Twin Ambitions - My Autobiography (25 page)

I had the beating of the European field. Breaking the British record convinced me that I was on the edge. I was
this
close to fulfilling my potential. Now I needed someone who had the expertise and ability to squeeze that 1 or 2 per cent more out of my running. For me, there was only one person for the job: Alberto Salazar.

I was keenly aware that Alberto had already turned me down once. Some of the stumbling blocks he’d mentioned in Birmingham still existed – the sponsorship issue, and the fact that his Oregon Project was purely focused on American distance runners. But at the same time, we were coming at this from a different angle now. I wanted Alberto to coach me on the track, not train me to run the marathon. Alberto had said that I had potential on the track; now I was starting to realize it, and I wanted Alberto to be the guy who got me over the line.

That meeting in Zurich went really well. Alberto liked the idea of working with me. We had a long chat. He explained a few things to me about the Nike Oregon Project and the group he worked with, what would be expected of me if I joined the group. I had to fit in with what he was trying to achieve in Portland. That was key. And I had to be prepared to work incredibly hard. I was ready for that. I’d heard about the Oregon Project; I knew training under Alberto would be more gruelling than anything I’d ever done before. Of course I’d heard the stories about his scientific approach, using underwater treadmills and cryo-saunas, for example, but the fact remains that Alberto possesses an incredible work ethic – a disciplined and relentless desire to improve. If he thinks there’s an aspect of your running that needs to be corrected, he’ll leave no stone unturned in his search to find a solution.

‘And, of course,’ Alberto added, ‘you will need to move to Portland.’

I nodded. I’d understood from the get-go that if I wanted to be coached by Alberto, I’d have to relocate to the USA with my family. London was our home, and Rhianna had just started school, but being coached by Alberto would give me the best possible chance of beating the Ethiopians and Kenyans in major competitions. When news of my move to Portland went public, there were a fair few comments in the media, asking why I was changing coach with less than two years to go until the Olympics. Others questioned the wisdom of leaving Alan Storey permanently when 2010 had been such a successful year. That’s not how I saw it. Sure, changing coaches is always a risk. But there’s a big difference between winning the Europeans and winning the Worlds or the Olympics. At the European Championships, I wasn’t competing against a huge pack of East African runners. If anything, the fact that I finished fifth in Zurich behind Tariku Bekele, Merga and Chepkok emphasized how much further I had to go in order to win on the world stage. The easier thing would have been to stay in England and keep the same set-up. But doing the easy thing isn’t what wins you medals. I knew that moving would be difficult, both for me and for my family. But it’s like I said. You have to make sacrifices in order to be successful. If I had to move away from my home to get better, then that’s what I would do.

We reached an agreement that Alberto would become my new coach, subject to resolving the sponsorship issue. My contract with adidas still had a few months to run, which meant I had to stay put for a while before I could link up with Alberto in Portland. Adidas had matching rights on my next contract. We were very open and honest with them about the situation. There was no pressure from Alberto or Nike to make the switch to Portland. It was entirely our decision. In fact, by agreeing to join Alberto’s group at the Oregon Project, I was putting myself in a weak negotiating position, since Nike knew I had to sign up to them before I could work with Alberto. I had no choice but to accept whatever offer they put on the table.

But the sacrifice was worth it. From now on, Alberto was the guy in charge. I wouldn’t have to be both an athlete and a coach any more. I could focus solely on running. Alberto would be the one calling the shots.

2010
had been a good year. The next year was going to be even better.

F
ROM
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.