by Mo Farah
‘How do you know until you’ve tried it?’
I shrugged. Okay, I thought, why not? I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I took a small bundle of leaves from Hassan and chewed on them for a bit. I didn’t notice any difference at first. Then I put my head down to sleep – and I couldn’t. My eyes were popped wide open. Qaat has this weird effect on your brain. You feel relaxed and happy for no real reason. Your mind starts to wander. You stare at the ceiling all night, thinking about random stuff. It makes you want to do things. You start getting ideas. I remember lying in bed, looking up at the ceiling and thinking to myself, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna build this and do that …’
The following day I woke up with this fog behind my eyes. I hadn’t slept a wink. I rubbed my eyes, climbed out of bed and headed into the kitchen. My mum was there, making pancakes for breakfast. I yawned. Mum took one look at me, pulled a face and said, ‘What’s wrong with your eyes? They’re all big and bloodshot.’
‘Nothing,’ I said weakly. ‘Nothing at all, Mum. I’m fine.’
Hassan and his bride, Hoda, tied the knot at a colourful ceremony held in a rented hall in the city. It was a beautiful day. Hoda – her name means ‘lucky’ in Somali – also happened to be a twin, although Hassan told me this wasn’t a coincidence. He’d always wanted to father twins when he got married, and believed he’d stand a better chance of doing so if he married one. They now have six kids – five girls and a boy – but no twins. Hassan insisted on all of the girls having names beginning with ‘H’ – just like their mum and dad. Typical crazy Hassan.
Two days after the wedding ceremony, Hassan and Hoda invited all their friends on a bus tour, a chance to travel through rural Somaliland, sharing memories and taking pictures of the happy couple. The bus would stop every so often, and we’d all get off, take out our cameras and have a bite to eat. The journey took us all the way from the city to the mountain peaks, thousands of metres above sea level. The scenery was amazing. I’d never seen Somaliland from high up. We had a great laugh. Hassan and Hoda looked truly in love. I was so happy for him – for them both. Despite all that had happened, he was building a life for himself in Hargeisa, and I was doing the same in Britain. As night folded in we rode the bus back to Hargeisa: Hassan, Hoda, me, all their friends.
It was the second wedding I’d been to in the space of a few months. Alan Watkinson also got married that same year. He’d invited me and my cousin Mahad up for the wedding. In the space of a few months two of the people closest to me had gotten married. It was a great feeling. As a gift, I presented Alan with a poster, a huge blown-up photograph of me winning my first English Schools Cross Country aged thirteen. In the photo I’m wearing a club vest over a baggy jumper, and gloves to warm my fingers against the cold. The expression on my face is a mix of pain and grit and determination. At the bottom of the photograph I wrote a message for Alan: ‘What you have done for me will never be forgotten.’
Athletics took a back seat while I was in Somaliland. It just felt so good to be back with my family. Two weeks went by in the blink of an eye, so when the day came for me to return to the UK, I suddenly decided that I wasn’t going to leave. Not for a while longer. I’d been away from Hassan and my mum so long, all I wanted to do was stay in Hargeisa. I made no effort to contact Alan Storey and tell him about my change of heart. Couldn’t have told him, even if I wanted to. My mobile didn’t function in Hargeisa because I was using a pay-as-you-go SIM that only worked in the UK. I never checked my email. I pushed all thoughts about athletics and St Mary’s and running to the back of my head and just enjoyed being around my family.
I did go out for a run once. I remember it being a blazing hot day. The temperature was in the high thirties, but it was still quite early and I thought, ‘I should probably go for a run before I get too out of shape.’ I got dressed, put on my running shoes and bolted out of the front door. Almost as soon as I started running through the streets, a bunch of kids started chasing after me. They were laughing and shouting, ‘Hey, hey! Crazy man! You crazy, man!’ As I said earlier, people don’t run in Somaliland. I was the only guy going out for a run, so I stopped and went back home. After that, I didn’t bother running again while I was there.
