by Mo Farah
I soon started to realize that being so isolated was one of the most important things about Kaptagat. Running is deeply embedded in the culture of the place. Everyone who lives there knows about running. You’re high up in the mountains to train and do nothing else. You’re not there to pick up your post, pay bills, run errands or meet up with mates. It’s athletics 24/7. Over 100 miles of hard running, week in, week out. And once I understood that, I began to reap the benefits.
As a distance runner, you learn that it’s important to rest more and do less. That might sound counterproductive, but it’s all about quality over quantity. The philosophy of the training camp is that the more basic the facilities, the better. There were often fifty or more guys out training at any one time. Many had luxurious family homes in town but preferred to live in a basic camp to maintain their focus and discipline. They worked hard with no distractions. As soon as my time at the camp was up, I knew I wanted to go back there in the future.
The next year, 2008, a very decent hotel cropped up in the neighbouring town of Iten, so I decided to base myself there. You can’t miss Iten. There’s a colourful sign hanging over the road leading into the town that reads, ‘WELCOME TO ITEN: HOME OF CHAMPIONS’. There are more comforts in Iten compared to Kaptagat. I stayed at the Kerio View hotel, which had a good restaurant, Internet and satellite TV where I could watch Arsenal games. It was just like a European hotel. Another athlete, Lorna Kiplagat, also had a training centre there, with a gym, a sauna and a dormitory block. American high school kids would stay there and train on the cinder tracks. Monday to Friday I’d make the trek to Kaptagat or the track in Eldoret. At the weekends, I’d head back to Iten. It was a good routine.
After that first trip to Kaptagat, I made going to the camp a regular part of my schedule. Once I’d been three or four times, people back home started to realize that other UK athletes could benefit from training at the camp. Before long, more and more British athletes began training at altitude in Kenya, and now UKA has an annual camp for 30–40 athletes in Iten, but I was the first to get out there.
I missed the cross country season in 2007 after suffering a stress fracture in my hip, which meant I wouldn’t be able to defend the title I’d won in San Giorgio the previous winter. While recuperating, I decided to leave the Kenyan house. After eighteen months living there, it was time for me to move on. I relocated to a room in a property London Marathon rented, also in Teddington, a three-storey red-brick house that accommodates six young athletes at a time. The location was perfect – it was literally across the street from St Mary’s. Although I would no longer be living with the Kenyans, there was never any real danger of me slipping back into my old habits. I stuck to the same routine as I’d done at the Kenyan house. Going to bed early. Getting plenty of rest. Eating healthily. Training hard. Now I’d seen what I could achieve by dedicating myself purely to running, I was determined not to let my performances slip. There’d be no more dramatic breakthroughs like the one at Heusden, I knew. From now on it was going to be hard, incremental improvements of 1 or 2 per cent here and there.
For a couple of years after Tania had given birth to Rhianna, we had almost lost touch. Things picked up again in early 2008, by which time Rhianna was two. One day I stumbled upon Tania’s profile on Facebook – she had recently joined the site and was friends with one of my friends, which is why her profile popped up. Eager to hear from her, I sent Tania a friend request along with a message asking her to get in touch. She quickly responded and popped round to the London Marathon-rented house to see me. At first, things felt a little strange. We hadn’t seen each other for a long time. Tania was a mother now, living in rented accommodation with Rhianna and holding down a steady job. She had split up from Rhianna’s biological father. The relationship between them had completely broken down by this point; he wasn’t on the scene with regards to Rhianna. As a result, Tania was having to raise Rhianna on her own, paying phenomenal childcare fees and juggling the demands of a full-time job as well. And I was striving to make my name in athletics. So much had changed. But soon we were chatting away and joking around like before. Some things hadn’t changed – such as the way I felt about Tania.
