Twin Ambitions - My Autobiography (15 page)

Some things had changed, though. The city was mostly peaceful, but the long-running civil war meant that inflation had gone through the roof. I remember changing a small amount of US dollars and getting back this massive wedge of Somaliland shillings. It was like lugging around a brick. I saw people carrying shopping bags of money when they went out to the markets.

Hassan had changed in some ways. He now had scars across his body from an accident he’d been involved in not long after I left Djibouti to live in England. One sweltering hot day Hassan and a friend had stumbled upon this strange object lying at the side of the road. They didn’t approach it because it looked like a bomb, but Hassan being Hassan, he decided to find out whether it
was
a bomb by hurling rocks at it from the other side of the road. His first couple of attempts landed wide and short. The third rock hit the target. The bomb exploded and a huge boom echoed around the street. Hassan, just a few metres away, was blasted with hot bits of shrapnel, smoke and dust.

He spent the next fortnight in hospital recovering from his injuries. The doctors decided against removing the shrapnel – it was too risky – so Hassan still has bits of metal embedded in his body to this day. Every time he goes through an airport metal detector he sets the machine off big time. I listened to this story and was like, ‘No way!’ Even I never did anything as nuts as that.

Other things were different too. Like the fact that Hassan now chewed
qaat
, a plant that’s supposed to give you a bit of a buzz. All grown-up Somalis chew this stuff. It’s like a mark of becoming an adult. You find
qaat
in a lot of countries in East Africa and in most Arab countries too. Some people see it as a drug, although for Somalis and Muslims generally, it’s a social thing, like drinking coffee or having a beer in a pub in England. I couldn’t help noticing that Hassan was chewing on this big ball of
qaat
. I asked him what it tasted like and he immediately offered me a bundle to chew for myself. I sort of hesitated.

‘Try it,
walaalaha
,’ Hassan said. ‘Everyone is doing it now.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it’s all that good for you.’

‘How do you know until you’ve tried it?’

I shrugged. Okay, I thought, why not? I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I took a small bundle of leaves from Hassan and chewed on them for a bit. I didn’t notice any difference at first. Then I put my head down to sleep – and I couldn’t. My eyes were popped wide open.
Qaat
has this weird effect on your brain. You feel relaxed and happy for no real reason. Your mind starts to wander. You stare at the ceiling all night, thinking about random stuff. It makes you want to do things. You start getting ideas. I remember lying in bed, looking up at the ceiling and thinking to myself, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna build this and do that …’

The following day I woke up with this fog behind my eyes. I hadn’t slept a wink. I rubbed my eyes, climbed out of bed and headed into the kitchen. My mum was there, making pancakes for breakfast. I yawned. Mum took one look at me, pulled a face and said, ‘What’s wrong with your eyes? They’re all big and bloodshot.’

‘Nothing,’ I said weakly. ‘Nothing at all, Mum. I’m fine.’

Hassan and his bride, Hoda, tied the knot at a colourful ceremony held in a rented hall in the city. It was a beautiful day. Hoda – her name means ‘lucky’ in Somali – also happened to be a twin, although Hassan told me this wasn’t a coincidence. He’d always wanted to father twins when he got married, and believed he’d stand a better chance of doing so if he married one. They now have six kids – five girls and a boy – but no twins. Hassan insisted on all of the girls having names beginning with ‘H’ – just like their mum and dad. Typical crazy Hassan.

Two days after the wedding ceremony, Hassan and Hoda invited all their friends on a bus tour, a chance to travel through rural Somaliland, sharing memories and taking pictures of the happy couple. The bus would stop every so often, and we’d all get off, take out our cameras and have a bite to eat. The journey took us all the way from the city to the mountain peaks, thousands of metres above sea level. The scenery was amazing. I’d never seen Somaliland from high up. We had a great laugh. Hassan and Hoda looked truly in love. I was so happy for him – for them both. Despite all that had happened, he was building a life for himself in Hargeisa, and I was doing the same in Britain. As night folded in we rode the bus back to Hargeisa: Hassan, Hoda, me, all their friends.

