Twin Ambitions - My Autobiography

by Mo Farah

  13

  THE PROJECT

  FROM my house in Teddington to Bushy Park is a distance of approximately 700 metres. Whenever I’m going for a run in the park, I’ll begin my warm-up by jogging at a light pace from my front door to the park gates. Two days after returning home from Zurich, I laced up my trainers and headed out the front door, intending to put in a good session at the park. I was on a big high after Zurich. I had the British record under my belt and a new coach to work with in the not-too-distant future, provided my sponsorship issue was resolved. When you’re in good form like that, you don’t want your season to end. But as I set off down the street, I could immediately feel that something was wrong.

  My Achilles.

  The tendon had been sore and stiff throughout the summer. Now it was so bad I couldn’t jog on it. At first I tried running through the pain. I just about made it to the park gate. There I stopped and thought, ‘This is too much.’ I couldn’t run any further. I turned around and limped back home. ‘That’s it for a few days,’ I thought. A couple of days’ rest, that’s what I needed. I put my feet up for two days and rested the tendon. The pain faded. Then I went out for another run.

  Soon as I started running, the stiffness came back.

  ‘This isn’t happening,’ I thought. The 2010 Great North Run up in Newcastle was in early September, less than two weeks away, and I was desperate to compete.

  At the end of the athletics season, when all the big track competitions are over, there are several major one-off races held around the world. As a distance runner, your aim is to finish the athletics season, then compete in a few big road races. One of the big public races is the Great North Run, held on a Sunday in September. On the Saturday there’s the Great North CityGames, staged in Gateshead, on a purpose-built track near the city centre. It’s free to watch and they host a number of events including the long jump, pole vault and mile race. I was scheduled to run the mile. On the back of my wins in Barcelona, I was now ranked the number one distance runner in Europe, and one of the best in the world. That made me a big draw for the road races. Suddenly Ricky’s phone didn’t stop ringing as organizers queued up to add me to their events. For me it was a chance to compete in one of the biggest road races in Europe. Now my Achilles was threatening to disrupt all that.

  I went to see Neil. He had a look at my Achilles.

  ‘Do you think it’ll be all right to do a run in, say, two weeks, a week and a half?’ I asked casually. I’d run with the injury in Barcelona and in Zurich. One more race would be okay, surely?

  Blackie laughed. ‘No chance, Mo! You need to give it some serious rest.’

  I had no choice but to withdraw from the CityGames. Then I rested up, under strict instructions from Blackie not to do any running work for two whole weeks. Meanwhile, Blackie did his best to treat the injury, giving me deep-friction massages, which involved applying a degree of pressure to the sorest part of the tendon with the pads of his fingers and squeezing hard to help speed up the natural repair of the tendon. I have a high pain threshold, but those massages were something else. Hands down, it was the worst pain I’d ever experienced. It felt like someone twisting a knife inside my Achilles.

  This was a deeply frustrating time for me. I was in brilliant shape coming out of the track season, and I was looking forward to carrying my good form into the road races. To make matters worse, I was restless from not being able to run, constantly fidgeting and making a nuisance of myself around the house. I was like a kid during the school holidays, full of energy but with no way of burning it off. After two weeks of rest and treatment, Blackie gave me the green light to start running again. The next morning I got up, itching to get down to Bushy Park and run. As soon as I stepped outside, I felt the soreness in my Achilles again.

  This was getting serious now. The injury wasn’t responding to rest. Neil took me to see an Achilles specialist who’d flown in from Sweden. He was a leading expert in his field – what this guy didn’t know about Achilles injuries wasn’t worth knowing. He carried out a thorough investigation of my foot, and afterwards he and Blackie decided that the best course of action was to give the tendon a further two weeks’ rest. If the soreness hadn’t eased up by then, the specialist recommended surgery. This was bad news. Going under the knife would mean missing several months of training, at the very least. And there are no guarantees with Achilles operations. Some athletes have the operation and never fully recover. It’s a big risk. Blackie and I were in agreement that surgery was a worst-case scenario. But we both knew that if the injury didn’t show signs of improvement, there was no other option.