Despite being a young mother (Tania was nineteen when she gave birth to Rhianna) and the difficulties of raising a child on her own, she was doing really well for herself. She had a great job, was earning good money and drove a nice car. When I first saw how well Tania was doing, I couldn’t believe she was able to achieve all that whilst juggling the pressures of being a single mother. I started to look at her in a completely different light. Here she was paying her way, doing everything for herself, not looking for any help. She didn’t mope around feeling sorry for herself. She just rolled up her sleeves and got on with it. It was clear to me that we shared that same sort of mentality – the willingness to graft, to raise and look after yourself and earn your keep in this world. We were cut from the same cloth.
We were soon spending a lot of time together. Every week Tania would come over to my house after I’d finished training. The two of us would crash on the sofa and watch Prison Break together. We absolutely loved that programme. We’d watch five or six episodes back-to-back. It became our weekly ritual. We were sitting on the sofa one evening, watching an episode of Prison Break, when I casually put my arm around Tania. She didn’t brush it off. That was the moment I thought to myself, ‘I’m in there!’
Even before we were officially a couple I was keen on meeting Rhianna. I kept on at Tania all the time. Telling her, ‘I really want to meet your daughter.’ We arranged to meet up at Bushy Park, where I often trained. Rhianna was two at the time. We met at the kids’ playground and the two of us hit it off immediately. Kids tend to warm to me anyway, because I have that childish side to my character. And Rhianna’s very easy to get on with. From that moment on we had this immense bond – a bond that has never been broken. The rest is history.
People say that nothing compares to the Olympics. They say it so many times that it’s become the ultimate cliché. The thing is, it’s true. Nothing compares because the Olympics is the biggest show on Earth. For me, making the Great Britain team was a massive deal. The Olympics is the world stage. Billions of people are watching you. You win a local athletics meet … great, well done. Five seconds later the race is forgotten about and you’re thinking ahead to the next event. The Olympics is different. Kids don’t dream about winning the Worlds. They dream about winning gold in the Olympics. I was the same.
One of my most vivid memories is watching the men’s 10,000 metres in Sydney. I was studying at Isleworth at the time, and for practically the whole week I’d been watching the swimming and the gymnastics, counting down the days until the athletics began. I remember being hooked to the TV when the race started. Watching legends like Haile Gebrselassie and Paul Tergat tearing around the track, matching each other step for step. Tergat kicking on in the final 200 metres and looking like he was going to win, then Gebrselassie doing this amazing sprint finish and nudging ahead of Tergat to take the gold by 0.09 seconds. After watching that race, I told myself, ‘I’m going to do as well as I can in running and I want to become Olympic champion.’
I was going to train as hard as I could for Beijing. Running on such a big stage meant so much to me. I was determined to do my country proud. To prepare for the 5000 metres, me, Micah Kogo and 12:55 5000 metres runner Boniface Songok went to train at altitude at a camp in Flagstaff, Arizona. All three of us were preparing for the Olympics and as Ricky Simms (who coached Micah, Boniface and all the Kenyans) and Alan Storey worked closely together we agreed that we would all do the same programme.
I already knew both Micah and Boniface from the house in Teddington and training in Kenya and had become good friends with them. Both had lived there for a while at the same time as me. Most Kenyan athletes come from rural areas, small towns and villages, but Boniface didn’t act like that. He was into cars and technology. He spoke good English, he had interests outside run
ning, perhaps more so than some of the other guys. As a result, I found it easier to socialize with him. I got on really well with Micah too. He liked to tell me how, when he was a kid, he had to run because it was the only way he could get to school.
Flagstaff is a small city along Route 66. It has everything a runner needs for a training base: all-weather tracks, sunshine, fitness centres and breathtaking scenery. The city is surrounded by huge mountains and forests, and you can go running on dirt trails or along rolling mountain roads. It’s perfect. The three of us – me, Micah and Boniface – stayed in this massive rented house in the city and concentrated on the programmes we’d been given by Alan Storey. Some of the sessions he’d set were really hard and long. In addition to my track work I was going to the gym and lifting weights. Micah and Boniface had wondered about this. Going to the gym was not something the Kenyans did too much of. They do exercises or circuits but don’t spend a lot of time in the gym. Not their thing. But Micah and Boniface wanted to know more. So we struck a deal: I’d take them to the gym in Flagstaff and teach them about weights and strength training, and in return, they’d teach me about running. As I’ve said before, you never stop learning. There’s always something new to pick up from an athlete. Boniface and Micah were brilliant runners and it’d be stupid of me not to try and learn as much as I could from them.
