Who Wants It Most?

You probably haven’t heard of Iten and Bekoji.  Iten is in Kenya and Bekoji is in Ethiopia.  Both are small, obscure towns in remote East Africa but they have been producing the world’s best middle and long distance runners for decades. The sleek African men and women you see on TV flying easily past the finish line will most likely be from or near these two places.

 And just like East Africa is the home of long distance runners, tiny Jamaica has more world class Sprinters than anywhere else on Earth. Usain Bolt is the most famous but there are many other super sprinters; Asafa Powell, Shelly Ann-Fraser and Yohan Blake among them.

 Similarly Brazil has been producing one super star footballer after another. Pele, Garrincha, Socrates, Kaka, Romario, Zico, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Neymar…the list goes on.

And if you believe all this performance is mainly due to a combination of pure talent, the genes, the shape of their bodies, the high altitude, the healthy food, excellent facilities, good funding etc. you better think again.  These have a relatively minor role.  So how do they do it?

 Effort

It’s a lot of painfully hard work. As Bob Bowman, the coach of swimming legend Michael Phelps once said “Michael hasn’t taken a day off in 5 years. He even trained on Christmas eve and on his birthday”. The average Brazilian footballer starts playing football at the age of 5 (!!) and if he has been training for 22 hours a week, he would have racked up 10,000 hours of training by the age of 13, far more than an European boy.

 The average Kenyan runner trains THREE TIMES a day, from 6am all the way into late afternoon. And every Tuesday young boys and girls in Iten train by running the feared Interval race over on a crude, circular dirt track. An Interval race is where you run (consecutively with no stops) very fast for 100m, then very slow for another 100m, then very fast again, as many times as you can ( I have tried this on a treadmill and it is horrible). Young Kenyans do this till they almost collapse, lying in a ditch throwing up, then they get up and then run again.  No one stops to help. No one ever asks at the start of the race “How many times?”. You just run. This is normal in Iten. As one Westerner who saw this said “Here I have seen runners suffer to a degree that I cannot in my wildest dreams imagine anyone in the West subjecting themselves to. This is a fast moving journey which wrenches the body beyond its mortal limitations. It starts with the recognition that Pain is the validation of Accomplishment”.

 Mindset

It’s also Mind over Matter. Kenyans don’t see pain as a sign of discomfort, they see it as a challenge. Research has shown the mind gives up much before the body does. As Paavo Nurmi once said: “Mind is everything, muscles are merely pieces of rubber.  All that I am, I am because of my mind”. Nurmi was a Finnish middle- and long-distance runner. He was nicknamed the "Flying Finn" as he dominated distance running in the early 20th century, setting 22 official world records and winning nine gold and three silver medals in the Olympics.

 The barrier is usually mental, not physical.

Confidence

Kenyans hate losing to foreigners in running. Fact. And they strongly believe they are the undisputed kings of middle and long distance running.

 You have to believe in yourself, even if no one else does, even if you fail often.

 Groups

World class runners, tennis player, golfers, footballers et al never train alone. Why? Because you need the pressure to get better and this can only come if you compete. Competition gives you constant, honest, immediate feedback and there is no better way to improve.

 Role models

Young wannabe Kenyan, Ethiopian or Jamaican runners are surrounded by super stars. On any early morning in Iten or Bekoji if you go running, you are likely to be joined by a big group of men and women who are Olympic Gold Medalists and world record holders, legends around the world who train as hard as and suffer just like the junior most runner. Stars like Paul Tergat, David Rudisha, Martin Lel, Haile Gebresellassie etc are role models and mentors. These champions are not super humans, simply ordinary people with an extraordinary ambition.  And the young runners think “If he can do it, so can I”.  Young Brazilian boys have Pele and Ronaldo in the back of their minds all the time.

 But much more than all the above you REALLY need to want to WIN. Not a wish or a hope or a mere desire but an Obsession.

Rasmus Ankersen dwelt at length on the above in his fascinating book “The Gold Mine Effect”. He once had a long conversation with Glen Mills, Usain Bolt’s Coach. At the end, Rasmus asked him a simple question: What factor, more than ANY other, determines who will be the winner?He expected Mills to give a long, complex answer, perhaps to do with a special sprinting technique, a superb start or something like that.

But after a long pause Mills looked him in the eye and said “The one who wins is the one who wants it most”.

In the end, that’s what counts. How badly do you want it?