Twin Ambitions - My Autobiography (7 page)

Training was hard but fun. Alex always found a way to keep it interesting. We’d start off with fairly simple stuff, doing repetitions across short distances that are ideal for juniors. Alex also introduced me to the concept of
fartlek
, a Swedish term meaning literally ‘speed play’, and perhaps better known as interval training. This is where you mix up intense sprint bursts with slower recovery periods so that over time you begin to build up your strength and stamina. On a
fartlek
session Alex would get us to choose how much effort we were going to put in on the sprints, the idea being that whatever effort we put in would be halved for the recovery period. So, say I did six minutes of intense running, I’d have to do a recovery interval of three minutes at a slower pace.

I started to get pretty good at running. By the end of a track session, I’d have lapped some of the other athletes a few times. It wasn’t long before I started competing in races.

My first runs for the club were in cross country because I’d begun training at the club at the end of the track season. I loved running cross country – back then I enjoyed it more than track. The course was usually held in some new and interesting place, and the courses themselves had lots of variations in the hills and dips. I have special memories of some of the courses. Twice a year I competed in the cross-country competition at Parliament Hill, on the fringes of Hampstead Heath. Britain has plenty of good cross country courses but Parliament Hill is right up there as one of my favourites. It’s hosted several English Schools races. It’s a tough, hilly, muddy course, and to win it I had to be at my best.

Running cross country was a lot less fun when it was cold. In the winter it used to be so chilly that I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes. No matter how fast or hard I ran, how high my pulse rate was, I couldn’t warm up my hands and feet. I tried everything. Hats, gloves, extra pairs of socks. During one race, the cold was brutal. A sharp wind was whipping across the hill, my hands were frozen to the bone and my ears were stinging. It got so bad that I ran the second half of the race with my hands tucked under my armpits in a desperate effort to warm them up.

Running for the club had an unexpected benefit: it helped me at school. Word got around that I was a star at running. Suddenly the other kids in class had this respect for me. I’d always been a popular kid at Feltham because I was warm-hearted and made people laugh, and I wasn’t afraid of having a go. But doing well at athletics made me something of a local hero at Feltham. Alan likes to tell this story of how, a couple of years after I’d joined the school, our class was taking part in an endurance lesson: two laps of the field, with a few twists and turns to make it interesting. The best kids could finish the course in around nine minutes. I sailed around the course, did it in maybe six or seven minutes. Graham Potter, the head of PE, happened to be observing the class. When the last kid had completed the second lap, Graham called everyone together in a big group.

‘Right, you lot,’ he said to the other kids. ‘Get your diaries out. Not you, Mo.’

Everyone did as they were told. I stood there scratching the back of my head, no idea what was going on. Then Graham pointed to me and said to the others, ‘Mo is going to sign all your diaries. Keep them safe because they’ll be worth something in the future. Mo is going to be a star.’

Having to sign my classmates’ diaries was slightly weird. There are some people who’d let that kind of stuff go to their heads, but I didn’t think too much of it. That was one of the reasons I had so much love at Feltham. I didn’t go around acting like I was better than anyone else. That’s never been my style. Whatever I’ve done, I’ve always tried to follow the example of my family and be kind and humble. I mean, how hard is that?

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I trained. At the weekends I raced.

The way it works in athletics is this: first you win your school races; then you represent your school in the district competitions, racing against other schools from the same borough. When you win those, you get to race for your school in borough events. Win the boroughs and you get the chance to run in the county schools competitions. If you finish in the top eight in the county event, you’re selected to race in English Schools for your county, competing against all the other counties from across England.

When I was a kid, English Schools was like a mini-Olympics. You had all the best runners from across the country competing in the same race. The field of runners at English Schools was usually strong, and one or two were marked out as the Next Big Thing in British athletics. You’d hear people talking about the times some of these guys were posting at races around the country and you’d think, ‘That guy is looking good. I’m gonna have to watch out for him at the Schools.’

