Organizers of the ING New York City Marathon coveted Haile Gebrselassie’s participation ever since he took up marathon racing eight years ago. Now, finally, the Ethiopian is set to join 45,000 other runners on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge on November 7 to contest the 2010 race.In addition to being a massive coup for the race, it also represents somewhat of a paradigm shift for Gebrselassie.
For the past four years, he has chased world records at the pancake-flat Berlin Marathon each September, setting the existing record of 2:03:59 in 2008. And, he has won in Dubai on three consecutive occasions, most recently last January. Over his marathon career, he has also racked up an enviable record measured no less by the fact that his 10th-best time is a staggering 2:06:52. Most of these times have been achieved with the aid of pacemakers.
There will be no official pacemakers in New York and the course record held by another Ethiopian, Tesfaye Jifar, is 2:07:43—surely evidence that a world record is out of the question. There must be another reason for the departure.
“If I win in New York, it’s New York. It’s like London; it is the one everybody wants to win,” Gebrselassie says. Simple.
Three years ago, New York Road Runners, organizers of the ING New York City Marathon, made the decision to eliminate pacemakers from the race, saying that rabbits detract from head-to-head competition. They were also concerned about the amount of television exposure directed at pacemakers at the expense of the “real” racers. Reminded that he will not have someone to run a prescribed pace, Gebrselassie is pragmatic.
“I have no choice,” he laments. “I wish we had a pacemaker at least until halfway. If not, what can I do? I will have to pace myself. My top priority is to win the race—it’s not to beat the course record. If it’s possible, I will try. It depends, of course, on the weather.”
Despite his penchant for beating records and recording fast times, Gebrselassie prefers not to spend time driving the course, studying every turn and every patch of asphalt. The course is the same for everyone is how he views it. He concedes that he has watched videos of the race and talked to his good friend and 2005 New York winner Paul Tergat.
Mind you, when he visited New York in June to announce his participation, he barely had time to have a meal.
After an 18-hour flight from his home in Addis Ababa, he went straight to Icahn Stadium for the announcement and to help celebrate National Running Day with an estimated 1,500 New York City school children. Those present were astonished that, 10 hours after arriving, he was back aboard a plane heading home to Addis. This is just another example of his enthusiasm for the sport that has made him a multi-millionaire as well as a United Nations Ambassador of Goodwill.
And, he declares that he is as committed and professional as ever.
“You see, nowadays, because of what I am doing in Ethiopia, money comes from what I am doing,” he says. “Why am I running? I can’t say it’s a hobby. After hard work, when I come back to my training, I am refreshed again. I want to keep up the training.”
Gebrselassie is a strong believer in the adage, “teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime,” and has been using his enormous influence to benefit people in his homeland.
Ten years ago, for instance, he invested some of his race earnings in a construction company run by his brother. At present, it employs some 600 workers. The company has built two public schools named after the brothers’ mother, Shawanness Gebrselassie, who insisted her 10 children receive an education though she herself never did. They also built office towers, a cinema and recently completed the Haile Resort, a $14 million hotel on Lake Hawassa, three hours south of Addis. Mary Wittenberg, president and CEO of NYRR, was among those who attended the opening. All this activity hasn’t prevented him from training twice a day, despite his ongoing battle with asthma and allergies.
“The motivation is still there,” he says quietly. “But one thing I want to tell you because of my health problems for many years, here in Ethiopia, there’s a lot of pollen and in the morning and it’s a little bit cold even. But these are the conditions I have to train in, and I have to do it. I am doing quite good.”
For the past six months, he has managed weekly training volumes of between 200 and 220 kilometers a week, all of it at elevations greater than 7,000 feet above sea level. Only one race will precede New York and that’s the Great North Run in Newcastle, UK, on September 19. There, he will face two-time ING New York City Marathon champion Martin Lel over the half marathon distance. For the six weeks in between, he plans to fine-tune his fitness for the world’s biggest marathon by dropping his mileage while working on speed.
Gebrselassie is often asked when he will retire. It’s a valid question. But he won’t enter into that discussion because he believes that once you set a date, you have already retired. Besides a victory in New York, he has other goals he wishes to achieve before the day comes when he is no longer among the upper echelon of distance runners.
“In the future, it is my plan to improve my [world record] time. My future big plan is to run in the London 2012 Olympics,” he boldly declares.
He will be 39 if he does qualify for the London Olympics. “Do you think I am too old?” he asks, laughing when he is reminded of this fact. He already has two Olympic 10,000m gold medals from Atlanta and Sydney. Concerns over the air quality led him to skip the Beijing Olympic marathon, although the danger never materialized. Does he regret missing Beijing?
“Why? Why? If I ran in Beijing, how could I break the world record?” he asks. “I broke the world record a month after Beijing.”
As he enters the final weeks of his preparation for New York, the man considered the world’s greatest distance runner maintains a positive mindset. Although the elite field is certainly to include some of the greatest marathoners on the planet, Gebrselassie is nonchalant about who is in the race.
“I have no idea right now,” he responds when asked about the competition he will face in New York. “Of course New York is not an easy marathon—it's a tough marathon—but I have to train well and then I will see who is ready to compete.”
One thing is certain. Haile Gebrselassie will be ready.
Freelance writer Paul Gains is a former 29:19 10K runner from Canada. His work has appeared in Time, the New York Times, Britain's Sunday Herald and many other periodicals around the world.
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