Twin Ambitions - My Autobiography (21 page)

I flew out to Addis Ababa with a few other Europeans, including the French steeplechaser Bouabdellah Tahri, Lidia Chojecka from Poland and Scott Overall, my old friend from Windsor Slough Eton & Hounslow. Also there was Mustafa Mohamed, another distance runner from a Somali background. I’d raced against Mustafa several times on the circuit, including the European Cross Country Championships in San Giorgio, when he finished third. He was already racing for Sweden by that point, having moved there from Mogadishu in his early teens. In 2007, the year following San Giorgio, when I’d been unable to defend my title because of injury, Mustafa took silver behind Sergiy Lebid. As well as being a good cross country runner, Mustafa specialized in the 3000 metres steeplechase. He’s a softly spoken, quiet guy, unassuming, but warm and friendly. We had that shared experience of leaving Somalia at an early age. There’s quite a few Somali-born athletes who had to move for one reason or another. Mukhtar Mohammed, for example, also runs for Great Britain and gave up a promising career as a footballer with Sheffield Wednesday to pursue his career on the track. There are Somali-born guys representing Holland, Belgium, Canada, the USA – all over.

The camp in Ethiopia was nothing like the one in Kenya. Instead of basing ourselves in a remote village, our camp was located in the north of Addis. We were basically running around the outskirts of the city, passing run-down shacks and piles of rubble. People would stand at the sides of the roads watching us train. The trails were narrow, steep and winding, and were also pot-holed and scattered with rocks, so I had to watch my step. The narrowness meant that the Ethiopians went out in tiny groups of one or two, unlike in Kenya, where sixty or more runners might go out together.

Maybe because of this, I got the impression that the Ethiopians were less welcoming than the Kenyans. Somehow they came across as more private. It’s not that they were cold towards us or anything like that. They just very much kept themselves to themselves. They didn’t like outsiders training with them. I found this strange. In Kaptagat I’d jump in on a training session and the Kenyans were more than happy for me to join them. Afterwards we’d share a meal, talk for a bit. There was none of this in Addis. I ended up training alone. As I picked my way up a steep, rocky incline, I might pass an Ethiopian runner, perhaps a pair, but I was never invited to join in their session. Not all the athletes were stand-offish, though. Meseret Defar, the 5000 metres runner, invited some of us to her house for dinner. The gold medal she’d won in Athens took pride of place on the wall. Meseret cooked us a traditional meal of
injera
flatbreads with a chicken stew and some vegetables. That was lovely of her, but I couldn’t help wondering why she was the only one who made us feel truly welcome at the camp. Looking back, I think it’s because we were male athletes. We weren’t competition for her, whereas the men probably perceived us a threat – European runners who’d come to their backyard to learn their training secrets.

After the European Cross Country in Brussels in mid-December I went back to Kaptagat/Iten for my winter training. I needed to get Beijing out of my head. Going into the 2009 season, I was desperate to get a win under my belt. I knew that the better I ran, the more my mind would begin to clear, the more I could put the Olympics behind me. I got off to a great start, winning the Aviva International Match 3000 metres in Glasgow on my seasonal debut in late January and setting a new British record time of 7:40.99, just beating John Mayock’s record by a tenth of a second. The next month I ran even faster in Birmingham, shaving more than 6 seconds off my time in Glasgow with 7:34.47 and moving me up to second on the all-time European list. The only British athlete ever to run faster than me outdoors at that distance was Dave Moorcroft. Winter training had gone well, and I felt in great shape going into the European Indoor Championships in Turin.

Big pressure came with the Europeans, though. On the back of my good performances in Glasgow and then Birmingham, people were hanging the gold medal around my neck before I even got to Turin. As for me, Beijing was lingering at the back of my mind, and I was conscious that Turin was the first major competition since then and I simply had to win. I had to work hard in that final. I led from the gun, but Bouabdellah Tahri was right on my heels throughout the race. I could hear him. We’d trained a lot together, knew each other’s weaknesses. Tahri had finished fifth in the 3000 metres steeplechase in Beijing, so he was no mug. But with five laps left I finally broke him and kicked on to win in a time of 7:40.17, a new championship record. Jesús España, who’d beaten me in 2006, was third. Crossing the line, I had this overwhelming sense of relief. Winning a big title from gun to tape isn’t easy. You can’t afford to let your concentration slip. I told the press that after the year I’d had, I was simply pleased to have won a big title. I wanted to try and build up some momentum over the next few months. The World Championships were coming up in August and I was desperate to do well against the Kenyans and Ethiopians.

