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Among the 40 best male marathon runners on the planet, 39 were born and spent their early years in Africa.
The other is from Bradford, lives in Leeds and gave up his job at Foot Locker so he could run with the Kenyans. It was in 2020.
Nearly five years later, and fresh off Britain’s best Olympic marathon performance in 40 years, Emile Cairess runs the track at Leeds Beckett University with metronomic grace and ease.
Thirty 400m circuits, each lasting 68 seconds, to cover 12km continuously in 34 minutes at a pace of just over 21km/h. That’s about the speed he’ll need to maintain on the streets of Valencia this coming weekend for another 9km to beat Sir Mo Farah’s British half marathon record of 59 minutes 32 seconds. To put this into context, the treadmill at the local running store reaches a top speed of 12 mph and is faster than most people could sprint just 100 meters.
“A tough session,” Cairess later says, sipping a decaffeinated cappuccino at his local cafe while explaining that an average week sees him running 215km. He expects this figure to increase over the next two years to 240 km.
Cairess, 26, has only specialized in the 26.2-mile marathon distance over the past 20 months, during which sixth and third places in London, followed by a fabulous fourth at the Olympics, have suggested that one of the last great unconquered frontiers of British sport could be just in sight.
No Briton has won the Olympic marathon title since it was one of the founding events of the Athens Games in 1896 and the last medal was Charlie Spedding’s bronze in Los Angeles in 1984.
Training partner and fellow Olympian Phil Sesemann describes Cairess as “relentless – he makes me feel like an amateur jogger,” adding that “everything he does, every thought he has, every action what he does is to be a better runner – there is nothing that Emile could do that would really surprise me.”
Cairess’s girlfriend, Georgia Yearby, says he is so laid back he is “horizontal” before identifying a necessary mix of extreme dedication and a certain laziness in combining 20 miles of running most days with , well, lounging in between.
“Discipline – and then not doing much – works for me,” admits Cairess. “I can’t do anything. Many people say they want to be a full-time athlete and then struggle to fill their day.
“But the more you recover and rest, the better you can train. I always continued like that. It’s definitely a long-term process.
Cairess sometimes dreams of running and, since running for the lampposts with his mother Alison as an energetic four-year-old in Bradford, he says he has never fallen in love with the sport. “Some people want to pretend they’re not obsessed – but it’s okay to love running and that’s about it in terms of a hobby,” he says.
“Why do I like it? It’s hard to describe – it’s quite an abstract feeling. Sometimes I run through the woods and I feel good and we’re like, “That’s an asset.”
Even in major races, Cairess typically runs with only a 1980s-style Casio watch on his wrist that contains none of the heart rate, pace, VO2max and stride length data that has become the norm. “I trust my intuition – I always know in my head the pace I ran at – and I know the distance of all my running routes,” he says.
Conversely, he accepts innovation in the field of carbon-reinforced “super shoes”. His two marathons this year have taken place in the £450 Adidas Pro Evo 1 and, while he thinks they are the best road running shoes on the market, he also thinks the performance gains are sometimes misunderstood.
“They’re fantastic, but some people say it’s a different sport,” he says. “Shoes aren’t working for you. I ran the British 10 mile record for under 23s in old shoes. Josh Kerr and Alex Yee were up there when they were younger and they are still the best in their event.
“My coach [Renato Canova] made guys run 2h3min or 2h4min [over marathon distance] with the old shoes. If you gave them new shoes, they wouldn’t run 1:59. Maybe that would have given them a minute. Either way, the more efficient you are, there’s less margin to add…but you get cumulative effects in training.
Cairess says he can run about 35 km at near marathon pace during a training run and experience only limited fatigue the next day. He then wonders whether the biggest impact of supershoes might be the running volume that becomes achievable as athletes gradually increase their training over the years.
A typical day now consists of waking up in the altitude tent in your room at 8:30 a.m. followed by a 20 km run at 10:30 a.m. before lunch and then a second session of around 12 km at 5 p.m. Three days a week he will also go to the gym in the afternoon.
The rest is a combination of eating, drinking and staying up, with help from YouTube, Netflix and video games. The fantasy game Baldur’s Gate and repetitions of The office are current favorites. As for food, the enormous physical production means that there is more freedom than one might expect.
“I actually eat anything,” Cairess says. “If you don’t eat enough, you’re more susceptible to injury and illness. I try to have a good diet, get all the nutrients, and then I can have bad things on top of that.
“So I can have salmon, rice and broccoli for tea, but then I can have three donuts for pudding. The other day I had gnocchi for tea and was still hungry, so I had a Domino’s [pizza] and tried the new Korean BBQ.
His training schedule is set each week by Canova, the 79-year-old coach of more than 40 world and Olympic medalists, following a chance meeting on the road in Kenya in January 2022.
Cairess, with the help of British coach Alan Storey, had thought extensively about his own training and had made significant progress by following everything he could find online on Canova. When Cairess then saw the Italian with a group of runners near Iten, he approached him and started asking him questions. Canova was so struck by this enthusiastic but unknown English rider that he immediately proposed making the arrangement official. “It was the first time I trained someone without knowing it,” he says with a laugh.
Breaking Farah’s British half marathon record would be a nice bonus next Sunday, but the overarching goal is another marathon next spring. While London’s elite pelotons will be finalized later, Cairess is keenly aware that Farah’s British marathon record of 2:05:11 is within reach and that the last local winner of the race was Eamonn Martin in 1993. Martin is now 66 years old. .
Cairess will more than double her usual stay in Kenya ahead of next spring, with training camps planned for next month and in March.
“They have hundreds of athletes, completely dedicated, like almost no one in the UK,” he says. “If there are 500 people without a plan B, obviously there will be a few who are really successful. Others will never race outside Kenya. They can train for 15 years and see nothing. There is no glamour.
“I think a lot of Europeans see East Africans as impossible to beat. When you train with them, you don’t feel the same intimidation. You go there, they train hard and you think, “I can do this.”
“Many of them don’t do it because they love running, but because it’s the easiest way to make a living and change their family situation. They must succeed because it is their only way out of poverty. In England you can get good A-Levels, go to university and earn a better living. You should feel blessed, but you also need to have a similar existence to perform well.
After gaining an A-Level in Mathematics, Biology and Physics, Cairess chose to study Sports Science at St Mary’s University due to their endurance running centre, which was also once Farah’s base, before working at Foot Locker and finding a sponsorship with Adidas to help him continue his education. passion. And even if recognition, records and medals come one after the other more and more, the fundamental motivation remains simple. “I could have studied finance at university and found a good job in London,” he says. “Running isn’t like football where you can be fourth and still make millions, but marathoning is good. It’s comfortable.
“I just like to see how good I can be. I don’t need anything else. I’ll do it maybe eight to ten years [professionally] but I would still continue to run anything.
“I feel like I’ll be in my prime around 30 [at the time of the LA Olympics in 2028] so I wanted to learn the marathon before I was really physically ready. I don’t do it for any particular achievements. I’m doing it to see what I can do. That’s what’s fun.
