a.m. They believed it was best to get the first run out of the way nice and early, when your head is clear and your body is nicely rested. Their main route was through Bushy Park. I remember shaking my groggy head clear and staggering out of bed to join them on a run. The Kenyans trained hard. And I mean really hard. Those first sessions, I bust a gut trying to keep up with them. By the end of the session I was knackered. After the run they spent forty-five minutes doing stretches, taking a few strides to warm down. I’d never warmed down for that amount of time. After our first training session, we went back home and the guys would rustle up some food. The Kenyans didn’t go in for Tesco Value lasagnes or McDonald’s burgers. They cooked simple, home-grown foods in these massive pots, typical Kenyan staples like ugali, a maize flour mix rolled into a doughy lump and cooked in a pot, served up with a stew or sauce to dip it in. This was new to me; I’d never tried it before. Kenyan runners swear by ugali: it’s loaded with the carbohydrates that distance runners need.

  After food, they’d sleep. In the afternoon, they trained again. In the evenings they ate, rested and went to bed early. They did this every day. It was a question of doing whatever the body needed in order to properly rest and recover from training. Late nights were harmful because they didn’t give the body enough time to recover between one session and the next. It was an almost monk-like existence.

  For entertainment, the Kenyans used to play chess. There was no proper chessboard, so they made one from a piece of cardboard and used bottle caps for the pieces. I’d never played chess before moving in with them. John Kibowen taught me how to play. He beat me every time. In the evenings they used to watch running videos. That’s all they ever did. No TV shows, no comedy, no movies. Just videos of old Olympic races, the Golden League (nowadays called the Diamond League). At first I couldn’t understand it. All I wanted to do after a hard day’s training was go out to town or play
some Pro Evo. Something – anything – to take my mind off running. But as I watched the Kenyans gathering around the TV to watch old races, it hit me just how little I knew about running compared to these guys. They took their athletics seriously. Running was their life. Their dedication was 100 per cent. It was eat, sleep, train, rest. Day in, day out.

  My attitude didn’t change instantly. The way these guys trained exploded a few myths that I’d grown up with. But it didn’t take long for the penny to drop. I remember going out for a run one morning with John Kibowen, Benjamin Limo and Sammy Kipketer. (I should explain: none of the other athletes was based at the house all year round. Once the season in Europe was over and they had no more races to compete in, the guys would return to Kenya, so there was a high turnaround in the house. Kibowen and Kipketer might base themselves at the house for five or six weeks. When they were done racing, they’d fly back to the training camp run in Kaptagat, in the Kenyan Rift Valley, and their rooms in the house would be taken by, say, Boniface Songok and Micah Kogo – a younger runner who was beginning to make a name for himself on the circuit by winning several road races in Europe. A few months later, Kibowen and Kipketer would return to the house from Kaptagat, and so on.)

  After training and a lengthy warm-down the four of us returned home. I was thinking, ‘Yeah, I’ll go out tonight.’ I was getting ready to go when Kibowen slapped on a video of an old Golden League meeting. I can recall sitting on the living room sofa, itching to go out and have some fun with the boys. Suddenly I asked myself, ‘For real, what am I doing here?’ Here I am sharing a house with the guys I’m supposed to be competing against in track races and cross country championships. But while they’re watching races, learning about different race tactics and events, I’m getting ready for a night out in Kingston. What was I thinking? How could I ever hope to beat the Kenyans in a race, if I wasn’t taking my career as seriously as they did? ‘If I want to beat these guys,’ I told myself, ‘then I’ve got to do exactly what they’re doing.’

  It was like a switch had been turned on inside my head. Like that, I knew what I had to do to win. I would have to work even harder than before. No more late-night trips to the cinema or dancing at Oceana. No more jumping off bridges. I couldn’t be doing with any of that. Not unless I was happy finishing fifth or sixth for the rest of my career. And no way would I ever be happy with that.

  It wouldn’t be easy. I knew that much. If it was easy, so the argument goes, then everyone would be a distance runner. But now I was willing to go that extra distance. I didn’t just want to be the number one British runner. I wanted to be the best distance runner in the world.

  From that day on my attitude changed completely. I went to bed early. I trained hard. I ate more healthily. I took naps in the afternoon after running through Bushy Park. I got in plenty of rest. I drank water, which I never used to do: I used to drink tea. I would have six or seven cups a day, taken with three or four lumps of sugar. Water didn’t taste good to me. I was like, ‘Who drinks this stuff? Tea is way better.’ On race days at the club, Conrad used to tell me to make sure I drank lots of water before the race. If the conditions were hot, I might have a few sips. That was my limit. I might have been dehydrated during the odd race, but I was so used to not drinking water that I never really noticed it.

  The late nights I’d enjoyed at St Mary’s were a thing of the past. I even changed my mobile phone number so that people couldn’t get hold of me and tempt me into going out. It was a bold decision, but the way I saw it, I didn’t have any choice. I had to make the running work. What else was I going to do? I had no back-up plan, no qualifications for anything else. It was running or nothing.