In the back of my mind, though, doubts were beginning to form about my training programme. Something had to change – I knew that much.

Alan Storey was more than simply my coach. He was someone I respected and listened to. I still believed in Alan, still thought he was the right person to take me forward. But I was starting to think more independently about my training needs. Asking myself, ‘Is this right for me?’ I’d always placed complete faith in Alan, followed his programmes to the letter, done whatever he’d asked of me. Now I started to question things. Nothing major – just small things here and there.

There’s no denying that I’d made really big strides under Alan. I’d stepped up to the senior ranks, got silver in the Europeans, won the cross country title in Italy and become one of the best distance runners on the European stage. But something wasn’t right. On the biggest stages – Osaka, Beijing – I was falling short. Despite pushing hard in training and making big sacrifices, living and training with the Kenyans, I was still finishing behind them in the major competitions. I believed I was capable of beating them. I looked at guys like Micah Kogo and told myself, ‘Here’s someone I’m regularly matching in training, yet he’s won Olympic bronze, broken the world record for 10k on the road and is the number one 10,000 metres runner in the world. I’ve beaten him in Dunkirk, so why aren’t I doing it in big events?’ What was most frustrating for me was that, in some ways, I trained harder than these guys. Not only was I busting a gut on the track, but I was putting in sessions at the gym, making more changes to my diet, paying attention to nutrition, going to high-altitude camps. In simple terms, I was putting in more effort than the Africans but getting less out. Something had to change.

I reached a personal low point at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin. I went into that competition thinking that I had a realistic shot of a medal in the 5000 metres. At first glance, the field was strong: Kenenisa Bekele was there, and Bernard Lagat. So too were Moses Kipsiro and Jesús España. That’s not how I saw it. ‘Kipsiro, I’ve beaten him in training,’ I thought. ‘España, I’ve beaten him in competition.’ Lagat and Bekele were top class, but looking across the line, there was no one else I wasn’t capable of beating on my day.

I finished seventh. I actually pulled away at the beginning of the final lap but fell away coming into the last bend. Bekele, Lagat, Kipsiro … they all placed ahead of me. I couldn’t help thinking back to the last World Championships in Osaka. Back then I’d finished sixth. Two years on, I was placing seventh. In my opinion, I’d actually gone backwards. That was hard to stomach. Throughout this period, I never lost faith in my ability. I never doubted myself, not for one minute. But I knew something needed to change. At least Rhianna and Tania were there to help take my mind off things. It was the first time they had travelled abroad to watch me run and it was a big deal for me, to have them both cheering me on, me wanting to make them proud. I was conscious of that while I was competing. It made me feel good, knowing that I had family up there in the stands.

I returned to Teddington, spent a week by myself, thinking things over. By the end of that week I’d reached a decision: I didn’t want to be coached by Alan Storey any more.

This wasn’t a decision I reached easily. On the one hand, I knew I needed a change. On the other, this was Alan Storey. He wasn’t just my coach. He was my friend – someone I felt close to. We’d been through a lot together, and when someone has done a lot for you, leaving them can be really hard. Normally when my mind is made up to do something, I just do it, easy. But when it came to Alan, I spent a long time weighing it up. I thought about what had worked in training for me, what hadn’t worked. I looked back over my performances under Alan and asked myself what I could have done better, or differently. Leaving Alan, I knew, would change everything for me. But in my heart I also knew that it was the right thing to do if I was serious about beating the Africans.

Different athletes respond differently to the same training programme. What works for one athlete doesn’t necessarily work for the next guy. As an athlete, it’s up to you to be honest about the areas you need to improve on. It’s like this: Alan Storey got me 98 per cent of the way towards becoming a World and Olympic champion. But I felt I needed someone else to come in and give me that 2 or 3 per cent to get me over the line.