  For two weeks I did everything I possibly could to help the tendon heal. I gritted my teeth through several agonizing deep-friction massages. I did sessions on an exercise bike. I hopped on one leg in the physio room. I performed calf raises to strengthen the muscles. I even cut the heels off my trainers in order to reduce the pressure on my tendons. Nothing seemed to work. The tendon was still sore. On the Friday we went back to see the specialist for another consultation. It wasn’t looking good. ‘Two days,’ the specialist said. ‘If the tendon shows no sign of improvement over the weekend, then we’ll arrange for you to fly to Stockholm on Monday. You can have the operation there.’

  On the Saturday, the tendon started to feel a little less painful. On the Sunday, I went out for a light jog. This time, the soreness wasn’t quite as bad. There was a little bit of feeling there and it still hurt, but it wasn’t as bad as it had been after Zurich. On the Monday, the specialist took another look at my Achilles. ‘The tendon has improved,’ he said. ‘You won’t need the operation.’ I breathed a massive sigh of relief. I’d been less than twenty-four hours away from having to go under the knife. The tendon never quite recovered – Achilles tendons rarely do – but it was good enough to run on again. To this day, it still feels quite sore.

  I spent Christmas and the New Year at the camp in Iten, and kicked off the 2011 season in style with victory in the Great Edinburgh Cross Country – the same event where, twelve months earlier, I’d nearly collapsed close to the finish line. With the Achilles injury pretty much behind me, I pulled clear of the lead group with two laps to go to finish 30 metres ahead of Galen Rupp, who was a member of Alberto’s Oregon Project. Ayad Lamdassem, who I’d beaten in the 10,000 metres in Barcelona, trailed in third. At the end of the month, I flew out to Portland, Oregon, on a recce mission to meet the other guys Alberto worked with and to find out more about the project.

  At this point, very few people knew that I was going to be working with Alberto. Outside my immediate family, Ricky and Neil were the only two people aware of my trip to the US. Going out there, I wanted to keep things under wraps because I wasn’t sure what would happen. We’d had that meeting in Zurich with Alberto, but I wasn’t signed up yet and, as far as I was concerned, I had to see the set-up with my own eyes before committing. If I liked the feel of things out there, I’d rubber-stamp everything with Alberto and bring the family over. At least, that’s what I had in mind. In fact, the opposite was true. Like a footballer trying out with a new club, I was the one on trial, not the Oregon guys. The group coached by Alberto is very tight-knit, and bringing in an outsider is a big deal. At the end of my trip, if the guys on the team gave me the thumbs-up, Alberto would take me on. If not, I’d be out – simple as that.

  Alberto put me up for a few days in the spare bedroom of his house. He’s an interesting guy, Alberto. Like me, he holds his faith close to his heart. Alberto is a devout Roman Catholic, a two-beers-an-evening kind of guy who wears a tracksuit and a baseball cap. He also happens to possess the wickedest sense of humour on the circuit. Some coaches like to imagine they’re funny, but Alberto is the real deal. He knows how to make people laugh. While I was staying at the house, he introduced me to his wife, Molly. They both went out of their way to make me feel at home, and I quickly warmed to Alberto. As a coach, he takes an interest in you above and beyond mere athletics. He cares about you on
the human level. You have this feeling that you can talk to him about pretty much anything that’s on your mind, and he’ll give you a sympathetic hearing. My first night in the Salazar household, we talked about all kinds of stuff.

  On top of everything else, Alberto also happens to be a forward-thinking coach when it comes to distance running. Naturally, I was full of questions about the Oregon Project when I first arrived. ‘What kind of sessions do these guys do?’ ‘How many reps do they do?’ ‘What about preventing injury?’ The next morning Alberto invited me down for a tour of the project headquarters to find out more.

  The idea for the Oregon Project was born in 2001, during a conversation in a deli between Alberto and Tom Clarke, the President of Business Development at Nike. They were both disgusted at the state of American distance running. The Boston Marathon had just taken place and the highest-placed US runner was sixth, and certain commentators were celebrating that like it was some kind of achievement. In response, Tom and Alberto came up with the idea of creating a special camp for training American distance runners with the potential to win Olympic gold and the big marathon races. Nike would provide the funds, and Alberto would oversee the project and provide his coaching expertise. They were going to put distance running back on the map, and Alberto was the guy who would make it happen.