They agreed on the spot.
Each day, the Kenyans taught me about pacing, doing the reps, working your way through a group, pushing towards the end of a race. We went on runs together where they’d start off slowly and then quickly pick up the pace rather than slowly winding it up. Those runs were hard work. After we’d finished our sessions on the track, we’d head to the gym, do some weights. Pushing each other to the limits. I didn’t realize it at the time, but in my quest to be in top condition for Beijing, I was making the classic mistake of overtraining.
We didn’t just feel tired: we looked it. Boniface and Micah had that look about them the whole time – slumped, as if they’d just woken up. I imagine I looked basically the same. It’s true that it’s the coach’s job to monitor the condition of his or her athletes ahead of competition and map out the sessions accordingly. But Alan was back in the UK. He had no idea how hard we were pushing. It wasn’t his fault. We were sending back amazing training times but he couldn’t see how tired all three of us were. An athlete is the worst judge of whether or not they’re tired, so we were totally blind to the fact that we’d badly overcooked it. The bottom line is, if you’re doing lots of fast sessions, like me, Micah and Boniface were in Flagstaff, then you need to get lots of rest to compensate for the strain you’re putting your body through. But instead of resting properly, we’d hit the gym and lift weights. If we’d had any idea of the damage we were doing, we’d have told Alan and he would probably have set us a less physically demanding programme. But our heads were in the sand, so we stuck to Alan’s gruelling sessions.
Honestly, I didn’t realize how bad things were until I took part in the Payton Jordan Cardinal Invitational in Stanford, California, on 4 May. Stanford was a warm-up towards the end of our time at the camp. If you’re generous, you’d describe my performance in the 10,000 metres as ‘okay’. I led the race for a while but ended up well down the field in fifth. Craig Mottram won, kicking on ahead of me with 800 to go to finish with a time of 27:34.48. It wasn’t the worst result in the world, but to lose the race in the final kilometre like that was disappointing. I knew I was capable of a better run. Disturbingly, I’d felt tired coming into the last 800 – more tired than was normal. I was starting to feel the effects of overcooking it in Flagstaff.
It wasn’t just me: Boniface Songok also had a pretty poor race, placing fourth in the 5000 metres, behind Bernard Lagat, when he’d been expected to finish in the top two. It was painfully obvious that we’d been pushing each other way too hard at the camp in Arizona. Now we needed to rest. Instead, we were having to compete. And as a result, our performances were suffering.
I spent six weeks at Flagstaff, then I bid goodbye to Boniface and Micah and returned to the UK. Back in Teddington, I did a few sessions. Nothing too intense. Now I was back at sea level rather than altitude, I started to feel like I was getting some of my strength back. At this moment I was on what I call ‘the edge’: about to hit peak form. But the edge is a dangerous place to be. Too many hard training sessions, and I’d tip over the edge and into a bad place. My body kept telling me that I needed a few days to rest, to take it easy and recover from Flagstaff. But instead I continued to train hard.
Back in Kenya, Boniface Songok and Micah Kogo were preparing to compete in the Olympic Trials in Nairobi. (You might be wondering why the Kenyans needed to qualify for the Olympics through trials while I didn’t. There are two standards, ‘A’ and ‘B’, based on certain times. For the 5000 metres the ‘A’ might be 13:15 and the ‘B’ might be 13:20. Each country can send three athletes for an event, two at the ‘A’ standard and one at the ‘B’ standard. In a country like Kenya, where you’ve got dozens of guys who meet the ‘A’ standard, they host trials to determine who’s going on the plane and who stays behind. In Britain the situation is different. I was the only British athlete to set an ‘A’ standard time in the previous twelve months, so I was allowed to run the 1500 metres in the Trial. My place in the 5000 metres was already assured.) In his trial, Boniface finished outside the qualifying positions, coming fourth. His Olympic dream was over. That was a big shock. Micah just about scraped his place on the team, finishing third behind Moses Masai and Martin Mathathi to qualify for the 10,000 metres.
