For all the months spent in Ethiopia, the times and data recorded, Mo Farah has no idea quite how Sunday’s London Marathon will unfold.
“You can’t,” he says. “Take Eliud Kipchoge in Boston the other day. You would have predicted him to win that.” Even the best marathon runner of all time can have a bad day, the world record holder ending up in sixth place.
For Farah, there is realism, too. Kipchoge’s record is not under threat from him, nor is the outcome of this weekend’s race. Instead, now 40, the Londoner joked about targeting the British masters record.
His farewell to marathon running is not quite like that of Paula Radcliffe back in 2015, when she recovered from her foot injury to mix it with club athletes. Nor will Farah be mixing it with the front group for his final competitive 26.2miles.
Other races will follow in 2023 — the details of which he will announce in due course — but this will be arguably the last meaningful race for Britain’s greatest ever distance runner.
After his heroics on the track, there was the expectation that Farah would be equally successful when he first dipped his toe in the water with the marathon in 2014. Instead, he has just one victory, from Chicago in 2018, and a solitary podium in his home city.
Ahead of his last stab at the distance, he said: “The marathon hasn’t gone as well as I wanted. Once I made the decision to go from the track to the marathon… the best I’ve done is win the Chicago Marathon. The rest hasn’t been great. But you can’t always think, ‘If only I’d done that’.”
When the time does officially come to hang up his running shoes, he is adamant he will do so with no regrets — whether that be about his marathon shortcomings or the controversy over his former coach Alberto Salazar, who is banned for life from athletics.
The last two years my body hasn’t allowed me to do the training and that’s the hardest thing
“I wouldn’t have done anything different,” he said. “Every part has been a journey that you never know where it will go. But I just took that journey and kept going and kept grafting. But if I look back and ask if I’d have changed anything, I’d have changed nothing.”
On the track is where he excelled, with four Olympic golds and six world titles, and for a period he was an unstoppable force over 5,000 and 10,000 metres. A year ago, he genuinely believed he had the ability to still make his mark at the front end of the marathon before injury. This year, he has stayed injury free but the focus has shifted.
Instead, the goal on Sunday morning is first and foremost to enjoy what may seem like an extended farewell to his fans.
“This will be my last marathon, so the key thing is to go out there and enjoy this weekend,” he said. “Because this is where the journey started — the young boy who took part in the mini marathon and won that but was watching the senior race and thinking, ‘One day I’m going to run the London Marathon’.
“It will be quite emotional, because it’s your last journey. When you know it’s the end of the road, you always get emotional. They key thing is not to let that get to me, just to run.”
With all he has achieved in his career, it is something of a mystery that Farah is still driven to run at the highest level. But increasingly he has come to concede that while the mind is still willing, the body is not.
“The last two years my body hasn’t allowed me to do the training and that’s the hardest thing,” he said. “For many years, I tended to take it for granted. As you get older, that totally changes.
“For me, that is the most frustrating thing. Just out of nothing it changes. You just can’t do it. The last few years have definitely been tough. But this is it. I don’t know if my body can do it week in, week out.”