It was the second wedding I’d been to in the space of a few months. Alan Watkinson also got married that same year. He’d invited me and my cousin Mahad up for the wedding. In the space of a few months two of the people closest to me had gotten married. It was a great feeling. As a gift, I presented Alan with a poster, a huge blown-up photograph of me winning my first English Schools Cross Country aged thirteen. In the photo I’m wearing a club vest over a baggy jumper, and gloves to warm my fingers against the cold. The expression on my face is a mix of pain and grit and determination. At the bottom of the photograph I wrote a message for Alan: ‘What you have done for me will never be forgotten.’

Athletics took a back seat while I was in Somaliland. It just felt so good to be back with my family. Two weeks went by in the blink of an eye, so when the day came for me to return to the UK, I suddenly decided that I wasn’t going to leave. Not for a while longer. I’d been away from Hassan and my mum so long, all I wanted to do was stay in Hargeisa. I made no effort to contact Alan Storey and tell him about my change of heart. Couldn’t have told him, even if I wanted to. My mobile didn’t function in Hargeisa because I was using a pay-as-you-go SIM that only worked in the UK. I never checked my email. I pushed all thoughts about athletics and St Mary’s and running to the back of my head and just enjoyed being around my family.

I did go out for a run once. I remember it being a blazing hot day. The temperature was in the high thirties, but it was still quite early and I thought, ‘I should probably go for a run before I get too out of shape.’ I got dressed, put on my running shoes and bolted out of the front door. Almost as soon as I started running through the streets, a bunch of kids started chasing after me. They were laughing and shouting, ‘Hey, hey! Crazy man! You crazy, man!’ As I said earlier, people don’t run in Somaliland. I was the only guy going out for a run, so I stopped and went back home. After that, I didn’t bother running again while I was there.

The good feeling lasted for two months. That was the happiest I’d been in a long while. If someone had offered me a job right there and then, I would’ve been seriously tempted to take it. The way I saw it, I had my family, I was happy and I didn’t need anything else. I didn’t want for anything in life. But deep down I knew I couldn’t stay in Hargeisa. It was a dream, that was all. My life in Britain was pulling me back. I had my scholarship at St Mary’s. I was starting out in athletics. I owed it to myself to see how far I could go as an athlete. I wanted to make my country, and my family, proud. As much as I dreamt about staying on in Hargeisa for good, Britain was my home now. I had to go back. In October I said goodbye to Hassan and my mum and everyone else.

When I returned home and explained to Alan Storey why I’d been away for so long, he was fine about it. He knew that I hadn’t seen my brother in many years; knew what it meant for me to go back to Somaliland. There was no anger from Alan, no lectures about going AWOL. ‘Did you at least stick to your training programme?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I lied, not wanting to disappoint him. ‘I went running every day.’

By this point it had been a full eight weeks since I’d done any training. But it was the off-season, there were no big races coming up for a while and I figured a few hard sessions in training and I’d soon be in good form for the upcoming cross country season. That plan went out of the window in my very first training session. I went for a run and immediately felt this intense pain flare up in my right knee. It seems obvious that the pain was related to the fact that I hadn’t been training. But no way could I admit to Alan that I hadn’t done a run for the best part of two months. At first I tried running through the pain. Sometimes you get these aches and strains that go away once you get into your stride. But this pain was different. It persisted, flaring up every time I went for a run. I’d feel okay to begin with, and then four or five minutes into the session my knee would explode in agony. The pain wouldn’t go away, no matter how hard I tried to run through it. And I have a high pain threshold; I can run through most things, but this pain was on another level. I didn’t know what to do. I knew I couldn’t tell Alan about not training in Somalia because I felt like I had let him down. On Neil Black’s advice I stopped training and went for some scans to get to the root of the problem. Nothing showed up.

The medical experts tried everything. Neil was as stumped as the rest of us. My knee was explored repeatedly, but no matter what tests they ran, the answers that came back were the same: the knee was fine. There was nothing wrong with it. To this day, no one can be sure what caused that sudden knee pain. We could never get to the root of it. I tried to go out for a run again. The knee flared. I gritted my teeth through the pain. The knee screamed. I ran some more. It went on like this for a while. Agonizing runs, physio, more tests, no answer. And then, just like that, the pain stopped. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Now I could go back to running.

