Marathon man is ready for London – British running legend speaks to Sport Magazine
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One month before facing the biggest challenge of his athletic career, Mo Farah made a discovery. He found out what happens when you well and truly empty the tank. Unconscious and lying motionless on the New York tarmac moments after finishing second in the city’s half-marathon, Farah’s body had decided: enough is enough - I’m out.
A few fearful minutes later, his eyes flicked wide open - a look of shock replacing the broad smile we have become accustomed to seeing from the double world and Olympic champion in the minutes after he’s finished a race. Taken away in a wheelchair and buried beneath coats and blankets, Farah appeared smaller and more fragile than ever.
Yet within the hour he was presented to the world’s media, allaying fears that his marathon debut in London just four weeks later was in doubt. “I’m alright, it’s not a big deal,” Farah insisted, highlighting the stark drop in temperature between New York and his training base at high altitude in Iten, Kenya, as a significant factor in his collapse.
He’s back in Kenya five days later, awaiting the arrival of his coach - marathon legend Alberto Salazar - to take him through the final stages of his preparation for the Virgin Money London Marathon.
“I got back yesterday,” he explains when Sport speaks to him for a post-NY, pre-London catch-up. “So at the moment I’m just recovering and getting back into it with a few runs until Alberto gets here in a few days. He has the plan for the next few weeks, so we’ll go through the whole thing when he arrives. But most of the hard work is done now. I might have one more long run and one hard track session to go before taking it easy for the last week and a half.”
Salazar has long been viewed as the perfect coach to help Farah master the marathon. In the early 1980s, the Cuban-born American won three consecutive New York Marathons - becoming renowned for giving everything he had whenever he crossed a start line. And he too collapsed at a finish line on more than one occasion.
“He wasn’t particularly concerned,” says Farah of Salazar’s reaction to seeing him play the leading role in the finish line drama the weekend before last. “He’s done it himself and, with what we put our bodies through, something like that is always possible.” Farah had already hit the tarmac once during the race itself when he was accidentally tripped up at the six-mile mark, falling hard on his right side.
“My hip is still a bit sore from that and I have a few grazes on my shoulder, but it’s nothing big,“ he says. “I was pretty lucky. I think having that fall and getting up and working so hard to get to the finish meant my body just didn’t have anything left by the end. For the last four miles, I was in a bit of trouble - seeing stars. I knew I was close to the edge.”
NEW YORK STATE OF MIND
Farah might have left New York without any lasting physical scars, but ahead of his first ever marathon, any mental ones could be just as damaging.
“It wasn’t a good experience for Mo,” says Steve Cram, athletics commentator and former 1,500m world champion. “And, if you allow it to, that can knock your confidence.”
Farah has come through difficult times before, notably in 2008 and 2009 when - despite being one of the best in Europe - he struggled at the Olympics and World Championships. He’s also experienced the finish line dramatics before. At the European Cross Country Championships in Dublin in 2009 and at the Great Edinburgh International Cross Country three weeks later, where he finished second and third respectively, he collapsed at the finish on both occasions.
“Those experiences have given him the ability to step back from one-off performances and look at how he’s progressing towards his major goal,” says Cram. “He began 2012 getting beaten at a cross country race and came fourth at the World Indoors, but those things don’t matter because the only thing we all remember is him winning two gold medals at the Olympics. I think, with the maturity you get in the part of your career when you are focusing on the big prizes, you don’t worry so much when you get a bit of a set-back. You just focus on the goal.”
Cram watched from close quarters as Farah worked his way up from being a raw British talent with huge potential into Europe’s leading distance runner on the track and, finally, to the lofty position of double world and Olympic champion.
But he concedes that Farah’s pedigree will have little bearing when it comes to tackling his first 26.2-miler: “The marathon is a bit unusual in that whatever you bring to it, it’s a bit of an unknown quantity until you actually run one. It doesn’t matter who you are, even Haile Gebrselassie struggled with his first couple of marathons. There are lots of athletes who tried to make the move up to the marathon, and it hasn’t worked for them.”
