Going the extra mile for a marathon place
London-based New Zealand runner Malcolm Hicks takes the longdistance commute to new levels, writes Marc Hinton.
Malcolm Hicks has an engineer’s brain, a distance runner’s doggedness and an Olympian’s ambition — which have all come in handy on the long road to Tokyo.
The 32-year-old London-based Kiwi is literally and figuratively going the extra kilometre as he zeroes in on a place in the Tokyo Olympics marathon. While balancing a fulltime job for a multinational engineering firm in one of the world’s busiest cities with the requirements of being among the leading distance runners on the planet, he has learned that compromise, commitment and organisation have become the pillars of his life.
Hicks is not your run-of-themill Olympic marathon runner. For starters he’s well over 6ft tall (1.85m), and stands out like the proverbial sore thumb among the compact frames of the modern endurance athlete. He’s also racing ahead in his engineering career, while running 2hr 10min marathons, which puts him in a pretty exclusive group of achievers in his gruelling sport.
Given he runs around 200km a week – while taking the longdistance commute to new dimensions – and must tend to his body appropriately to allow him to do that, it’s a remarkable feat of time and energy engineering to pull off what he does. But, as he says from London, it’s a juxtaposition of career and sporting pursuits he would not have any other way.
Hicks looks odds-on to line up in the marathon on the final day of the Tokyo Olympics on August 9 (being held 800km north in the less sweltering city of Sapporo), subject to final selection approval and his qualifying time not being overtaken by a late contender or two.
Last month, Hicks slashed his personal best for the marathon by nearly 4 minutes in running 2:10.04sec for the 42.195km of the Seville event in Spain (making him the fourth fastest Kiwi ever). He was 22nd over the line in an historically quick race across the board, which saw the first 31 finishers all dip under the World Athletics qualifying standard (2:11:30) for Tokyo.
That should see Hicks make the Kiwi team. Only national record-holder Zane Robertson has gone faster in the qualifying period, with that 2:08:19 in Southport, Australia, last year, and New Zealand can select three athletes for the marathon.
‘‘I’m not home and hosed but I’ve put in a pretty good application,’’ says Hicks. ‘‘I’ve run under the [qualifying] time, and performed quite well in Doha [at the 2019 world championships]. There’s nothing more I can do now.’’
Hicks certainly deserves to realise his Olympics dream, given the remarkable strides he has made in just two years (and four races) since dedicating himself to the marathon. He ran 2:16:28 on debut in Berlin in 2018, then followed that up with 2:13:51 in Dusseldorf last year, which gained him a spot in the Doha world champs’ midnight marathon, where he finished 27th in a credible 2:17:45 in the heat and humidity.
Then came Seville, which in many ways was a pressure situation. Because he’d raced Doha, and ticked off his first major championship in the black singlet, he had forfeited the chance to run an Olympic qualifier earlier. Six months out from Tokyo, the timing was ideal to allow a full Games build-up.
Luckily, Hicks found himself amongst a large group of likeminded athletes all chasing that Olympic qualifying goal and they paced each other through a remarkable race. The top 19 finishers all dipped under 2:09, with the first 14 all sub-2:08.
‘‘I go in relatively conservatively,’’ says Hicks who was a high-level track runner before switching up. ‘‘You’ve got to learn the marathon. I’ve seen enough people with high expectations go out and blow up or have really terrible experiences. I know the work it requires to run a 2:10, and when I started marathoning I wasn’t there. I couldn’t hit the mileage, couldn’t hit the long runs, and I knew it would take time.
‘‘My coach [New Zealandbased] Paul Hamblyn and I have been patient and strategic. It’s 6 minutes [improved] in four marathons, so we’ve just chipped away, been smart and we knew the target of 2020, how much time we had and I think we’ve nailed it so far.’’
Hicks has certainly nailed his
life balance. Unlike almost all his contemporaries at the pointy end of his sport, he works fulltime, for Danish engineering firm COWI in London.
‘‘It gives me balance,’’ he says. ‘‘It makes you very efficient in terms of your training and maximising your recovery because you don’t have a lot of time. It also means you sacrifice a little bit more outside work and sport around how you spend your time.
‘‘It keeps you level-headed because you’ve got something to focus on outside of sport, and that can be important for a marathon runner when injuries come along. But it does make life incredibly busy.’’
Hicks and wife Alana have things pretty much figured out. Luckily for him, the British work day doesn’t typically start until 9am, which allows him to do most
of his training before heading to the office. He further maximises time by including the work commute in his regime.
‘‘I get all the big stuff done in the morning, and in the evening it’s just a run home, 30-40 minutes, and that’s me done for the day,’’ says Hicks. There is still plenty to juggle as he totes up around 200km a week, with his morning runs varying from an hour to two-and-a-half.
From his East London home he can take in Victoria Park, the marshlands and canals and even, with a bit more effort, Epping Forest further north. ‘‘I do most of my training locally, and by including my commute it kills a few more ks. It’s also an efficiency thing that saves me valuable extra time. I can run to work faster than I can get there on public transport, so it works well.’’ With his analytical engineer’s mind, Hicks loves what he does. A lot of thought goes into load management, training programmes, recovery, heat adaptability and the science of running just over 42km at an absurdly quick pace.
He’s had his share of injuries through two decades of running – ‘‘your body has a limit and you’ve always got to respect that’’ – and is well aware he treads a fine line between building necessary fitness and doing damage to himself. ‘‘It’s all about learning your limits,’’ he adds.
Hicks learned a lot from Doha, around both being in a professional environment and adapting to the heat. It will, he is sure, make him better prepared for the Olympics, which won’t be quite as draining.
‘‘If you’re smart about preparation, do the work, the testing — the marathon is all about trying to minimise the variables and control as many as you can. The better you know about how you perform and react to the heat, the better you’re going to go on the day.
‘‘I don’t want to change too much,’’ he says of the lead-in to Tokyo. I’ve competed well and my 2:10 was while I was in London working fulltime. That’s the environment I’ve created. You can be a fulltime runner with all these people around you, but you’ve still got to find where you’re comfortable and the mindset you compete best in.’’
Right now Hicks’ demanding double life continues to turn up results that suggest nothing’s broke, so it definitely don’t need fixing.