Twin Ambitions - My Autobiography (34 page)

Tania tells me that I have this ability to switch off rather than let something bother me. She’ll look at me and say, ‘How do you do that?’ I try not to let things get to me. I don’t stay awake at night, staring at the ceiling and thinking about what I did wrong or if I should have done this instead of that. It’s the same when I’m running. I block out every distraction. I forget everything else. I am no longer the chilled-out, smiling father. I’m the guy who wants to win.

One of my favourite quotes is from the basketball coach Taras Brown: ‘Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.’ He used to make the young Kevin Durant (now a star player in the NBA) repeatedly write down this quote on a piece of paper before he was allowed to play a game. The first time I set eyes on that quote I instantly felt it summed up my own attitude to running. I believe that talent can get you a certain distance – maybe halfway to where you want to be. Then you start thinking, ‘Hey, I don’t need to put in that much effort.’ Wrong. Unless you work hard, your talent will slowly start to slide away. You might not see it at first, but one day you’ll be doing a race when someone with less talent suddenly shoots past you on the home straight.

Winning double gold at the Olympics has been the defining moment of my career. But as soon as London was over, I looked in the mirror and told myself, ‘I want more.’ That’s just how I am. When I win a race, I’m happy for a little bit. Then I forget about it and focus on the next thing. In 2012 it was all about the Olympics. And in 2013 I had my sights set on the World Championships in Moscow – and the chance to avenge my silver in the 10,000 metres final in Daegu.

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012 had been such a massive high for me that I found it hard to motivate myself at the start of the following year – at least to begin with. As an athlete, one of the hardest things is letting go of a win. When you win a title or a medal, you celebrate, but then you have to let go and move on. That’s hard when you’ve spent years training for it. And in the wake of the Olympics I found that my motivation wasn’t quite there in terms of winning further championships. As usual, I took myself off to Kenya for my high-altitude training, a time I always regard as the beginning of my season. As soon as I arrived in Iten, I said to myself, ‘Right, that’s it. I’m not doing any more media appearances now.’ I stopped doing any TV and press interviews. I threw all my energy into preparing for 2013. I had one eye on the World Championships in Moscow that August. It was critical for me to get off to a good start – beginning with the 3000 metres indoors at the British Grand Prix on 16 February. I eased ahead of Florian Carvalho to win the race in 7:42.00. A good, solid start.

I flew back to the US to compete in the New Orleans half-marathon on 24 February. Training had gone well. I’d worked hard in Kenya, had my motivation back and was in good shape heading into the race. The time wasn’t ridiculously fast, but I won, beating Gebre Gebremariam, the same guy I had beaten in the New York half-marathon in 2011, and setting a new course record in the process, with a time of 60:59 on only my second-ever half-marathon. I suffered a severe stitch around the 8-mile mark. Alberto was following me in the lead truck and could see the pain etched across my face. I pushed through it and officially broke the record this time, unlike New York. As I warmed down, one of the officials strolled over and told me that WDSU, a local news channel, wanted to do a live interview with me. Fair enough. I agreed to do it and inserted my earpiece ready for the interview. But as the presenter, LaTonya Norton, started asking me questions, it became clear that she didn’t know who I was. That’s not her fault. The interview had been set up in a rush and she hadn’t been properly briefed about me.

At one point she asked me, ‘Now, haven’t you run before?’

At first I thought I’d heard it wrong. ‘Sorry?’ I asked.

There was a pause. ‘This isn’t your first time?’

There was another pause as I tried to think about how to reply without embarrassing this woman. Someone had put her on the spot and I felt bad for her, so I tried to change things around with my answer. ‘No, no, it’s not my first time,’ I said. ‘I’ve done half-marathons before but not in New Orleans … this is my first time in New Orleans.’

One of the UK newspapers picked up on this interview and posted a link to it online. From there it went viral. Before you knew it, the link was all over Facebook and Twitter. The phones were ringing like crazy with journalists wanting to talk to me about it. Norton came in for a ton of criticism. A lot of it was unfair, I thought. She’s a TV presenter. It’s not her job to keep up to date with who’s who in British athletics. Besides, in the US
no one
knows who I am. I rather like it that way. In Portland I can live like a normal person. I can do regular stuff, like go to Starbucks, buy nappies, do the grocery shopping. Sometimes people back home don’t get that.

