This is Emil Zatopek, and he’s not just one of the greatest runners in history, he’s one of the best human beings to ever live.
Never heard of him?
You, my friend, are in for a treat.
That’s him, naturally, in first.
Emil was born on September nineteenth, 1922-coincidentally, the same date as his future wife. She must have loved that-as someone who just got married, I know women are all about that destiny and fate stuff.
Zatopek was the seventh child in a poor Czechoslovakian family and, as you might have guessed, life was not easy growing up. Later, Australian coach Percy Cerutty said ‘He earned, and won for himself, every inch of a very hard road.’
If he says that, it’s 100% true.
Percy Cerutty, also an old-time hard-as-nails crazy bad-ass motherf*cker.
At sixteen years old, Emil was working in a shoe factory, when the factory sports coach (I guess that was a thing?) had them all run a race.
He came second out of a hundred runners, and thus, his story began.
He approached training in a very logical way. Other runners of his day ran slowly for long distances. He thought to himself:
“I already know how to run slowly. I need to learn how to run fast”.
He developed a rigorous system of fast repetitions with short, ruthlessly limited recovery jogs. He started with running around a 400m track 10 times, quickly, with short jogs in between each effort.
He was not the originator of interval training, but he was the foremost promoter of it, and his workouts are the stuff of legend.
- Tempo runs are great, but they are done much slower than 5k race pace-usually about half marathon pace.
- Intervals, on the other hand, can be done faster than race pace, at race pace, or slower than race pace. They offer far more flexibility. You can alter the pace and recoveries as much as you want. They’re specific.
By the mid-1950s he was doing up to 100 fast 400m laps a day, with 150m jogs in between.
To save you the counting, that’s 55km, or 34 miles!
His usual workout was 40x400m, but still…that’s 10 miles worth of intervals. It’s no wonder that he dominated.
When Zátopek first developed his regime of high-volume interval training, his fellow athletes were appalled. It was so…so different from everything everyone else was doing.
‘Everyone said, “Emil, you are a fool!”’ he remembered. ‘But when I first won the European Championship, they said: “Emil, you are a genius!”’
And they were right. That’s true genius-going against the grain, going against common knowledge, going against what everyone in your entire field believes is right. Following your gut. Going the road less traveled.
The best part of this picture is the expression on the face of the guy above him.
If someone looks at you when you are running, you’re doing something!
‘Before Zátopek,’ wrote Fred Wilt, the US 10,000m runner and training guru, ‘nobody had realized it was humanly possible to train this hard.’
He was actually not particularly talented. More than average, sure…but certainly not the most talented in the major races.
He outworked people. He outlasted people. He out-willed people.
“He studied chemistry as a young man, and from the moment he took up serious running he explored hitherto untried ways of improving his performance. Early experiments included holding his breath until he passed out; eating young birch leaves (in imitation of fast-running deer, he explained); eating vast quantities of dandelions and garlic; and drinking a mixture of lemon juice and lane-marking chalk to keep up his vitamin C and calcium levels.”
While not all of his…erm…experiments succeeded, he did.
Just four years later, at 20 years old, he broke the national records at 2,000, 3,000 and 5,000 meters.
A little thing called World War Two got in the way, but he managed to win the 10,000m at the London Olympics in 1948, and came second in the 5,000m.
For most runners, an Olympic gold medal is the crowning achievement of a career.
But Emil was just getting started.
The following year Zátopek broke the 10,000m world record. Twice. Not satisfied, he went on to better his own record three times over the next four seasons. He also set world records in the 5,000 m, 20,000 m (twice), one-hour run (twice), 25,000 m (twice), and 30,000m (just once, slacker!).
Throughout this, his brutal interval workouts continued. It was almost all intervals, all the time. His willpower was legendary. He made his workouts harder on purpose, even carrying his wife on his shoulders when running sometimes, or wearing heavy shoes.
‘When a person trains once, nothing happens. When a person forces himself to do a thing a hundred or a thousand times, then he certainly develops in ways more than physical. Is it raining? That doesn’t matter. Am I tired? That doesn’t matter either. Willpower becomes no longer a problem.’
When asked about his tortured facial expressions, Zátopek is said to have replied that "It isn't gymnastics or figure skating, you know."