KEEP ON MOVING
Why, then, would Farah step away from an arena in which he has become one of the world’s leading athletes to effectively start from scratch?
“The type of person I am, I don’t like standing still,” explains Farah. “I like to try different things. And I wanted to test myself before it was too late. Most great athletes you speak to say they wish they had tried it one or two years earlier, when they were so good on the track. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve stepped up now - as well as the fact that there’s no World Championships or Olympics this year.”
Farah emphasises the magnitude of the test he faces on the morning of April 13, though, saying: “I’ve never covered the full marathon distance. I’ve run only up to 22 miles in training, so I don’t know what’s going to happen or how my body is going to react. I know I’m going to be okay up to halfway, but then I guess anything can happen. You’ve got so many great athletes - the world record holder, Wilson Kipsang, and the guy who won in New York, Geoffrey Mutai - in the race who can run sub-2.05, so it just depends on how the race goes.”
While Farah’s lack of marathon experience is already being used by some as a reason why he can’t win this year’s race, former GB athlete and two-time Olympic marathon runner Liz Yelling says it could work in his favour.
“I think it’s great to have that naivety going into your first marathon,“ she says. “It’s an unknown entity. You don’t know what it’s going to feel like, and that can be an advantage for Mo because he doesn’t have any of the hang-ups that others with more experience might have. And he’s going in there knowing he can compete against the best. There are no barriers for him, he’s just going to go and race it.”
Yelling competed on the track before turning her focus on to the road, and says there is a difference in atmosphere between the two: “I found the road less pressurised. Track running can be a very intense situation, but in the marathon you have a bit more time and the course is more varied. It’s a different type of racing.”
Paula Radcliffe will be at this year’s race as part of the BBC’s London Marathon line-up. Having also made her marathon debut in London (winning the 2002 race in a European record time of 2:18.55), the women’s world record holder can offer an insight into how Farah might approach his own.
“I felt I was able to go into it with nothing to lose,” she says. “I could run hard in the first half of the race because it was my first one. So, if I blew up, well - I’m still learning about the distance. So it took a bit of the pressure off.
“Nobody could say to me: ’You’re definitely supposed to be good at this.’ Although I believed I was going to be good at it - and I’m sure Mo does, too - he’s definitely not expected to win, as he would be on the track. It’s a step into the unknown, but in the same way it’s a stimulating step - something that’s refreshing and inspiring.”
GOING THE DISTANCE
Up to this point, the biggest difference Farah says he has had to cope with has been the increased volume in his training: “That’s been the toughest part for me - being tired every day. You don’t have that bounce that you normally do. When you’re track running, you have a lot more energy. But marathon training is constantly pounding and running, running, running every day. By the time the evening comes, you don’t want to do anything except just go to bed. I’ve lost so much weight, too, compared with when I’m on the track, because you’re constantly burning off whatever you eat.”
Farah might be up against one of the hottest marathon fields ever assembled in London, but Cram says the Brit’s most dangerous opponent could be the distance itself: “It’s an unusual event in that you have to get to grips with the race itself - the marathon distance - as much as you do with your competitors. In fact, you’re probably racing both things. If you’re racing the 10,000m, you know through your training that you’re not going to get to 8,000m and blow up completely, so you race your competitors tactically and try to do the right things. But, in the marathon, it’s the distance that can come back and grab you as much as your competitors.
“There’s a big difference mentally, too, between competing in a 10,000m on the track - where you’re pretty much racing the whole thing - and a marathon, where it’s a case of surviving the first 18 miles before you even start thinking about racing. You almost don’t want to do anything except be in the group for the first hour and 40 minutes, and just hope you get to that point in the race feeling good. It’s then that you have to start thinking: ’Am I able to push on here?’”
