“Today, we die a little.”
These famous words were spoken by legendary runner, Emil Zatopek on the starting line of the Olympic marathon in Melbourne in 1956. The temperature was somewhere around 90 degrees Fahrenheit and he was well aware that the next 2 hours and something minutes would be filled with nothing short of extreme physical agony.
I recently finished reading Zatopek’s inspiring biography written by Richard Askwith, where I learned of some of the most inspiring stories of one of the greatest runners of all time. Emil Zatopek did not just revolutionize the sport of distance running, he reinvented it. He rewrote the record books and redrew the boundaries of endurance, redefining the idea of what was humanly possible. At the 1952 Helsinki Olympics he won the triple crown, winning gold medals in the 5k, 10k, and the marathon, a feat that to this day has never been achieved again. In his athletic career, he won five Olympic medals, set 18 world records, and went undefeated in the 10k for six years. While all of these athletic accomplishments are remarkable, they are not the main reason why he has become my new favorite runner. It was his infectiously cheerful and generous personality that ultimately won me over. I believe it is not what he did that made him a true hero, it is how he did it.
Zatopek grew up as a poor carpenter’s son in Moravia, who built himself up through sheer hard work and determination to be one of the most incredible athletes the world has ever seen. Emil’s training principles were revolutionary in the sense that it took over a decade before sports scientists were able to define the physiological principles underlying his approach to interval training. The most important part of Emil’s formula was the effort he put in. Anyone can do interval sessions; the difficult thing is doing them as Emil did them. He is known to have done 80-100 fast 400 meter laps a day! He would run in heavy boots through thick snow, he would hold his breath until he passed out, and he would run in a bath full of laundry for two hours. Zatopek trained himself to be tough in mind as well as body. He said,
“When a person trains once, nothing happens. When a person forces himself to do a thing a hundred or a thousand times, he develops in ways more than physical. Willpower is no longer a problem.”
He would run each lap to the genuine limit of his endurance, without surrendering to the instinct (that we always want to cling to) to keep a little left in reserve. He believed that training was a science, but he brought to it an intense subjectivity- focusing not on the stopwatch, but on what it felt like at the limits of endurance, and learning how to manipulate those limits. Simply said, “When you can’t keep going, go faster.”
It is impossible to capture all of Zatopek’s greatness in such a short blog post. I haven’t even begin to touch upon the subject of Emil as a political figure who took a stand against the Soviet tanks that invaded his native Czechoslovakia in 1968. His bravery led to him spending his later years in isolation as an itinerant laborer, far from his home and his beloved wife. While the aftermath of his courageous stand in 1968 led to some of his loneliest years, Zatopek was not a man who could easily be broken.
The thing that excited people most about Zatopek was his humanity. People spoke of his warmth, his sportsmanship, and his spontaneous generosity. He shared his training secrets with anyone who asked- and in mid-race would offer words of encouragement to rivals, or take the lead when it was not in his best interest to do so, simply out of sportsmanship. His most famous act of generosity was in 1966 when he gave one of his gold medals to Australian distance runner, Ron Clarke- the greatest distance runner to never win a gold of his own.
Zatopek will always be remembered as a true hero. His fellow Olympians worshipped him, ordinary people were inspired by him, and the world became a better place because of him. In 1952 as Zatopek approached the Olympic arena in Helsinki, nearly 70,000 people roared in unison: ‘Za-to-pek! Za-to-pek! Za-to-pek!’ He was about to make history by winning his third gold medal of the games, in addition to winning the first marathon he had ever run. This became a true Olympic moment; a moment where people from so many different nations came together to cheer on one man in a joyous celebration of sporting achievement.
The great Australian, Ron Clarke, said it best,
“There is not, and never was, a greater man than Emil Zatopek.”
