The Olympic marathoner who trained by carrying his wife on his back
One of the greatest had bizarre ways of building his strength
Of all the Olympic events, the marathon is the best metaphor for life: a test of physical and mental toughness that doesn’t end until you collapse at the finish line.
It’s also a race that, like life, you win in your own way.
Bikila, the great Ethiopian who was the first athlete to win back-to-back marathons, ran barefoot in Rome in 1960. Some of the men competing in Paris on August 10 will be wearing so-called super shoes like Nike’s bright orange-and-white Alphafly 3 model, which has built-in foam that makes for a trampoline-like ride along the 26.2 mile course.
But—for sheer color—no athelete tops Emil Zátopek. He perfected the Finnish training method known as Fartlek, or “speedplay,” which lets a runner vary the pace of his runs. Ed Caesar writes in Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon (Simon & Schuster, 2015):
“The great Czech champion Emil Zátopek took this idea to a new level, running a huge volume of high-intensity speedwork, sometimes in army boots and occasionally carrying his wife on his back to improve his strength—a method that failed to gain traction. Zátopek was not the prettiest athlete—he ran, in the words of one journalist, ‘like a man wrestling with an octopus on a conveyor belt’—but he was remarkably successful. At the 1952 Olympics he won three gold medals, in the 5,000m, 10,000m, and the marathon (in his first attempt at the distance).”