Having breezed through the school cross country trials, I was entered into the Hounslow Borough Championships, competing for Feltham. Sadly, my English still wasn’t up to scratch and I had great difficulty understanding the course route. Early on in the race I moved to the front of the lead group and took a wrong turn. By the time I looked over my shoulder and saw the rest of the pack heading in a completely different direction, I’d lost a lot of time on the leaders. I frantically spun around and gave chase to the other kids, clawing back on them metre by metre, fighting my way to the front of the group as we bulleted towards the finish line. A hundred metres to go, I’d managed to push my way to the front of the pack. All of a sudden, this huge kid sprinted away from me to leave me trailing in his wake in second place. I was pretty beat up about it at the time, although Alan told me I’d done brilliantly just to catch up with the others after going the wrong way. For me, I felt I should have done better.

I told myself, ‘No way am I gonna lose to that kid again.’

In the classroom I continued to struggle, but when it came to running, I was proving to be a quick learner. I’ve got what they call a good athletics brain. Simply by observing other people in training sessions at the club and trying out different things, I began to build up an idea of how to run a race, which tactics to use in which situations. I had this compulsive desire to improve – this determination to win. There are some extremely talented people who fall into a trap of believing that because they have talent, they don’t have to work hard. I was never fooled by that. I took the toughness and the work ethic that I’d learnt as a child in Gebilay and Djibouti and carried it with me into competitive running. The pain was no big deal. I could handle the pain. If it hurt, it didn’t really matter to me. I would keep on running, no matter what.

Alan likes to say that I never won a big race the first time I competed in it. He’s got a point. Competing in the borough races was very different from running against twenty-odd kids in my class at Feltham. Not all junior athletics coaches shared Alex McGee’s philosophy of putting long-term development over short-term gain. There were some big kids in the same age category as me and at first I found it hard to win races.

Losing a race was hard to stomach. I hated losing more than anything. In my first year at Feltham I took part in the school relay, running the last leg of the race. I started in lane six. With three legs of the relay done, the race was on a knife-edge. The kid handed me the baton. I snatched it and sprinted away to win the race by a huge margin. Graham and Alan had been watching from the side of the track. I noticed them swapping a look after the race. Alan approached me, shaking his head.

‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to disqualify you,’ he said.

I frowned. ‘What for?’

Alan pointed at my feet. I looked down and realized my mistake. I wasn’t in lane six any more. Somewhere along my mad dash to the finish line I’d accidentally moved out of my lane.

‘You’re in the wrong lane, Mo,’ Alan went on. ‘Sorry, but it’s the rules.’

In the heat of the moment I flipped and launched the baton through the air with this huge throw, furious with myself for making such a simple mistake. The baton landed somewhere on the other side of the track. Losing my temper that day was a mistake. I rarely lose my cool these days, but I hated that feeling of being beaten. When I crossed the finish line in a counties race in second or third place, I might not show it, but I’d be hurting inside for a few days. I’d go away and mull over my defeat, asking myself why I’d lost the race, what I could have done differently, how I could improve. By the time the next race would come around, I’d be even more determined to beat the kids who’d finished ahead of me. You’d find me at Feltham Arena in the evenings doing extra training sessions. Pushing myself harder. Wanting to win.

The second time I ran a race, I usually won.

After a few months I began competing in the county championships for Middlesex Schools. My first race at that level, I got revenge over the kid who’d beaten me near the finish line in the borough race, easily placing ahead of him. I only finished fourth, though. At the start of the race everyone took off in a flurry of colour and excitement, when I felt this blow land on the small of my back, like someone had struck at me with a hammer. The force of the blow knocked me off my feet. In the rush to take the lead, one of the other kids had pushed me over. Whether it was deliberate or not was impossible to tell. Accidents happen in races; there are lots of you running in close proximity and sometimes an arm or a leg catches someone. It was a foul day. The ground was thick with mud, the wind biting and fierce, and I was wearing flat trainers because I didn’t own a pair of spikes. Under the circumstances, I could have been forgiven for throwing in the towel, but I was determined to win that race. I scraped myself off the ground and immediately set about chasing down the lead pack, running through the course as fast as I could. I came close, but not close enough. At the end of the race Alan threw an arm around me.