The good feeling lasted for two months. That was the happiest I’d been in a long while. If someone had offered me a job right there and then, I would’ve been seriously tempted to take it. The way I saw it, I had my family, I was happy and I didn’t need anything else. I didn’t want for anything in life. But deep down I knew I couldn’t stay in Hargeisa. It was a dream, that was all. My life in Britain was pulling me back. I had my scholarship at St Mary’s. I was starting out in athletics. I owed it to myself to see how far I could go as an athlete. I wanted to make my country, and my family, proud. As much as I dreamt about staying on in Hargeisa for good, Britain was my home now. I had to go back. In October I said goodbye to Hassan and my mum and everyone else.
When I returned home and explained to Alan Storey why I’d been away for so long, he was fine about it. He knew that I hadn’t seen my brother in many years; knew what it meant for me to go back to Somaliland. There was no anger from Alan, no lectures about going AWOL. ‘Did you at least stick to your training programme?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ I lied, not wanting to disappoint him. ‘I went running every day.’
By this point it had been a full eight weeks since I’d done any training. But it was the off-season, there were no big races coming up for a while and I figured a few hard sessions in training and I’d soon be in good form for the upcoming cross country season. That plan went out of the window in my very first training session. I went for a run and immediately felt this intense pain flare up in my right knee. It seems obvious that the pain was related to the fact that I hadn’t been training. But no way could I admit to Alan that I hadn’t done a run for the best part of two months. At first I tried running through the pain. Sometimes you get these aches and strains that go away once you get into your stride. But this pain was different. It persisted, flaring up every time I went for a run. I’d feel okay to begin with, and then four or five minutes into the session my knee would explode in agony. The pain wouldn’t go away, no matter how hard I tried to run through it. And I have a high pain threshold; I can run through most things, but this pain was on another level. I didn’t know what to do. I knew I couldn’t tell Alan about not training in Somalia because I felt like I had let him down. On Neil Black’s advice I stopped training and went for some scans to get to the root of the problem. Nothing showed up.
The medical experts tried everything. Neil was as stumped as the rest of us. My knee was explored repeatedly, but no matter what tests they ran, the answers that came back were the same: the knee was fine. There was nothing wrong with it. To this day, no one can be sure what caused that sudden knee pain. We could never get to the root of it. I tried to go out for a run again. The knee flared. I gritted my teeth through the pain. The knee screamed. I ran some more. It went on like this for a while. Agonizing runs, physio, more tests, no answer. And then, just like that, the pain stopped. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Now I could go back to running.
But the knee wasn’t the only thing interfering with my running. Mentally, I was distracted. For months after I’d returned to St Mary’s, my mind kept drifting back to Hargeisa and the beautiful days I’d spent with Hassan and my mum. I’m sure Alan could see that I was a little distant, that my mind was elsewhere. People couldn’t get through to me. Flying back to Somaliland had been a life-changing experience for me. Now I was back in the UK, I didn’t have the same hunger for athletics. All I could think about was my family. I still put in the effort training and competing in races. But, if I’m honest, I was on autopilot for almost a year after my trip. I was going through the motions. The knee injury affected my training, I missed a large part of the winter cross country season, and maybe my motivation suffered as a result.
In mid-April 2004 I flew out to the UKA camp in Potch
efstroom for some warm-weather training. Among the other athletes there were Sam Haughian, Anthony Whiteman and Neil Speaight. Anthony had competed at the Olympic Games in Atlanta and Sydney; Neil was a talented middle-distance runner who competed for Belgrave Harriers, the best athletics club in the Premiership. Sam was getting ready to compete for Great Britain in the 5000 metres at the Athens Olympics. He’d missed much of the previous track season because of injury, but big things were expected of him going into the Games. The year before he got injured, Sam had the best season of his career. He came second in the 5000 metres at the Spar European Cup in Florence, and finished fifth in the Commonwealth Games in Manchester, beating Craig Mottram, the Australian, when he clocked the 5000 with a time of 13:19.45. Sam was that good.
