Emile Cairess interview: From working in Foot Locker to trying to break Africa’s marathon stranglehold

Of the top 40 men’s marathon runners on the planet, 39 were born and lived their early years in Africa.

The other hails from Bradford, lives in Leeds, and gave up his job in Foot Locker so he could go running with the Kenyans. That was in 2020.

Almost five years later, and fresh from producing Great Britain’s finest Olympic marathon performance in 40 years, Emile Cairess is lapping the track at Leeds Beckett University with a metronomic grace and fluency.

Thirty 400m circuits, each at 68 seconds, to run a continuous 12km in 34 minutes at a pace of just over 21kmph. It is roughly the speed he will need to hold on the streets of Valencia this coming weekend over a further 9km to beat Sir Mo Farah’s British half-marathon record of 59min 32sec. To put that into context, the treadmill at the running shop around the corner maxes out at 19kph and it is faster than most people could sprint for just 100 metres.

“A tough session,” Cairess later says, sipping a decaf cappuccino at his local coffee shop while explaining that an average week sees him run 215km. He expects that to increase over the next two years to 240km.

Cairess, who is 26, has only been specialising over the 26.2 mile marathon distance for 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 British sport’s last great unconquered frontiers might just be in sight.

No Briton has won the Olympic marathon title since it was one of the founding events at the 1896 Athens Games and the last medal was Charlie Spedding’s bronze in Los Angeles in 1984.

Phil Sesemann, a training partner and fellow Olympian, describes Cairess as “relentless – he makes me feel like a hobby jogger” adding that, “everything he does, every thought he has, every action he takes, is to be a better runner – there is nothing that Emile could do that would actually surprise me”.

Cairess’s girlfriend, Georgia Yearby, says that he is so laid back as to be “horizontal” before pinpointing a necessary blend of extreme dedication and a certain laziness in combining 32km of running most days with, well, lounging around in between.

“The discipline – and then not doing much – that suits me,” agrees Cairess. “I can do nothing. A lot of people say they want to be a full-time athlete and then struggle to fill the day.

“But the more you recover and rest, the better you can train. I just always kept at it. It’s definitely a long-term process.”

Cairess sometimes dreams about running and, since racing for lamp posts with mum Alison as an energetic four-year-old in Bradford, says that he has never once fallen out of love with the sport. “Some people want to pretend they are not obsessed – but it’s fine to love running and that be pretty much it in terms of your hobbies,” he says.

“Why do I love it? It’s hard to describe – quite an abstract feeling. I’m running sometimes through the woods, feeling great, and you just think: ‘This is ace’.”

Even in major races, Cairess generally runs with only a 1980s-style Casio watch on his wrist that has none of the heart-rate, pace, VO2max and stride-length data that has become the norm. “I go by intuition – I always know in my head the pace I’ve run – and I know how far all my running routes are,” he says.

Conversely, he does accept innovation in carbon-reinforced ‘super shoes’. Both his marathons this year were in the £450 Adidas Pro Evo 1s and, while he thinks that they are the best road-running shoe around, he also believes that the performance gains are sometimes misunderstood.

“They are fantastic, but you see some people saying it’s a different sport,” he says. “The shoes don’t run for you. I ran the British record for 10 miles for Under 23s in old shoes. Josh Kerr and Alex Yee were up there when they were younger and they are still the best ones in their event.

“My coach [Renato Canova] has had guys run 2hr 3min or 2hr 4min [over marathon distance] with the old shoes. If you gave them the new shoes, they wouldn’t be running 1hr 59min. Maybe it would have given them a minute. The more efficient you are anyway, there is less margin to add … but you do get compounding effects in training.”

By that, Cairess says that he can run around 35km at close to his full marathon pace in a training run and experience only limited fatigue the next day. He wonders, then, if the biggest super-shoe impact might be the volume of running that becomes feasible as athletes incrementally increase their training over the years.

A typical day now involves waking up inside the altitude tent in his bedroom at 8.30am followed by a 20km run at 10.30am before lunch and then a second session of around 12km at 5pm. On three days of the week, he will also go to the gym during the afternoon.

For the rest, it is a combination of eating, drinking and staying off his feet, with the help of YouTube, Netflix and video games. The fantasy game Baldur’s Gate and repeats of The Office are the current favourites. As for food, the vast physical output means that there is more freedom than you might expect.

“I just eat anything really,” says Cairess. “If you don’t eat enough, you are more susceptible to injuries and illness. I try to have a good diet, get all the nutrients, then I can have bad stuff on top.

“So I might have salmon, rice and broccoli for tea but then I can have three doughnuts for pudding. The other day, I had gnocchi for tea and I was still hungry, so I had a Domino’s [pizza] and tried out the new Korean barbecue one.”

His training programme is set on a weekly basis by Canova, the 79-year-old coach of more than 40 world and Olympic medallists, following a chance roadside meeting in Kenya in January 2022.

Cairess, with help from British coach Alan Storey, had been largely figuring out his own training and had made significant progress by following whatever he could find online about Canova. When Cairess then saw the Italian with a group of runners near Iten, he approached him and began asking questions. Canova was so struck by this enthusiastic but unknown English runner that he promptly offered to formalise the arrangement. “It was the first time I’d been coach of somebody without knowing,” he says, laughing.

Beating Farah’s half-marathon British record would be a nice bonus this coming Sunday but the overarching aim is another marathon next spring. While London’s elite fields will be finalised nearer the time, Cairess is acutely aware both that Farah’s British marathon record of 2:05:11 is in range and that the last home winner of the race was Eamonn Martin back in 1993. Martin is now 66.

Cairess will more than double his usual time in Kenya before next spring, with training camps planned for next month and March.

“They have hundreds of athletes, just fully dedicated in the way that barely anyone is in the UK,” he says. “If there are 500 people with no plan B, you are obviously going to get some who really make it. Others will never race outside of Kenya. They can train for 15 years and not see anything. There’s no glamour.

“I think a lot of Europeans look at 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’.

“A lot of them don’t do it because they love running, they do it because it’s the easiest way to earn a living and change their family circumstances. They have to become successful because it’s their only way out of poverty. In England, you can earn good A-Levels, go to uni and earn a better living. You should feel blessed, but you also have to have a similar existence to perform well.”

Following A-Levels in maths, biology and physics, Cairess chose to study sports science at St Mary’s University because of their endurance-running hub, that was also once Farah’s base, before working in Foot Locker and finding sponsorship with Adidas to help pursue his passion. And, while recognition, records and medals have increasingly followed, the root motivation remains simple. “I could have done finance at uni, got a nice job in London,” he says. “Running is not like football where you can be fourth tier and still make millions, but marathon is alright. It’s comfortable.

“I just enjoy seeing how good I can be. I don’t need anything else. I’ll do it maybe eight to 10 years [professionally] but I’d still carry on running whatever.

“I feel I’ll be in my prime at around 30 [at the time of the LA Olympics in 2028] so I have wanted to learn the marathon before I’m really ready physically. I don’t do it for particular achievements. I’m doing it to see what I can do. That’s the fun in it.”