Fortune favours the bold or so it goes.
The best training group in the world. The home of Eliud Kipchoge, three more world champions and under the guidance of one of the planet’s most-renowned coaches, Patrick Sang.
Your home for almost four years and a base that has taken you from a 2.10 marathoner to the Dutch record holder, a genuine contender for global medals. In 2020 you choose to leave.
That is the path Abdi Nageeye has taken. Coached by Gary Lough between 2020 and August 2023, he has spent the last three years in Iten, training alone or with a few selected helpers.
We meet in Eldoret, an hour or so drive from his accommodation a few hundred metres higher on the escarpment. Two hours of interviews, it is a rare deviance in an otherwise rigid schedule.
With the days till the Budapest World Championships ticking down, the training block has consumed him and he’s spent the past few days worrying about how he’ll fit in his daily 90-minute nap.
A business of his, a restaurant nearby has been asking for a meeting for a month. They will have to wait another day. For Nageeye, now is the time to leave no stones unturned:
“I want to be at the start line and say I did everything I was able to do. I didn’t skip one training because of laziness. I didn’t skip one training because of friends, because of party or whatever. I didn’t skip one training because of a football match or Diamond League which was late. I slept good every day.
Everything was ok. My food, my supplements, my recovery. I want to say ok, how was my preparation, 100%? Yes 100%.”
It’s an easy thing to say but you get the sense that that neuroticism is genuine. In stepping away from an established support network of coaches, physios and cooks that he enjoyed for all those years in Kaptagat, Nageeye chose to abandon a set up that was 99% there in pursuit of his own perfection.
Born in Somalia, brought up in the Netherlands, he has spent a career training all over the world. From Flagstaff to Font-Romeu to Ethiopia and now Kenya. He knows what it takes to compete at the global level and it leaves him little choice.
“You are not running with amateurs. You are running with other guys who are somewhere in the mountains in Addis Ababa, somewhere in the mountains in Kaptagat, Kenya or in America.”
When tired and lazy in his own words he thinks of them:
“You know how Eliud was living? Discipline. If you keep discipline every where you go, it’s ok. The only thing is to be aware hey you are all alone, nobody is here. I’m the one who has to wake up. Nobody will see me. There’s no GPS following me. I do my training and people will count on me when I’m on the startline.”
To say Nageeye trains alone is to bend the truth. He knows to fight at the top level you need that competitive edge and in his own words he admits he needs to know just how crazy people are. Yet he is selective with when he chooses to, being guided by heart rate to avoid over-exerting himself on easier days.
When training alone he has novel methods of keeping himself on his toes. On lonely track days, Nageeye often has one friend on a bike.
The demands are simple:
“Lets say we’re doing four laps at 70 seconds, don’t wait for me if you drop me. Even the recovery don’t wait for me. That’s what the coach said and that’s what we are going to run.”
As the bike pulls away, the Dutchman remembers those group days. He remembers how he would haul himself back over the final 200m, closing his eyes and shrinking the gap. Once more he does the same.
While alone on the track, that sole bike acts as a Kaptagat ghost.
To some Nageeye’s pursuit may seem a strange choice – total lonely, though purposeful focus.
In a way it’s an attitude that has characterized his career, doing things in a different way. When others retired, he could think of nothing worse. When they took jobs outside competing, bought apartments, while he relatively struggled, their attitude perplexed him:
“I was like nobody would disturb my career, that was what I was thinking but in a relaxed way. I would come and I would see they have a car and they were laughing at me. People tell me you are 24, 25, stop have a job, be normal and I thought no this is fun, I’m on holiday actually.
I’m going to Ethiopia, I’m going to Flagstaff or Iten, Why should I? You live once! Why shall I focus now to buy expensive apartment or to rent or to have job, no way. I thought in a simple way and now they are asking me to borrow money.”
Success or at least the sort that turns subsistence into something bigger, came late for the Dutchman. An eighth place finish in Amsterdam in 2015, he was 28 when he broke the Dutch record two years later at the same course, finishing ninth in 2:08:16.
30 as he touched the realms of the planet’s finest, a 2:06:17 performance in Rotterdam. Olympic silver arrived at 32.
Whilst his Rotterdam win in April of 2022 took no-one by surprise it represented the first marathon triumph of his career, a little over a month after he celebrated his 33rd birthday.
And it’s a success he never banked on achieving. Remembering his first days in East Africa the present reality seemed so far from his mind:
“For a long time I thought there is no way I can beat the Ethiopians and Kenyans, there is no way. You see the gun going and you see the Kenyans like phew (gesturing in the distance).
I was busy thinking this is not the end. I want to be there but how can you run that fast? So it is funny that today they see me in Iten they are like “Oh Abdi! Can I train with you? And I’m like wow.”
For Nageeye, Mo Farah was the man who changed that, who made him believe that he could compete against anyone.
So it is fitting that all those years later they shared the same coach in Lough, albeit a few thousand miles apart.
All by himself, Nageeye has chosen his path, one few others could follow but one that may yet bring World Championship glory.
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All images and feature image courtesy of the NN Running Team.