Potchefstroom didn’t hold a lot of happy memories for Sam. The training camp is based in the grounds of North-West University. You have the camp on one side and the university buildings on the other, with Thabo Mbeki Way slicing down the middle. The first time Sam attended the camp a big bunch of us went out in the afternoon for a run on the grass around the campus, a good 10 kilometres. At a certain point, the group decided to head back, but Sam kept on running even though the light was fading. He was going at a good speed when suddenly he saw this pole, one end of a chain-link fence that had been partially taken down, just in front of him. Sam jumped over the pole to avoid crashing into it, but he jumped too late and the sharp tip of the pole gashed the inside of his thigh. He fell to the ground, blood pouring from the wound. Luckily, some exchange students happened to be camping nearby. They heard Sam’s cries for help and managed to get him to hospital. The surgeon who operated on him said afterwards that if the gash had been a centimetre longer either way, he wouldn’t have been able to save him. Sam came that close to dying.
During my stay in April, I could see that something wasn’t quite right about Sam. I didn’t know what was bothering him, but he wasn’t his usual bubbly self. He seemed a little quiet, a bit down, like he had something on his mind. On the Friday evening, Sam and his physiotherapist, Rebecca Wills, drove down to Johannesburg while the rest of us stayed in Potchefstroom. I went to bed, wondering what had been on Sam’s mind and looking forward to going for a run with him the next day.
Late that night we learned that Sam had been involved in a car accident. He was being treated at a hospital in Johannesburg. They said his condition was critical. They didn’t know if he was going to make it. Rebecca had also been injured and was being treated for her injuries at the same unit. Crazy as it might sound, it didn’t occur to me that Sam’s life might be in danger. I remember thinking, ‘Has he broken his leg? Is he going to have to miss the Olympics? Sam will be so disappointed. He’s trained so hard to get to Athens.’ Then we got the dreaded news that none of us wanted to hear.
Sam had died of his injuries. The news came as a complete shock. I felt cold and stunned, like someone had punched me in the guts. Sam was dead. I simply couldn’t believe it. None of us could. It was like something out of a nightmare. Sam was the brightest runner among us, and suddenly he wasn’t there any more.
Sam had grown up not far from me in Feltham. I’d met his mum a few times. I felt terrible for his parents. I realized they must be going through hell back in the UK. I wished I could do something to help, but in that situation you feel utterly helpless.
When the police asked for someone based at the training camp to go down to Johannesburg and identify the body, Anthony Whiteman, Neil Speaight and I volunteered. It seemed the right thing to do – the very least we could do. Early in the morning, the three of us drove to the city and made our way to the hospital. It was the longest journey of my life.
When I saw Sam lying there in the hospital, the first thing that went through my head was that I wanted to wake him up. I kept waiting for him to open his eyes and say something. But he didn’t. His eyes stayed clamped shut. So many things were going through my head. I wanted to know more about what had happened. Where, when, how, why? It didn’t seem possible. One minute we had been joking and laughing, talking about the future. Then all of a sudden, Sam was gone.
He was just twenty-four years old.
Anthony, Neil and me drove back to Potchefstroom in silence. The camp was eerie. Everyone was devastated by the news. None of us wanted to stay for a moment longer. We wanted to go home.
For the longest time I didn’t want to talk about what had happened. I didn’t say anything to anyone. Not to Alan or my friends or my family. But not talking about it didn’t help. The only way you can deal with stuff like that is by talking. Gradually, I started to talk about it with people close to me, to try to come to terms with it. I didn’t want to admit it at first, but Sam’s death affected me deeply.
The hardest thing of all was accepting that life goes on. I found that really hard to take. I’d always imagined that when people died, life was never the same any more. But it doesn’t work that way. The rest of the world goes on without you. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from. For a time, everything felt different, but then slowly things started returning to normal. That was actually the scariest part for me. I’d see Sam’s younger brother Tim around the club and instantly I’d be transported back to that night in Potchefstroom.
In the end, I realized that life is precious – that you don’t have any control over certain things, and all you can do in this life is to try to be kind and decent to those around you. To be a good person, to do the best you can. Sam was a brilliant young athlete. More than that, he was one of the nicest guys in athletics. That’s the memory I have of Sam. I’ve tried my best to follow his example.