  The Nike campus, where the Oregon Project is based, is located in Beaverton, about 6 miles west of downtown Portland. A woodchip trail encircles it, and there’s an all-weather track surrounded by dense trees with mountain peaks visible in the distance. This is where I’d be putting in hard work, training with the other guys in the group. Once Alberto had finished giving me the grand tour of the facilities, he introduced me to the rest of the team.

  My main training partner would be Galen Rupp, who I already knew from competing against him in cross country and track events. Galen was three years younger than me, and the star of the Oregon Project – the guy they called the ‘project’s project’. He’d been training with Alberto since the age of fourteen and became a project member straight out of Central Catholic High School in Portland. Like me, Galen had preferred playing football as a kid. Like me, he was also very fast: in his high school freshman year he was running 200 metres in under 30 seconds. And also like me, Galen had almost no interest in running before his coaches persuaded him to start running on the track. We had a lot of things in common off the track as well. We both enjoyed playing FIFA; we both loved pancakes; we had the same taste in music, even down to the fact that we both had the same track playing for the first dance at our weddings (‘Differences’ by Ginuwine). We looked at each other and were both like, ‘What are the chances of that?!?’

  Alberto also introduced me to the rest of the project members: Alan Webb, a middle-distance runner who’d been an American high-school prodigy; Kara Goucher and her husband Adam; and Dathan Ritzenhein, who took bronze at the Birmingham half-marathon in 2009 when I had first met Alberto, although he wasn’t in Portland at the time. It was a small, tight group. I went out for runs with Galen to get a feel for the intensity of training I’d be doing. In the evenings the entire group went out for a meal downtown. Being around Alberto, Galen and the other guys, everything just seemed to click. It felt right. I could see that Alberto was creating something special here. I thought, ‘This is the place to be.’

  On the third day Alberto told me that he’d be flying down to Albuquerque in New Mexico to see how things were going with Dathan. I’d join him later, but for the next few days I would stay on in Portland and get to know the other project members a little better. Alan Webb had a spare room, so I crashed there. I spent some more time hanging out with Galen. On the fourth day I caught a flight to New Mexico and met Dathan, and was there for a day or two. The more time I spent around Alberto and his group, the more I wanted to be a part of things.

  I flew back to London, pumped with excitement. Talking to the guys in the group, seeing the facilities, spending time with Alberto, everything had confirmed to me what I’d already known: moving to Portland was the right thing to do. When I got back home, I sat Tania down and told her all about the trip. She could see that I wanted to make the move. Even though it meant moving away from our friends and her family, Tania was happy for me; she was willing to do whatever I felt was right for my running career. The move was more difficult for Rhianna. She’d just started school and was beginning to make friends. Uprooting her and changing her life was the biggest obstacle we had to overcome. But while I was in Portland, I’d done my research about where we’d live, the schools in the area that might be suitable for Rhianna. I had it all planned out. We also had to consider the fact that even though we’d be moving to the US as a family, there’d inevitably be long stretches of time when Tania and Rhianna would be pretty much on their own while I was off at training camp.

  Ultimately, both Tania and I felt the move was the right one for me. It really wasn’t that hard a decision to reach. Sure, we’d have some adjustments to make to live in another country. But Tania had seen me finish sixth or seventh in the field behind the Kenyans so many times, she knew as well as I did that something had to change. She had just one question.

  ‘Do you genuinely believe this guy will help your career?’

  I nodded. ‘A hundred per cent.’

  ‘Then, okay.’

  That sealed it, really. We took Rhianna out of school and in February 2011 moved into a rented three-bedroom apartment in Portland. I say ‘apartment’ but it was more like a decent-sized house. The Londoner in me was stunned by how big people’s homes were in the US. Portland was pleasingly chilled, a very relaxed city. Everyone was so nice to us when we moved in. People had time for us. It’s the opposite of somewhere like New York, where everyone is busy all of the time. It turned out to be a good age for Rhianna to move too. When you’re five years old, you can adapt easily and you don’t really think too much about things. She treated the move like one big holiday. And Rhianna was already well travelled by that age; flying on a plane for her is like jumping on a bus.