‘That was a remarkable achievement,’ he told me. ‘To claw your way back to fourth like that. Well done, Mo.’

I smiled. But all I could think was, ‘I didn’t win …’

Alan was a constant source of encouragement. He never gave up on me. He drove me to training. He took time off from his weekends whenever his teaching commitments allowed him to come and watch me compete, travelling up and down the country, cheering me on from the sidelines in the borough and county championships. He’d make sure I stuck to the training programme Alex McGee set for me at the club. Whenever I needed help, Alan was there for me. I remember one time I climbed aboard the club coach on a Saturday morning. We were off to race somewhere in another county. I had no money for lunch and didn’t know what I was going to do for food. Alan must have seen the look of concern on my face because he stopped beside my seat on the coach and asked if I had any money for lunch. I shook my head. Just like that, Alan dug out his wallet and handed me a crisp £5 note. I was touched. Five pounds was a lot of money to me back then. Alan didn’t have to do that. It came out of his own pocket, not the school. But he genuinely believed in my talent. He wanted to see all his students from Feltham succeed to the best of our abilities. And if that meant helping me out with things like lunch money, he was willing to do it. Without Alan, I would never have been able to take those first few steps towards my Olympic dream.

You might wonder why my mum, or my Aunt Kinsi, didn’t watch me race. The truth is, in Somali culture people don’t really view running in the same light as we do here. If you go out for a run in Somalia, people think there’s something wrong with you. To them, running is a crazy man’s sport. You should only be running if there’s a good reason – fetching water, perhaps, or escaping danger. In their eyes, the idea of someone running in a pure race format is puzzling. I think Mum viewed my running in this way. As a sort of hobby – something I did in my spare time to burn off energy. She didn’t attend my races because it never occurred to her that running was something to be taken seriously. The same was true for Aunt Kinsi. As it would be for most Somalis.

One Thursday after training at the club Alan reminded me that I had an event at St Albans on the Sunday. He wanted to know how I intended to get there. ‘Are you going to go on the coach with the other runners, Mo?’

‘Coach?’ I repeated, nodding. ‘Yeah. Cool.’

In those days, although I’d been in England a couple of years, my English was still rough around the edges. I could have a conversation, but there were gaps in my vocabulary and sometimes I didn’t understand what people were saying. Instead of admitting that I was confused, I’d simply smile and nod and pretend that I understood. If that drew a puzzled response from the other person, I figured I’d given them the wrong answer, so I’d change my ‘yes’ to a ‘no’, quickly shaking my head. In my mind, it was preferable to owning up that I didn’t know what the other person was saying.

On the Sunday morning I got up and waited for the coach to arrive. No sign of it. An hour passed. Still nothing. It was getting dangerously close to the start of the race and I was starting to think that the driver had forgotten to pick me up and gone without me. Just then I gazed out of the window and saw a car pull up outside our house. Alan bolted out of the car.

‘Mo, what’s happened?’ he exclaimed breathlessly. ‘Why didn’t you get on the coach?’

Alan had gone to watch the race, arrived at St Albans and waited for me to get off the coach. When I had failed to emerge, he’d driven to my house to come looking for me. As he explained all this, I scratched my head.

‘I thought you meant the coach was going to pick me up from my house,’ I said.

There was no time to lose. I grabbed my stuff and hurried into the car with Alan. We raced north to St Albans on the M25 and made it to the course in the nick of time. I won easily, having almost missed the race.

My cousin Mahad used to come with us on the trips. I’d ride up front with Alan, while Mahad sat in the back seat singing or making jokes. It was nice to have him tag along. He was the more vocal of the two of us. When we weren’t taking the mick, I’d take the opportunity to brush up on my English, pointing to things in the fields at the side of the road and saying the English words to Alan. ‘Cow.’ ‘Sheep.’ ‘Tree.’ Alan just nodded. I don’t think he realized how poor my English was back then.