Twin Ambitions - My Autobiography (22 page)

Prior to going to Kenya I had mentioned to Dave Bedford that I was moving away from Alan. I’d gotten to know Dave pretty well down the years through his son, Tom, and the fact that London Marathon sponsored the endurance programme at St Mary’s. He could see that I was not satisfied with the way things were going in my career, finishing seventh at the World Championships. During one conversation, the talk turned to my plans for the next year. I told Dave I wasn’t sure what to do.

‘Well, Mo,’ said Dave. ‘We both know that you’re capable of a lot more than you’ve done in the past year. Maybe it’s time for a change? Forget track. Why don’t you try running the marathon instead?’

I remember hearing this and thinking, ‘If I switch to road races, that means turning my back on the track.’ Was I prepared to do this? It would be a huge decision. I spoke to Ricky and we talked it through. There were reasons to make the switch, and reasons
not
to make the switch. The last twelve months had been pretty rough. Beijing, then Berlin. I wasn’t closing the gap on the Kenyans and Ethiopians, despite my best efforts. Guys like Bekele were still way ahead of me. I wondered: Could I never get any better than fifth or sixth on the global stage? But at the same time I honestly felt that I hadn’t achieved everything I was capable of on the track. If I turned my back on the track now, would I regret it, knowing that I could have done more, that I could have done better? Running in the London Marathon appealed to me, but it was something I imagined doing later in my career. This moment might have come too soon.

In the end, I decided that if I was going to make the switch, I’d only do it if I could be trained by the best guy in the business: Alberto Salazar. If Alberto said no, I wouldn’t make the switch.

‘I’ll speak to Alberto,’ said Dave. ‘Look into setting up a meeting. But listen – if Alberto agrees to be your coach, will you make the switch?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Although I had never met him, I knew about Alberto. He’s one of the most famous distance runners in the USA, but he’s less well known in Britain. Alberto was born in Cuba, but moved to Weyland, Massachusetts, at a young age and began competing in high school track-and-field events. He wanted to emulate the achievements of the legendary US runner Steve ‘Pre’ Prefontaine, who had died tragically young in a car accident. Alberto had an older brother, a college runner who competed in some of the same National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) races as Pre. As a result, Alberto would hear about what Pre and the Oregon runners were doing, having a pre-race meal of peaches on toast, going for 3-mile runs to warm up on the day of their races, and he’d do the same things. Alberto then went on to become one of the greatest marathon runners in the world. He ran his first-ever marathon at New York in 1980 in a time of 2:09.41 and ended up winning the race. He won two more New York Marathons, in 1981 and 1982, added the Boston Marathon title in 1982 and twice broke the American 10 kilometre road record. Alberto also had this reputation as a true fighter. He trained hard – harder than anyone in the business – and he wasn’t afraid to put his body through hell. In 2007 he suffered a heart attack on a practice field at the Nike campus. His heart stopped beating for 14 minutes. Miraculously, Alberto survived. He returned to coach the US Olympic team in Beijing.

Many in athletics considered Alberto to be something of a genius. I knew that if I had him as my coach, I stood the best possible chance of winning at the 26.2 mile race – the marathon. For me, there was no point switching from track to road if my results were going to be the same. Track, road – in the end, whatever surface I was running on, I just wanted to win. I was conscious of the fact that there would be tough competition in the marathon. I knew about guys like Martin Lel, who won the London Marathon three times and New York twice; Sammy Wanjiru, the Olympic Champion and a London and Chicago winner; Haile Gebrselassie, who held the world record and was still going strong; and newcomers like Tsegay Kebede. Alberto had achieved amazing results with the likes of Kara Goucher (bronze in the 10,000 metres at the Worlds in Osaka) and Dathan Ritzenhein (a three-time USA Cross Country winner). For me, hanging up my spikes only made sense if I had Alberto coaching me at the marathon. It was that or nothing.

In mid-October the World Half-Marathon Championships were taking place that weekend in Birmingham. Alberto was in town to watch Dathan Ritzenhein compete, and Dave asked if I would like to travel up to meet him? Alberto, not Dathan. I said yes.

We met in a hotel in Birmingham city centre. The IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) had taken over the hotel for the weekend and everywhere you looked there were athletes and coaches and agents. Dave introduced me to Alberto. Of course, I’d seen him around on the circuit, but this was the first time we had properly met. We talked for a bit, but it soon became clear that Alberto wouldn’t be able to coach me.