  Around this time I had also switched athletics clubs, moving from Windsor Slough Eton & Hounslow, who were in Division One, to the Premiership club Newham & Essex Beagles. I’d had great fun at Windsor and made some really good friends at the club, but I felt there simply wasn’t enough of a challenge in Division One for me to keep improving as an athlete. In contrast, there were some really tough competitors in the Premiership. The strongest club in the country was Belgrave Harriers, based in Wimbledon and with eleven Premiership titles to their name. Their alumni included the likes of Philips Idowu, the triple jumper from Hackney who competed in the Olympic Games in Beijing and the World Championships, winning gold in Berlin in 2009 to add to the gold he won in the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in 2006. As well as Belgrave there were clubs like Birchfield Harriers and Shaftesbury Barnet. For me, competing for Newham & Essex was a step up in competition. The field was full of top-class athletes who’d represented Great Britain at various levels. The club members included the likes of Christine Ohuruogu, the 400 metres specialist who later won gold in the event in Beijing as well as gold in two World Championships, Osaka in 2007 and Moscow in 2013. The change of club scene was exactly what I needed.

  In training I started keeping up with the Kenyans, matching them. It got me thinking, ‘If I can match these guys in training, then why can’t I do it in competition?’ It wasn’t long before I had a chance to find out. The following March, 2006, I was selected to run for Great Britain in the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Australia. This was my first major outdoor senior track event representing my country. I couldn’t wait to get out there and race.

  There’s a question mark over every athlete making the step up to the senior level. People are watching you and thinking, ‘This guy might have posted some good results in the juniors, but can he do the same in the seniors?’ Until you do it, the doubts don’t go away. I was conscious of the same question mark hanging over me when I flew out to Melbourne two months ahead of the games in order to acclimatize. I would be staying at a house owned by Nic Bideau, Sonia O’Sullivan’s partner. Nic was also an athletics coach – he used to manage Cathy Freeman, and at the time I travelled to Melbourne he was looking after Craig Mottram.

  Craig was a big deal at the time, one of the stars of the 5000 metres. He’d already competed in the 2000 Olympics, running in front of a home crowd in Sydney at the age of just twenty. A few months before I flew out to Australia I’d watched Craig win bronze in the 5000 metres at the World Championships in Helsinki. Watching that race, I was like, ‘Woah!’ For a white guy to finish in the medal places ahead of the likes of John Kibowen and Eliud Kipchoge, another great Kenyan runner, was an incredible feat. White guys simply weren’t supposed to beat the Africans on the track. The Kenyans called him ‘Big Mzungo’ – Big White Man. In a way, Craig’s achievement in Helsinki eclipsed that of my Kenyan training partner Benjamin Limo in winning the gold. It made a lot of other athletes – me included – sit up and take notice. Here was someone special.

  I already knew Craig a little before the training camp in Melbourne. During the summer, for European meetings, he would base himself in Teddington, same as the Kenyans. I’d often see him at Kingsmeadow running track in Kingston. Alan Storey would take me over there on Tuesday afternoons for a session, and Craig would be there too, training under Nic. Because of the connection between Alan, Sonia and Nic, I’d sometimes join in with Craig. Not often, just once or twice. I was curious. Here was a guy who’d put himself on the distance-running map. He’d done good things at 5000 metres and I wanted to know what his training was like, what he did differently from me. I’ve always thought, no matter how good you are as an athlete, you can always learn something new, always get better. It’s part of my job. I’m always interested in what other athletes are up to – what they’re doing in training and why. These guys are my competition, after all. It’s my responsibility to know what each and every one of them is capable of. Craig was one of the guys I looked up to. I was a bit in awe of him at first. Seeing him win bronze in Helsinki taught me that the Kenyans were beatable. That if Craig could do it, then I could too.

  I flew out to the training camp in mid-January 2006. The games were taking place from 15 to 26 March. The idea was I’d spend two months in Melbourne acclimatizing, training alongside Craig and an
other Australian distance runner, Collis Birmingham. The three of us would train together at the high-altitude camp at Falls Creek, about four hours’ drive from Melbourne. It seemed like the perfect preparation.

  When it came to training with Craig, I felt he was using me to help him without him wanting to help me improve as an athlete. Normally when a group of athletes do a track session they will share the pacemaking duties, rotating who runs at the front, where it takes more effort to run at a particular speed. During one rep, an athlete will go in front and lead the group through laps of, say, 62 seconds. For the next rep that runner will go to the back of the pack, and another guy will lead the group at the required speed. You see it a lot in cycling where the front guy does all the work and the others sit in his slipstream.

  But judging your pace is something you only get better at over time. Your body instinctively knows what pace it’s going at. You can feel it. It’s sort of like driving a car. The first time you’re behind the wheel of your new motor, you’ve got to constantly check the speedometer to see what speed you’re doing. After a few drives you start getting used to the feel of the car. All of a sudden you don’t have to look at the speedometer any more. You just instinctively know that you’re doing 50mph. I’m much better at it now – pacing, that is – but back in 2006 I was useless. Couldn’t tell how fast or slow I was going. I’d start off really fast and would have no idea how long it was taking me to clock a lap.

  As the young buck in training, I was supposed to share the pacing duties with Craig but as he was so much faster at the time I was afraid to take the lead – and when I did my pacing was all over the place. I would help out for the first few reps but I struggled to run consistent splits. If we were supposed to go 62 seconds in one rep I’d go 60, and the next I would be at 64. By the end of the session, it was easier for me to just follow Craig. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing. The longer this went on, the angrier Craig was getting.