For Mo Farah, winning is once again becoming a habit he just can’t seem to kick. At this stage of his career, you almost start to wonder what’s left out there for the 31-year-old Briton. What unfulfilled goals could be great enough to get him out of bed each morning and commit to a workload so arduous that only those with an insatiable hunger or questionable sanity—or both—could endure?

As it turns out, Farah’s sights are already well trained on a succession of targets, each of them big enough and appetizing enough to make the chase worthwhile, to make him care. Despite all the gold medals in the last four years, all the fame, all the wealth, Farah is still hungry.

As he sits in the bowels of Birmingham’s Alexander Stadium, wearing a polo shirt and thick-framed glasses, Farah is his typically relaxed self as he tries to explain to yet another press inquisitor just how he keeps that fire lit, when it must be the easiest thing in the world to allow it to slowly fade away. “It’s harder to stay at the top than to get there,” he says. “Sometimes you need to have one bad race to show you can be beaten. That was a big motivator for me.”

The race he is referring to, of course, was April’s London Marathon, where Farah finished a disappointing eighth in his debut in 2:08:21. He’d won it all on the track in the previous few years, bagged double Olympic gold (5,000m and10,000m) in London in 2012 and done the same at the world championships last year in Moscow. But the marathon experiment? Farah considers that it ended in failure. Even still, he has no regrets.

“I’m definitely happy with my decision,” he says. “It was the year to try the marathon. At least now I know what it takes and how it feels.” The race proved a humbling experience for Farah—getting soundly beaten on the streets of London in front of his home crowd, who weren’t used to seeing him lose.

He’ll be in no rush to tackle the 26.2-mile distance any time soon. “The thing is: I trained hard for the marathon; I really did everything in my ability and it wasn’t enough,” he says. “You need to have more experience and your body has to have done at least one or two marathons before you can run faster. I don’t know how some people can just go into it and run fast; maybe I’m just not a marathoner, but more of a track runner. After Rio [2016], I’d maybe try it again.”

That race in London took its toll, physically and mentally. In the months that followed, Farah struggled to work his way back into full training to prepare for a track season that began to look like a lost cause. “Coming off the marathon wasn’t as easy as I thought it’d be,” he says. “I wanted to compete in June, but I struggled with illness.

“Training was pretty cut back. I was just running once a day. Some days I’d have to rest and run again the next day. It took me much longer to recover. I’ve been back to full training for the last three weeks, though; back to where I was in the past. I’m doing over 100 miles a week, with three key sessions.”

With his health restored, Farah went to Zurich last week for the European Championships and successfully defended his 5,000m and 10,000m titles, taking facile wins by employing his trademark catch-me-if-you-can tactics from the front on the final lap. The wins meant a lot more to him than most assumed, given where he’d come from just weeks earlier.

“Only a couple of weeks ago, when I had to pull out of the Commonwealth Games, I was starting to wonder if I might not even be there for Europeans,” he says. “I was definitely not ready and wondering if my whole season was done. That’s why I celebrated so much; when you go through a lot you just can’t help it. When things are going wrong you learn a lot about your body. I’ve learned to have patience and believe in yourself.”

On Sunday, Farah was back to his winning ways. He dispatched a relatively weak field with ease at the Birmingham Diamond League, winning the 2-mile race in 8:07.85 and smashing Steve Ovett’s British record. Farah covered his second mile in 4 minutes.

His track season completed, Farah will now take to the roads for the Great North Run in Newcastle on September 7, the half-marathon in which Farah was outkicked and ultimately outsmarted by Kenenisa Bekele last year. When he lines up for the race in a fortnight, times will mean nothing to him. “The goal is always just to try win,” he says.

It’s how it’s been these last few years for Farah—his focus aimed at gold medals instead of fast times. The question, though, is whether Farah intends for that to change, whether he plans to truly commit to chasing fast times on the circuit and possibly even challenge Kenenisa Bekele’s 5,000m and 10,000m world records?

“Yeah, definitely,” he says. “It is a big goal of mine at some point next year or after that. I haven’t run a personal best in the 5K for three years. When you train for a championship, it’s harder to be able to go for fast times, so it has to be either the beginning of the season or the end. I’ll have a chat with coach [Alberto Salazar].”

After the Great North Run, Farah will take a break; two weeks or so, he reckons, though that’s open to revision. “Alberto’s always changing his mind,” Farah says. “It might be 10 days or a week. Last year I got two weeks.”

After his break, Farah will return to Portland, Oregon. A new addition to the training group this fall is world junior 3,000m champion Mary Cain, who has been coached by Salazar for a number of years but will now train on-site with the group after enrolling at the University of Portland. Farah naturally knows all about Cain and is confident she will progress well to the senior ranks, though cautions that it will be a long-term project.

“She’s a fighter,” he says. “She’s still young and learning a lot. To become a world junior champion, you must have talent and ability. I never won world juniors. I finished 10th.”

And as an athlete who transitioned so successfully from relatively unsuccessful junior to a world-beating senior, Farah has some advice for Cain. “I would say to her: Enjoy it while you’re young,” he says. “When you’re a kid and you get pushed into it, you don’t see life. For me, I went to University, did what I needed to do at that age and had fun, and then I was ready to commit. That’s why I’m good at what I do, because in your mind, you commit; you go for it.”

It may have taken several years, but Farah certainly got there in the end. The question now is how much longer he can stay at the top. After all, he’s done it all on the track, highlighted by that glorious double gold on home turf at London 2012. It’s the memory of those races—that high, that addictive rush of taking on and beating the world—that keeps him going. “I want to go out there and continue to make history for my country again,” he says.

Race after race, win after win. It’ll continue like this, he hopes, all the way to Rio 2016 and beyond.

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