How well Farah handles this change in approach will be a good indication of the path his career will take from here, with the Olympic Marathon in 2016 a potential target. But, for now, he is keen to hang on to his track persona - and all the golden glory that comes with it. That’s something that becomes clear when we ask him whether he has adjusted his running style for the longer distance.
“A little bit, but I don’t really want to change too much,“ he explains. “This year is just about trying the marathon to see if I’m any good at it or not. For me, I’m a track runner. I’m known as a track runner and all my medals have come from the track, so I don’t want to change too much. And, you know, if I’m good at it and run a decent time, then maybe we might look at it and say: ’Okay, maybe we do need to change a little bit to improve.’”
SPEED MATTERS
Farah knows he also has the opportunity to add to his collection of global titles at the 2015 World Championships in Beijing. But does he worry that his renowned sprinting speed might have been somewhat diluted by focusing on the marathon for so many months? “That’s a question I ask myself and that we’ll need to get answered after London,“ he says. “My aim is to do my first race at the Glasgow Diamond League [July 11-12] and, after that, we’ll see what I’ve lost and how I felt and use that to make a decision on what I’ll do next.
“At my level, I’m not just going to turn up at major championships like the Commonwealth Games unless I’m confident I’m ready to go. I would hate to disappoint the public, who support me by turning up, by coming fourth or getting bronze or something. No, if I do it, I’m going to turn up feeling 110 per cent and knowing I can win. That’s the only way I’ll do it. That’s why I need to ask: ’Have I lost any speed?’ And: ’How have I come off the marathon?’ I hope people can understand that. Every race I do, I want to go out and be able to win it, to give something to the fans.”
Yelling insists Farah has nothing to fear. She says: “Some people actually become stronger and faster from marathon training. It’s a fallacy that you lose your speed. I know Jo Pavey [the British athlete who won 10,000m silver at the European Championships in 2012] has jumped into the marathon and gone back to the track and actually been faster than ever. To run a sub-2.05 marathon, you still need a good basic speed to chip along at sub-five minute miles. So you can mix the two up if you train carefully. You might temporarily knock a few edges off your speed when you’re in marathon mode, but you can retrain it. If you have had it once, you can always bring it back again.”
Radcliffe emphasises that Farah’s track speed will be required in London by reminding us that long-distance legend Gebrselassie is pacing this year’s men’s race. “The men have asked to go out very fast,” she says of the four-minute-43-second-mile pace they’ll have to beat to break the 2:03.23 world record set by Kipsang in Berlin last September.
“It’s probably faster than Mo ideally would want, so I don’t expect him to be at the front pushing it on, even with the crowd support he’ll have. I think the difficulty for him will be more holding back and running at his own pace off that. He’s smart, though. He’ll use the energy the crowd gives you in the second half of the race, when you really need it.”
Should Farah keep pace with Gebrselassie, he will have a strong chance of achieving yet another historical milestone in British athletics history by setting a new British marathon record. Steve Jones set the current one of 2:07.13 at the Chicago Marathon in 1985, and with Farah already possessing British records at 1500m, 5,000m and 10,000m, a fourth would surely put his status as the nation’s greatest ever athlete beyond all doubt.
While he is focusing on the “great experience” the race will give him and “looking forward to running in front of a crowd who will hopefully come out and give me the support that really drives me”, the question remains: can he actually win
the thing?
“I don’t think it’s unrealistic to think he could,” says Cram, who would love nothing more than to have the London Marathon winner sitting next to him when he hosts the An Audience with Mo Farah charity event just two days after the race. “But the key for him is to have a really positive experience in his first marathon. And that could mean he comes fourth, smashes the British record and gets beaten by the world record holder and former winners.
“So winning it is not really the measure, because he could win it in a slow time and we might think: ’Well, that wasn’t so good.’ It’s more about his performance and how he copes with racing the distance. Nobody runs their best marathon in their first marathon - nobody. But it’s hard if that first marathon is quite a negative experience.
“The key is that he races it in a way that, whether he comes first or fifth, he finishes and thinks: ’That was good, but I know I can do better next time.’”