‘It’s not possible,’ he said. ‘Not at this moment in time, anyway.’

‘Why not?’ I asked Alberto.

‘Three reasons.’ Alberto counted them off on his hand. ‘You’re sponsored by adidas. I work with Nike. It’s none of my business who you’re sponsored by, but I can’t coach an athlete who’s under contract with a rival sponsor. And somehow I doubt adidas would be very happy with that arrangement either.’

I nodded. Fair enough. ‘What’s the second reason?’

‘You’re British. Strictly speaking, the Nike Oregon Project is about promoting American distance running.’

The Nike Oregon Project, with Alberto directing it, had been specifically created by Nike to improve the prospects of US distance runners. American distance running, as in Britain, had been in a bad state for a long time. Alberto had previously brought over a couple of Kenyans to help train the American athletes, but that hadn’t worked out. Since then, the project had focused purely on US runners.

‘That’s two reasons,’ Alberto went on. ‘Third, I personally don’t think you should be running the marathon yet.’ He turned to Dave Bedford. ‘I’ve seen Mo a couple of times. The kid has got great potential on the track if he works on one or two things. For me, he gives up the track now, it’s too early.’

I left the hotel thinking, ‘Alberto doesn’t want to coach me, so what am I going to do now?’ I had a big decision to make on my future. Dave Bedford was still pushing for me to switch to the road. I was about to go to Kenya to start my winter’s training. I weighed everything up and felt I had unfinished business on the track. My mind was made up. I wasn’t going to run the marathon. Not yet, anyway. If I had given up track then, I would have felt like I had failed. There would be plenty of time for the marathon in the future. I wanted to give the track one more shot.

And this time I wanted to break the British 5000 metres record.

I
MOVED
in with Tania after returning from Kenya in late 2009. The lease on the place she was renting had come up for renewal and I thought, ‘Why don’t we just move in together rather than living in separate homes?’ Things had been going really well between us and I was ready to take our relationship to the next level and share a home together. I was spending a lot of time at Tania’s anyway, so we were practically living together by that point. Maybe if that lease hadn’t come up for renewal, the idea of living together wouldn’t have occurred to me. But now that the opportunity had presented itself, we decided to take it.

Not long after moving in together, we attended the wedding of one of my close friends, Mustafa Mohamed. He married his Swedish wife in Gothenburg; it was the first time Tania and I had attended a big function together as a couple and being there, seeing how happy Mustafa and his wife looked, brought up the subject of marriage in my mind for the first time. I was in love with Tania, things just felt right between us and I thought to myself, ‘I want this. I want to get married.’ Within two weeks of returning home, I decided to pop the question. We were watching TV one night, talking about this, that or the other, when I just casually dropped it into the conversation.

‘Do you want to get married?’

Tania looked at me for what felt like the longest moment. She probably wondered if I was joking. To be fair, it wasn’t exactly the conventional down-on-one-knee proposal.

‘Are you asking me to marry you?’ she asked at last.

I nodded. ‘For real.’

I was serious. It clicked. Tania smiled.

‘Let’s do it!’ she said.

We set our wedding date for the following April. Everyone was thrilled for us. Tania’s parents, Bob and Nadia, were over the moon. In the meantime, I knuckled down to the business of smashing records.

13:00.41. Dave Moorcroft’s 5000 metres British record had stood since 1982. I hadn’t even been born then. For me, breaking the record was the biggest thing. Ever since I’d edged closer to 13:00 in Heusden, I’d been obsessed with it. I believed – I
knew
– that I could break it. And twenty-seven years is a long time. But this was about more than simply beating Dave’s record: running a sub-13:00 was something I’d never done before, and it would put me in the mix with the world’s leading distance runners. Kenenisa Bekele had clocked 12:37:35 in the Netherlands in 2004 to set a new world record. Championship races are tactical and the pace is usually slower. But running under 13 minutes would give me a psychological boost going into the big competitions.

People have this idea that athletes set their aims for things that are a long way away: the Olympics, the Worlds. That isn’t how it works. For sure, a young runner might dream of running in the Games, but there are loads of steps to take before getting to that level. So you don’t look too far ahead. You focus on something closer. Making this time or winning this race meeting. Inch by inch, you edge towards your big goal. At this point, I wasn’t thinking about the next World Championships or Olympics. The only thing I could think about was getting back out there on the track and beating that record.