I still kept in touch with Tania. Our lives were pulling us in different directions, but we were still close and we still found time to chat on the phone – these long conversations talking about nothing really, like you do at that age. A year or two into my time at St Mary’s I dropped hints to Tania, about the way I felt about her. I remember us talking on the phone one evening as I was getting ready to fly out to yet another training camp. I said something about wanting to pack Tania in my suitcase and take her everywhere I went. Anyway, it didn’t happen. I didn’t feel any resentment over it. I was just happy to be friends. I still dropped in on Tania, popping round to her house and chatting with Bob and Nadia. Tania had a boyfriend at the time, but regardless of that fact, I always had what I like to call the sweet spot for her. And Tania knew how I felt, even if I hesitated to express it. One evening in early 2005 I went over to her place for a chat. We did our usual thing. Sitting around, listening to some tunes. I didn’t know it at the time, but Tania was pregnant. The fact that she didn’t tell me was nothing to do with shame or anything like that. Tania simply didn’t want to hurt my feelings. She didn’t feel the same way about me as I did about her, and she knew that if I learned she was having a baby with someone else I’d be disappointed – because that would mean things might never happen between us. Actually, I didn’t find out that Tania was pregnant until she gave birth to Rhianna that summer. None of this altered my feelings towards Tania. We kept in touch after Rhianna had been born, although shortly after that we might only speak once in a blue moon. Partly that was the stress of motherhood for Tania. Partly it was down to my training commitments and travelling. For a couple of years, things simply got in the way.
For a while after Sam died, training felt weird. I needed something to focus on, something to take my mind off Potchefstroom. The next big meet on the horizon was the 2005 European Under-23 Championships, which were taking place in Erfurt, Germany, in July. I felt good about my prospects going into the Under-23s. My times had been good in training, I’d put my knee problems behind me and I’d improved my 5000 metres personal best to 13:30.53. Earlier that year I finished sixth in the European Indoor Championships in Madrid in a personal best 7:54.08. At the Under-23 championships two years earlier in Poland, Chris Thompson had beaten me into second place. This time I was determined to win.
Erfurt was a wake-up cal
l. I was way off the pace, finishing 4 seconds behind the winner, Anatoliy Rybakov of Russia, in 14:10.96. It didn’t feel like it at the time, but losing in Erfurt was the best thing that could have happened to me. The disappointment of that defeat stung me to the core and helped to focus my mind. I flew home from Germany, thinking that something had to change.
My results in 2005 were a real mixed bag. I was trying to make the step up from the juniors to the senior ranks and was quickly finding out that there was a big difference between the two. My first race for Great Britain had been at the World Cross Country Championships in St Etienne-St Galmier, France. I finished in thirty-seventh place in a field dominated by Kenyans, Eritreans and Ethiopians. There was also a bunch of Kenyan athletes who’d switched to Qatari nationality, which made the field even stronger.
Personally, I’m against fast-tracking the naturalization of athletes. I don’t blame the runners – these guys have families to feed, and athletics careers are notoriously fragile and short-lived. It’s hard for some of them to make the Kenyan team, simply because there are so many good runners in Kenya. If they go to Qatar, they can make enough money to look after their family, have a good life, and compete in the Olympics and the World Championships. But I believe the countries themselves shouldn’t be allowed to naturalize athletes so easily. If you want to run for Qatar or Bahrain, you should be expected to live in that country for a number of years before becoming eligible. At the moment you have guys who are running for Kenya one minute and appearing at the Worlds for Qatar the next. That isn’t right.
It would be a lie to say that East Africans weren’t totally dominating the field. I saw it in competitions, and I saw it in training too. Every Sunday a few of the lads and me would do a hill session in Richmond Park. We’d meet up at Ham Common and do sessions up and down the incline just inside Ham Gate. The sun would be out, people would be jogging or walking their dogs, and the swans would be floating on the lake. Then the Kenyans would rush past us, this blur of colour tearing up the incline at a ridiculously fast pace. I’d glance at Scott Overall or Abdi Ali. We were all thinking exactly the same thing: ‘Man, these guys are gooooood.’