On the running track, there is no challenge too great. But it seems that even for Mo Farah, domestic life can sometimes leave him defeated
Double Olympic gold medal winner Mo Farah’s wife Tania has given a revealing interview to The Sunday Telegraph in which she speaks of the challenges of bringing up young twins and an older daughter, when their father is away for up to half a year.
She also told how much he misses the children when he is away training and competing and how manages to keep in touch by Skype, often overcoming 11-hour time differences to stay in regular contact. Even when he is at home, Tania said the he is often so exhausted he can, on occasion, find himself overwhelmed by the demands of childcare.
She recounted one incident when she was unwell and had to leave Mo, 30, in sole charge of their twin daughters, Aisha and Amani, now 13 months, and Rhianna, eight.
“He had to hold the fort in the house with all three kids, and the twins were much younger then as well,” she said. “He had to feed them, change them and bathe them and get Rhianna ready for bed while helping her with her homework. He failed miserably. They all fell asleep on the sofa, all of them including the babies. I woke up a couple of hours later to find they were fast asleep and that no one had been fed or changed and Rhianna’s homework wasn’t done.”
The family have been based in Portland, Oregon, since 2011, when they moved to the United States to allow Mo to train under American coach Alberto Salazar. But Tania, 27, calculates that he is away for between five and six months of the year, including absences of up to eight weeks at his high-altitude training camp in Kenya, where communication is often fraught with difficulty
The long separations have inevitably placed a burden on Tania, who admits that life can be tough looking after three young children on her own for much of the year. Her only help is a part-time nanny who comes in three mornings a week to get Rhianna ready for school while Tania deals with the twins.
“It’s hard but it’s something that we’ve had to cope with since we first got together really,” she said. “Mo was going away a lot from day one, so I had to get used to that pretty quickly.
“It’s hard because I have to juggle everything on my own, not just the kids but paying the bills and the general day-to-day stuff that people do. I have to do all of that, so Mo doesn’t have to worry about it.
“There’s also the fact that we miss him. We don’t get to see that much of him, so when we do see him we appreciate that time so much more.”
She added: “It’s particularly hard when he’s in Kenya because there’s an 11-hour time difference,” said Tania. “Our morning is night in Kenya so we find ourselves talking just before he goes to bed or just before I go to bed.
I’ll be getting ready for breakfast and he’s just getting ready for bed so it’s quite weird having those conversations.”
On the rare occasion that Mo is able to find a reliable internet connection in Kenya, the couple will turn on their webcams and communicate by video on Skype, with Tania holding the twins in front of her computer to let Mo see them.
“He’ll be trying to get their attention,” she said. “You’ll see them looking at the screen. They seem to recognise him or they recognise his voice at least, but then they’ll look confused because they don’t know what’s going on.”
When Mo — who has just released a new autobiography, Twin Ambitions — is at home, Tania says he throws himself into playing with the children, despite his exhaustion from training.
“He’ll be out for a long run in the morning, then he’ll come home for perhaps an hour or so for a snack, and then he’ll go to the gym for a few hours to do his weights.
“Then he’ll come back home again and have another hour break before he has another run, either on the treadmill at home or outdoors.
“He’s gone most of the day and when he is at home he’s not doing a lot and he’ll maybe try and get a nap in.”
The twins were born a month after Mo’s double triumph at the London Olympics, which he celebrated by having his two gold medals inscribed with his daughters’ names.
Having been separated from his own identical twin, Hassan, for 12 years after leaving his native Somalia at the age of eight, Mo — and his wife — are determined that their daughters are not parted, despite the pressures on family life caused by his career.
“I’ve always said from the moment they were born, ‘I don’t what them to be apart, ever’,” said Tania. “Even if it’s just a trip to the shops, I want the twins always to be together. They belong together. Wherever one is, the other one is there, too.”
When they are old enough, Tania hopes their father will teach them Somali. “I certainly would like them to learn Somali as a second language because it’s their father’s language, but it’s difficult with Mo not being around all the time,” she said.
Despite the pressures of home life, Tania is convinced that settling down with a family has been the making of Mo as an athlete. His run of gold medal-winning success began just a few months after the couple were married in 2010.
“A lot of people have said that if you’re happy in your mind, it doesn’t just have to be all about the training on the track. Mo says there was always something missing in his life before. He didn’t have the family. He didn’t have a woman that he would come home to and cook for him. He now has that.
“When we first got together he was living in student-like digs in Twickenham with six other athletes. He was earning okay then and could have afforded his own place and lived fairly comfortably, but he didn’t feel the need to. He said he didn’t have a family or wife to support and, psychologically, I think that was having an effect on his running.
“Once we got together and things started to escalate and it looked like things were moving towards marriage, something must have clicked in his mind. It was a subconscious thing. I think he just felt a lot happier, and that translated to the track.”
The couple have known each other since childhood and were close friends before romance blossomed. Although she insists he is unaffected by his fame and success and remains “very, very humble”, what has definitely changed is his self-discipline and professionalism. “He’s so much more responsible than he used to be,” she said. “He never used to be as disciplined as he is now, and that goes way back to when we were in school and he used to mess around a lot.
“Even when we got together he didn’t seem to be as knee-deep and as engrossed in his training as he is now. He’s now got a routine that he never sways from and he’ll never let anything get in the way of this training.
“That’s why he knows he has to go away to training camps and has to get a solid block of two months’ non-stop training in. He would never let us get in the way of that, and we wouldn’t want to get in the way of that.”
Source The Sunday Telegraph