Despite the warning signs, I kept up my intense pre-Beijing training programme. I was doing block sessions, big reps of 1000 or 1200 metres, amounting to a total of 12–15 kilometres. That’s a lot of work, but at the time I thought it was the right approach. I wanted to be as strong as possible going into the Olympics. Athletics is a fragile sport. You train hard for four years, waiting for your chance to compete on the biggest stage of all, and then your dream can be wrecked in the time it takes to click your fingers. Maybe you get tripped up on the third lap. Maybe you didn’t put in enough hours on the track. Maybe you haven’t researched your opponents properly. This was my first Olympics. For all I knew, it might be the only one I ever got to compete in. A lot can change in four years. I was determined not to let this moment pass me by.
Three weeks before the Games began, I put in an unbelievable session alongside some of the other guys preparing for the 5000 metres. I kept pace with Moses Kipsiro, the Ugandan who’d won bronze in Osaka the previous year. On the last lap I actually surprised myself by running faster than him. Matching a world-class runner like Kipsiro, I told myself, meant that I was doing something right. I came off the track filled with a sense of excitement. Thinking to myself, ‘That’s probably the best session I’ve ever done.’ I was pumped and ready to go.
The truth was, I’d peaked too soon.
Training is like running up a hill that has a sheer drop on the other side. You have a good session, you get further up the hill. Then you have more good sessions. Suddenly you’re close to the peak. But if you push it too hard for too long, you go over the top and fall off the edge. You crash. That’s what happened to me in the build-up to Beijing. I was only aware of this in hindsight. At the time, I didn’t think anything was wrong. I flew out to the training camp in Macau to link up with the rest of the Great Britain team, full of confidence about my chances in the 5000 metres. Alan travelled with me this time, as he was part of the official UKA delegation. It was good to have my coach there. The mood in the camp was vibrant, friendly, relaxed. I caught up with people I hadn’t seen for a while on the circuit and tried to ignore the tiredness that was working its way deep into my muscles. ‘I just need some more rest, that’s all,’ I tried to convince myself. While I was in Macau I did just a few light sessions. I didn’t want to push it. But then, after one supposedly easy session, I came away thinking, ‘That was a lot harder than it ought to have be
en.’
I rested up some more.
I delayed my departure to the Olympic village in Beijing to the day before my heats. As an athlete, the last thing you want to be doing is hanging around, counting down the days to your race. Staying in the village is a weird experience. You’re in this bubble, cut off from the outside world. You’re barely aware of being in a foreign country. If you asked me, ‘What’s Beijing like?’ I couldn’t tell you because the simple truth is, I don’t know. I spent my entire stay in Beijing cooped up in the village, sharing a room with the marathon runner Dan Robinson. When I wasn’t sleeping, I hung out in the entertainment centre, playing the arcades or having a go on the air hockey table to take my mind off the upcoming race.
Still, I was incredibly excited. The Olympics! The pinnacle of my career so far. I loved everything about it. So many athletes from all over the world – every country imaginable. I remember getting my Great Britain kit. You’re given loads of kit, including a Great Britain suit and everything. There’s this sense of occasion. You’re part of something special. I really got into that. I kept my kit as a souvenir – I’ve still got it at home somewhere.
The morning of the heats I woke up feeling pretty good. I still wasn’t 100 per cent, but at least I seemed to have shaken off the tiredness that had troubled me in Macau. I was racing in the second heat, alongside Edwin Soi of Kenya, Moses Kipsiro and my old rival from the European Championships, Jesús España. A good field, but I still favoured my chances of reaching the final. Before my race I’d been in the call room at the stadium, watching the first heat on the live TV feed. Matt Tegenkamp, the American, had qualified in first place, with Eliud Kipchoge and Tariku Bekele second and third. Those guys were guaranteed a place in the final three days later. Now it was my turn. All I had to do was finish in the top four places in the race to be sure of my place. Even if I finished fifth or sixth, the three fastest losers advanced to the final too.