My year didn’t get off to the greatest start. On Christmas Day 2009, I went to Richmond Park to do a hill session on my own. It was a freezing cold morning. I was running up and down repeatedly on this one hill when I noticed a couple with a baby in a pushchair walking up the same hill. They were taking up nearly the entire path, and as I was having to run around them, I couldn’t train properly. After three or four attempts to run around the couple I got a bit fed up and approached the man.

‘Sorry, mate,’ I said. ‘Would you mind moving just a little bit to the side of the path so I can run past? I’m training.’

The man refused. I’m not sure why, but he appeared to have got the idea into his head that he had right of way on the path. I wanted to get my sprint sessions done so I asked the man politely again if he would consider moving. He still refused. Things quickly escalated into a heated argument – from both sides. Neither of us would budge. We both believed we were in the right. All of a sudden the man stepped towards me, as if he wanted to fight. He was much taller and bigger than me but I did not want to back down so I took a step towards the man. We were in each other’s faces. Then it all kicked off. Before I knew it, we were having a full-blown fight, rolling around on the ground, trading blows. Onlookers had to pull us apart before things got really bad. Meanwhile, Tania was at home preparing for our first Christmas Day under the same roof when I called her.

‘Come down to the park,’ I mumbled incoherently. ‘Come down, quick as you can.’

Tania couldn’t understand me so I passed the phone to an onlooker.

‘I think you’d better come down,’ the man said to Tania. ‘There’s been a fight. He’s okay, but you’d best get down here.’

Several minutes later the police showed up. A few minutes later Tania arrived. She’d rushed down to the park from our flat. I was caked in mud from where I’d been rolling around on the grass. There were nicks and cuts all over my face and I sported a massive bruise on my head. I wasn’t badly hurt or anything but you could tell that I’d been in a scuff. Nothing came of it; there were no arrests made or anything like that. The other guy looked the worse for wear too and although I told the police that he had attacked me first they were reluctant to press charges, because the guy looked as if he had come off worse in the scrap, despite being much bigger than me. Thankfully things calmed down after that and I came home, cleaned up and changed and forgot about it. We all had Christmas dinner, but it’s fair to say my day got off to a bad start.

Earlier in December I had run the European Cross Country Championship in Dublin and finished second on the 9.97 kilometre course. In early January 2010 I ran the 4 kilometre Great Edinburgh International Cross Country and placed third. On both occasions I collapsed at the finish line. At the time there was a lot of speculation that I’d suffered some kind of dietary problem, with reports claiming that I had lower than normal levels of iron and magnesium. In Ireland I’d been locked in a duel with Alemayehu Bezabeh, an Ethiopian athlete who now represented Spain. Bezabeh was running fast in Dublin – and I mean
fast
. I ran as hard as I could, trying to beat him. Ricky likes to say I have the heart of a lion, and I was pushing harder and harder, right to the very limits, practically killing myself to finish ahead of this guy. I started feeling dizzy. But no matter how hard I ran, I couldn’t catch Bezabeh. I don’t even remember crossing the line.

Three weeks later in Edinburgh the same thing had happened. I got off to a blistering start. At one stage I’d put almost 100 metres between myself and the second-placed runner. Towards the end of the course I had the same dizzy spell. Something wasn’t right. I faded badly and was close to collapse at the finish line. Paramedics rushed over to me immediately.

It wasn’t the first time I’d felt dizzy in a race. In my junior years I had tried sticking faithfully to Ramadan during the athletics season. I remember running in the European Cross Country Championships Juniors race one year when I suddenly felt faint and started experiencing these dizzy spells as I went round the course. Somehow I made it to the finish line before collapsing through sheer exhaustion. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had gone wrong: the race was in the middle of Ramadan and I’d fasted in the days leading up to it. Chris Thompson had been competing at the same championships. He came over and checked up on me. When I explained what had happened, he was stunned that I’d been able to run in the first place. For me, I was never going to say, ‘I can’t do Ramadan, I’m an athlete.’ But obviously collapsing in races was no good either. I had to find a balance, so I began fasting in the lead-up to Ramadan, breaking the fast during race meets and then catching up with the fasting days I had missed out at the end of the season.