  Having said that, relocating was a stressful period for me and my family. When we headed out to the US, I was under the impression that our visas would be issued shortly after we settled in. In reality, merely beginning the process of obtaining a US residential visa takes a while. We had a top, top lawyer appointed by Nike and working on our behalf to handle the visa process during our initial months in the US. We kept waiting to hear. We kept hearing nothing. While we waited for our visas to be issued, we were stuck in a sort of limbo. I couldn’t officially become a member of the Oregon Project because I wasn’t with Nike and I wasn’t a US citizen. Alberto appreciated the unique situation, so I was still allowed to train at the Nike campus – but because I wasn’t formally a Nike athlete, I would turn up for training twice a day dressed head to toe in adidas kit. (My contract with adidas had expired but my new one with Nike hadn’t started yet.) This was the Nike world headquarters, a massive campus with thousands of employees, and under normal circumstances, it’s forbidden to walk around with so much as another sponsor’s logo on your socks, let alone with a logo splashed all over your hat, your top, your leggings and trainers. I stood out like a sore thumb and if it had been anyone else, I would have been ejected. Thankfully Alberto put in a word with the top guys at Nike, including Phil Knight himself, the CEO and founder of the company. He told them that I was with Alberto, that I would eventually be signed up to Nike once my visa situation had been sorted out. Although that didn’t stop people coming up to me during my first weeks on the campus and saying, ‘What are you wearing?’

  The wait for our visas dragged on. Rhianna couldn’t enrol at school. I was getting frustrated with the delay. Weeks turned into months. Tania started to worry about how much school Rhianna was missing. In early May the lawyer advised us that in order to get our US visas we would need to leave the country and present ourselves at the US Consulate General Office in Toronto, where we had an appointment (the closest US embassy to
Portland was actually in Vancouver, but they had no appointments for the next two months, which is why we made the longer trip to Toronto). All we had to do was turn up at the consulate, hand over our passports and have an interview. Then they’d stamp our passports and we’d be allowed to return to the US. The lawyer informed us that the process should take no longer than four days. That was the timescale we were given. We packed our suitcases with enough clothes for four or five days, booked a room at a nearby hotel – and off we went.

  We arrived at the Consulate General on University Avenue for our scheduled appointment with all our paperwork in order and one of the best lawyers in the US handling our case. But instead of being invited in for an interview, the staff immediately handed our passports back to us, along with a piece of paper which more or less said that the consulate could not process our visa application because we were being investigated by the FBI. This was a shock. We hadn’t been expecting this. Tania scanned this piece of paper and sent it across to the lawyer. He was stunned. It turned out that the reason why we were under investigation was because my passport stated that I was born in Mogadishu, which was a hotspot for terrorism at the time. The authorities had taken one look at my passport, noted my place of birth and decided that I needed to be investigated, ignoring the fact that I had been vouched for by Nike and had competed in the Olympic Games. We were then told that our applications couldn’t be processed until the FBI had done a full background check on me. They would also need to investigate Tania and Rhianna because they were also on my application. The lawyer said the process could take up to ninety days. In the meantime we wouldn’t be allowed back in the US.

  By this point we were panicking hard. It wasn’t as if we could simply go back to London. Our home was Portland now. All our clothes and possessions were there. And this was a World Championship year. I had some big meets coming up and I needed to train. I was losing fitness fast, so Alberto put me in touch with a local athletics coach. I rented a car and drove out to meet him. He showed me around the city parks, pointing out the good running routes. I did a few training runs here and there, but it wasn’t the same. I needed to train at high altitude. Eventually we decided, as a family, that there was no point sitting it out in Toronto for ninety days. It was in my best interests to jump on a plane and head to Font-Romeu so I could train at the high-altitude camp. That was literally the only option we had: train there, wait out the ninety days until the FBI investigation was complete. Then fly back.