In April I flew back to the UK and ran half the course at the London Marathon. A few people openly criticized my decision not to run the full race. I felt some of their comments were ridiculous and frankly quite bizarre. Some sections of the media made it seem as if I was putting in the bare minimum of effort just to cash a cheque, and insinuating that this was an affront to the many thousands of people who participate in the London Marathon each year. This upset me. I’m not the first person to have run a part of a marathon – in fact, it’s not unheard of for athletes to run up to twenty miles, as a pace setter or simply on a practice run, and return to race, and win, the full marathon the following year. I had a very good reason for running half the distance: I wanted to learn the course and understand it before competing at the full mileage in 2014. I’d never run a marathon before, so it made no sense for me to run the full distance at my very first attempt. Besides, why wouldn’t I practise for the world’s biggest road race? Preparation is everything in athletics, and that race was a big learning curve for me. Maybe that’s not so obvious from the outside, but running a marathon is completely different from running 10,000 or 5000 metres on a track. Unlike track events, which often take place late in the afternoon or early in the evening, the marathon starts in the morning. That means you have to eat well the night before and get up five or six hours before the race to get a good meal in. For the London Marathon, this involves getting up at 5 a.m., and I’m not used to that. Then you have to learn the course: where to go fast, where to push it. And there are all the little details, such as making sure you pick up the right drink at each water station. In the professional race, each athlete has their own bottle specifically tailored to their needs. The bottles are labelled at each water station, but I didn’t realize this. I just saw a red bottle and thought, ‘That must be mine.’ Then I took a sip. It was horrid! I’d picked up someone else’s bottle by mistake. There was no way I could drink any more of it and it was too late to run back to the water station and leave it there, so I just chucked it over my shoulder. I missed the next drinks station. It was to the left of the road, and I was on the right. I didn’t see it. I basically ran that half distance without any fluid intake, and we were running at a serious pace. By the end of the route I was gasping. So I learnt a lot at the race, from the big stuff right down to the details. And when it comes to running the full race, I’ll have a much better idea of what to expect.

After London I went back into training, and in mid-May I took part again in the Oxy HP Meet at Eagle Rock, competing in the 5000 metres. On the morning of the meet I had my usual pre-race meal of pancakes and syrup. A short while later, my stomach started playing up. Then I was violently sick. Two or three hours until the race, I was feeling terrible. Somehow I managed to get through the race and actually win, but it took a lot out of me. As soon as I crossed the line, I dashed for the toilets and threw up. That night I alternated between lying in bed and emptying my stomach in the bathroom. Galen was sharing a room with me and the poor guy had basically to look after me all night. The next day I felt a little less rough, so I flew back to the high-altitude training camp at Park City in Utah to spend time with my family. They had travelled down from Portland, but soon they were sick too: Tania, Rhianna, the twins, Tania’s mum Nadia – the whole family was throwing up. Even the nanny fell ill. It was obvious that we’d all picked up some kind of virus. It was the worst possible timing because I had the 10 kilometre Bupa road race coming up in London at the end of May, and the Pre Classic was scheduled for five days later in Eugene. I talked it over with Alberto and stopped training for a few days. I then did one light session and flew to London for the Bupa race. I won it and flew back to Utah the same day. I still wasn’t feeling great, and told Alberto.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. The Pre Classic is coming up in a few days. Personally, I don’t think you should be doing the 10,000 metres. The field is loaded, it’s the longer distance, it’ll be a hard race.’

I nodded. It made sense not to run. ‘So what am I gonna do instead?’

‘Well, why don’t you go in for the 1500 metres?’ Alberto suggested.

That didn’t appeal to me. There were some strong guys competing in the 1500 metres, and the best I could hope for would be sixth or seventh place. I didn’t see the point in running a race I couldn’t win. I reached a compromise with Alberto and we agreed that I’d run the 5000 metres. It would be less arduous than the 10,000 metres and I still had a good chance of winning, no matter what. But my fitness was off because of the lingering effects of that stomach virus, and on the last lap Edwin Soi, the Kenyan who won bronze at the same distance at the Beijing Olympics, kicked on and pulled away from me over the last 200 metres. I finished nearly a second behind him, on 13:05.88, but I was still working much harder than normal because of the effects of that virus. It was my first defeat on an outdoor track since 2011. I was gutted that my long-unbeaten run was over – I’d wanted to keep that record going for much, much longer. I just had to look back and accept that in terms of my condition at the time, second was where I was at. I’d tried my hardest in that race and there was nothing else I could have done, but I was hurting on the inside.