But the knee wasn’t the only thing interfering with my running. Mentally, I was distracted. For months after I’d returned to St Mary’s, my mind kept drifting back to Hargeisa and the beautiful days I’d spent with Hassan and my mum. I’m sure Alan could see that I was a little distant, that my mind was elsewhere. People couldn’t get through to me. Flying back to Somaliland had been a life-changing experience for me. Now I was back in the UK, I didn’t have the same hunger for athletics. All I could think about was my family. I still put in the effort training and competing in races. But, if I’m honest, I was on autopilot for almost a year after my trip. I was going through the motions. The knee injury affected my training, I missed a large part of the winter cross country season, and maybe my motivation suffered as a result.

In mid-April 2004 I flew out to the UKA camp in Potchefstroom for some warm-weather training. Among the other athletes there were Sam Haughian, Anthony Whiteman and Neil Speaight. Anthony had competed at the Olympic Games in Atlanta and Sydney; Neil was a talented middle-distance runner who competed for Belgrave Harriers, the best athletics club in the Premiership. Sam was getting ready to compete for Great Britain in the 5000 metres at the Athens Olympics. He’d missed much of the previous track season because of injury, but big things were expected of him going into the Games. The year before he got injured, Sam had the best season of his career. He came second in the 5000 metres at the Spar European Cup in Florence, and finished fifth in the Commonwealth Games in Manchester, beating Craig Mottram, the Australian, when he clocked the 5000 with a time of 13:19.45. Sam was that good.

Potchefstroom didn’t hold a lot of happy memories for Sam. The training camp is based in the grounds of North-West University. You have the camp on one side and the university buildings on the other, with Thabo Mbeki Way slicing down the middle. The first time Sam attended the camp a big bunch of us went out in the afternoon for a run on the grass around the campus, a good 10 kilometres. At a certain point, the group decided to head back, but Sam kept on running even though the light was fading. He was going at a good speed when suddenly he saw this pole, one end of a chain-link fence that had been partially taken down, just in front of him. Sam jumped over the pole to avoid crashing into it, but he jumped too late and the sharp tip of the pole gashed the inside of his thigh. He fell to the ground, blood pouring from the wound. Luckily, some exchange students happened to be camping nearby. They heard Sam’s cries for help and managed to get him to hospital. The surgeon who operated on him said afterwards that if the gash had been a centimetre longer either way, he wouldn’t have been able to save him. Sam came
that
close to dying.

During my stay in April, I could see that something wasn’t quite right about Sam. I didn’t know what was bothering him, but he wasn’t his usual bubbly self. He seemed a little quiet, a bit down, like he had something on his mind. On the Friday evening, Sam and his physiotherapist, Rebecca Wills, drove down to Johannesburg while the rest of us stayed in Potchefstroom. I went to bed, wondering what had been on Sam’s mind and looking forward to going for a run with him the next day.

Late that night we learned that Sam had been involved in a car accident. He was being treated at a hospital in Johannesburg. They said his condition was critical. They didn’t know if he was going to make it. Rebecca had also been injured and was being treated for her injuries at the same unit. Crazy as it might sound, it didn’t occur to me that Sam’s life might be in danger. I remember thinking, ‘Has he broken his leg? Is he going to have to miss the Olympics? Sam will be so disappointed. He’s trained so hard to get to Athens.’ Then we got the dreaded news that none of us wanted to hear.

Sam had died of his injuries. The news came as a complete shock. I felt cold and stunned, like someone had punched me in the guts. Sam was dead. I simply couldn’t believe it. None of us could. It was like something out of a nightmare. Sam was the brightest runner among us, and suddenly he wasn’t there any more.

Sam had grown up not far from me in Feltham. I’d met his mum a few times. I felt terrible for his parents. I realized they must be going through hell back in the UK. I wished I could do something to help, but in that situation you feel utterly helpless.

When the police asked for someone based at the training camp to go down to Johannesburg and identify the body, Anthony Whiteman, Neil Speaight and I volunteered. It seemed the right thing to do – the very least we could do. Early in the morning, the three of us drove to the city and made our way to the hospital. It was the longest journey of my life.