As a soldier, he used to jog on the spot on sentry duty. Yes, his day job was serving in the army, and it wasn’t a token position. He often trained at night after getting off from work, climbing the walls of the track to get in because it was locked (what’s your excuse, eh?).
Forced to remain indoors to do the laundry, he filled the bath with washing and jogged in it, barefoot, for two hours.
Discovering an extremely effective workout method, many would hide their secret from others.
Not Emil. He shared with others runners. He gave. He helped.
The size of his will was only eclipsed by the size of his heart.
Even his rivals loved him for his wit, humor, compassion and positivity.
In the 1952 Olympics, he was lagging behind early in the race.
Even during the last lap, he was fourth, and looked sorely beaten, his arms flapping around like a chicken with it’s head cut off.
But as the last half lap of the race approaches, you can see his will gather like a tsunami, gradually at first but quickly unstoppable.
In a burst of rage, nearly frothing at the mouth, round the last bend he burst forth, convulsing down the final straightaway to clear victory.
He had broken them.
The thing is, he wasn’t the fastest guy.
He had the slowest 1500m of the top competitors.
He had the slowest 800m.
He had the slowest sprint speed.
But he was the grittiest man to ever walk the face of this great green earth.
And on that day, it was enough. It was a world record.
A few minutes after he won the 5,000m, he was gifted with another gold, but this one wasn’t won by him.
It was won by his wife, Dana Zátopková. She was a javelin thrower, and threw 50m to win the gold medal.
Born together, gold together, old together.
Emil won the 10,000m as well. Another world record.
Three golds for the Zatopek family.
It wasn’t enough for Emil.
Fulfilling a quote of his, ‘One’s willpower increases with each task fulfilled.’, he decided to enter the marathon, an event he had never run.
Seeing as he had never ran a marathon before, his strategy was simple, and smart: he raced alongside Jim Peters, the British world-record holder at the time, and paced off of him. After a fast first fifteen kilometers, Zátopek asked the Englishman what he thought of the race thus far.
Truth be told, Peters was hurting, but he bluffed and told the Czech that the pace was "too slow," in an attempt to slip up Zátopek.
Being a marathon novice, Zátopek took him at face value, and simply accelerated.
Peters did not finish.
Zátopek won the race by two full minutes and set an Olympic record.
Four years later in 1956, Zátopek attempted to defend his marathon gold medal. However, he suffered a groin injury while training and was hospitalized for six weeks. He had a hernia. He resumed training the day after leaving hospital, but never quite regained his form.
He still finished sixth.
Who won?
None other than Alain Mimoun, who had finished second to Zatopek in that 1952 5000m.
“Victory is great, but friendship is greater”
Emil set eighteen world records, but he never got big-headed or egotistical.
This is Ron Clarke. He set almost as many world records-seventeen, in fact-about a decade after Zatopek retired. But, he never won an Olympic medal. In 1964 he was upset by Billy Mills, and in 1968 the Olympics were at altitude in Mexico City.
To this day, he doesn’t remember the last lap of that race. Some suspect that heart was permanently damaged.
Zatopek invited Ron to Czechoslovakia, and as a parting gift he gave him his 1952 Olympic 10,000 m gold medal with the following words:
"Not out of friendship, but because you deserve it."
After all those gold medals, he was naturally a hero in his native country, and quite influential. He was an influential figure in the communist party. However, he supported the democratic wing, despite knowing full well what would happen to him.
He stood up for what he believed in, and after the 1968 protests known as the “Prague Spring” he was stripped of his rank and expelled from the army and the party.
He was removed from all important positions and forced to work in a string of menial manual labor positions. He was not allowed to see his friends or his wife for long periods of time.
He ran through a hernia, through the soviet winter in his army boots, in a bucket of laundry, and past the competition to multiple gold medals.
That finally broke him.
The pain of a run made his heart stronger, but the pain of losing his soulmate broke it.
Eventually, the ruling party deemed him not to be a threat, and let him return to his life and to his love.
In February 2013, the editors at Runner’s World magazine selected him as the Greatest Runner of All Time.
But, he was so much more than a runner.
He loved, he gave, he inspired and his legend lives on in the hearts and minds of millions of people around the world.
And it will continue to do so, as long as his story still gets told.
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