I sort of drifted away from Alan for a while after Berlin. We talked less and less. I went off to Kenya as usual. Instead of following Alan’s programme, I decided to try coaching myself. Going it alone. Sometimes I would train with athletes in Iten, guys like Moses Masai, who got a bronze in Berlin. Then other times I’d jump in workouts with some of the other groups training on the track in Iten. At this stage I was mainly building up my mileage. I knew what I had to do. It wasn’t rocket science. Some of the runners training at Iten then were actually Kenyans who’d been naturalized as Qataris. They were being trained by Renato Canova, an Italian coach employed by the Qatari Athletics Federation. They were staying in the same hotel as me and sometimes I would join in with their workout rather than driving to Eldoret or Kaptagat to train.

Renato was a former schoolteacher, and he’d been coaching professionally since 1969. He had a good reputation on the circuit for his work with the Kenyans. He’d coached some of the most famous distance runners of the past few years: Saif Shaheen, Moses Mosop, Wilson Kiprop and Christopher Kosgei. The sheer intensity of his sessions took me by surprise. I had thought that the sessions under Alan were tough, but they were nothing compared to what Renato’s group were doing. He insisted on doing a high number of reps, running circuits of flats coupled with uphill sprints to build up my strength. Everything was done at a faster speed than I’d been used to. We’d have a few hours’ rest at midday. Then, in the afternoon, we’d head back to the track and do some more running work.

Renato liked to talk a lot. In that respect, he was your typical flamboyant Italian. Very expressive, very passionate. When it came to debating what was best for me in training, Renato could be quite forceful. I’d disagree with him on something he’d said, or question something, and he’d be like, ‘No, no, no, Mo! You mustn’t do it like that. Do it this way instead!’

Renato Canova wasn’t the only one dispensing advice to me in Iten. At the same time I would join in on the odd session with guys coached by Jama Aden. Jama was also working for the Qatari federation. (As the Qatari runners were mostly naturalized Kenyans, it was easier for the athletes to stay on and train in Kaptagat/Iten, where conditions were ideal for training, rather than relocate to the desert.) Like me, Jama was born in Somalia and we had known each other for years. He ran for his country before becoming a world-renowned coach. He had family in Sheffield. Jama had mentored one of my personal heroes, the great Abdi Bile, another Somali athlete, winner of the 1500 metres in the 1987 World Championships in Rome and the 1989 World Cup in Barcelona, when he beat Seb Coe. To get advice from the man who’d coached Abdi Bile was a privilege. We had the same arrangement as with Renato – very informal, just jumping into workouts with their groups or giving bits of advice here and there over cups of tea in the Kerio View. I was very grateful for the help. There was nothing in it for Renato and Jama, really. But they loved the sport and loved helping an athlete reach his potential.

Now I was getting the experience of training with different groups, I realized that what the Kenyans or the guys under Jama and Renato were doing was different from my training programme under Alan Storey. On the back of that, I knew that my instincts were right, that things simply hadn’t been working for me 100 per cent back home. But there was a downside to going it alone. I’d think too much. When someone else is mapping out your programme, you follow it and that’s it. Maybe you suggest one or two changes here and there. But basically, what your coach says goes. Now, at the end of a good session, instead of focusing on my rest and recovery, I’d already be thinking ahead to the next session. I was doing a lot of what I had done previously with Alan, but with the freedom to add in elements that I thought were missing. I was having to filter all the advice being given to me, trying to figure out what worked for me and what didn’t. Instead of concentrating on my rest, I was questioning myself: Was that run too hard? Did I go too slow? How did I look on the workout today? What should I do tomorrow? I needed someone I really trusted to be there and tell me these things.

It would have been ideal to have Alan there with me. But the truth is Alan couldn’t travel with me wherever I went. He had numerous commitments in his role as Head of Endurance for UK Athletics, which meant he had to base himself in the UK for much of the year. Although he gave me as much time as possible, he simply wasn’t able to completely oversee me in training. What I really needed was someone who could be there with me all the time. And I didn’t have that.