Free Twin Ambitions - My Autobiography by Mo Farah

‘Sheep.’ ‘Tree.’ Alan just nodded. I don’t think he realized how poor my English was back then.
    We had some great fun at the club. One night, close to Christmas, we went out for a run along a regular route through Feltham. As we set off, someone decided we should go carol singing instead. We went from house to house and knocked on each front door. I’d never sung Christmas carols before. As soon as the owners answered, everyone began singing. In return, they gave us sweets. It was the weirdest thing I’d ever seen.
    I soon progressed from the county championships to English Schools, representing Middlesex. At the same time, I was competing for the Borough of Hounslow in the athletics league. But there were still times when I was reluctant to go training or wanted to hang out with my friends and play football. As any athletics coach will tell you, football and training don’t go well together. The kicks to the legs take the speed out of you; the general wear and tear of running up and down on the pitch, striking a ball – it impacts on your running ability. But I can be stubborn, and at that age I just wanted to play. As I progressed through the junior ranks, from school races to borough, then county and finally English Schools, it soon became obvious that I couldn’t keep up both running and football. One or the other had to go.
    By the age of twelve, I’d reached English Schools level and was close to achieving something special. The top eight runners in English Schools events got to wear an England vest and had the chance to compete against Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in the National Championships. Whoever won those races was then selected to represent Great Britain in the junior European Championships. The thought of representing my country in athletics was a huge motivation for me. Britain was my home now. It’s the place where I first went to school, where I made friends and learnt to become a runner.
    For me, competing for my country was the ultimate goal.

5
AN ARSENAL KIT
    I N 1996, when I was twelve years old, I was selected to run in the annual English Schools Cross Country Championships in Weymouth, Dorset as a reward for finishing second in the counties race. It was my first race at national level.
    Weymouth was a 4.5 kilometre race. I’d started out running 3 kilometre races and worked my way up to the longer distance from there, with the length of the races increasing year by year. But this was my first race at 4.5 kilometres, and on top of that, the race was open to both Year Eight and Year Nine students. I was competing against 300 kids, about half of whom were older than me, some as old as fourteen, and I was smaller than most of the other Year Eights. Before the start of the race, Alan had given me a pep talk.
    ‘Look, Mo,’ he said. ‘You’ve done really well just to get here. If you come in the top fifty, you’ll have done an amazing job. Even top hundred would be a good result.’
    Alan was careful to manage my expectations. For sure, there’s a danger in telling someone they can win a race because if it doesn’t happen for whatever reason, they’re crushed with disappointment. Psychologically, losing when you expect to win is harder to process than winning when you don’t expect to place that high. No doubt Alan saw the size of the field, realized that many of the other runners were physically more developed than me, and wanted to make sure I didn’t feel under any pressure to win as easily as I’d done at the borough and school competitions. But I saw things differently. This was my first English Schools run. I wanted to win.
    The race started. The pace was ridiculous. I focused on my own race and didn’t worry too much about what the guys in front were doing. I tore round the first bend in the middle of this huge pack of runners, most of whom were twice the size of me. At that point I was down in a hundredth place and quite a way back from the front. As we started