I travelled home to Portland, spent a day with my family, then returned to the training camp at Park City, determined to get myself back in shape for the World Championships. That first session on the track, I nearly killed myself. Hands down, it was the hardest session ever. By the end of it I was lying on the ground, absolutely spent, having pushed myself to breaking point. My defeat to Soi at the Pre Classic burned inside me, and sometimes the only way I can get over a result like that is to take it out in training. Alberto was by the track at the time and he told me he’d never seen anything like it – he’d never seen someone go so hard in training. For me, it was a great session. I wanted to feel better after Eugene, and the only way I could do that was to go as hard as possible in training.

In late June 2013 I flew back to the UK and took part in the European Team Championships in Gateshead. I won the 5000 metres in a time of 14:10.00, running a last lap of 50:89 and finishing more than 3 seconds ahead of France’s Bouabdellah Tahri. I was feeling sharper. I felt like I was getting back on track after the Pre Classic. A week later I travelled down to Birmingham for the British Grand Prix and won the 5000 metres again at the Diamond League meeting. Everybody was there for that race: the Ethiopian Hagos Gebrhiwet, the current World Cross Country champion, and his compatriot Yenew Alamirew; Mark Kiptoo of Kenya and Moses Kipsiro of Uganda; and my nemesis from the 10,000 metres in Daegu, Ibrahim Jeilan. No one was missing. That’s the way I like it. A loaded field: that’s what you need when you want to purge your system of a defeat. Gebrhiwet and Alamirew were in great form and had posted the fastest times in the world going into the race. They both looked like they would take some beating going in to Moscow. Prior to this, I’d not faced any serious threats to my crown. This was different. I pulled ahead of both Alamirew and Gebrhiwet to win. Now I was on a roll – and the Pre Classic result was ancient history.

The following day I retreated to my training camp in St Moritz, Switzerland. I spent the best part of three weeks working on the speed I needed to produce that sprint finish in the distance events. In the third week of July I competed in the 1500 metres at the Diamond League meeting in Monaco. I wanted to compete at Monaco because I saw it was a valuable opportunity to test out my speed in a race where I knew I’d be up against some very quick guys: Asbel Kiprop, Caleb Ndiku and Bethwell Birgen, all from Kenya. And although the 1500 metres isn’t my usual event, I felt confident going into Monaco. In St Moritz one week earlier, I’d had a stunning session on the track. Alberto came up to me afterwards and said, ‘You’re ready to run 3:30.’

Monaco is always a fast race. The track is dead – there’s no wind, nothing. It’s just fast. Pure speed. I love that track. In 2010, I’d run 12:53 there in the 5000 metres, and the year before that I’d clocked 3:33 in the 1500 metres. I knew if I got into the right place and ran a good race, I’d do well and clock around or just under 3:30. My aim was to follow the leader, Asbel Kiprop. I knew that it was important for me to get to the front as quickly as I could and then follow Kiprop, who was the hot favourite. That was my plan. At the same time, I went into that race with no fear. My mentality was very much, ‘Whatever happens, happens.’ As far as I was concerned, Monaco was just another race, another event. It didn’t have my name on it, unlike, say, the 5000 or 10,000 metres. If I ran a bad race, people wouldn’t be on my back. I had nothing to lose.

The first 300 metres I went flat out. I managed to settle into a good pace and I was sitting in third place for almost the entire race. Towards the end I surged into second place, but I couldn’t catch Kiprop. The guy was in a different league. He was always out in front. As we raced to the finish line, I began closing the gap, but it was too late. Kiprop won the race in 3:27.72. I finished second in 3:28.81, breaking Steve Cram’s British record of 3:29.67, which had been set twenty-eight years earlier. Before that night in Monaco, my best time at the 1500 metres was 3:33.98. When I first saw my time on the screen I was like, ‘What the f—?’ I had no idea I could run that fast. I’d figured I could do 3:29 at a push. But 3:28 was a big surprise. It just shows you that if you just switch off and go with it, anything can happen. It was also the sixth-fastest time at 1500 metres of all time. I now placed higher in the all-time rankings at 1500 metres than for my normal 5000 and 10,000 metres races. When I was younger I’d done some work with Hicham El Guerrouj’s coach, who said I should be a 1500 metres runner. He mentioned it again after the race. He reckons in some ways I was more suited to 1500 metres than the longer distances.