Emil Zátopek ran like someone in extreme pain: his arms flailing, jaw clenched in a grim smile, breathing like a jackhammer. It often looked as if he were going to collapse at any second. It sometimes looked as if he were going to die out there on the track. Yet, he never did, he just kept winning, over and over again.
Zátopek was born in 1922 in Czechoslovakia. According to Richard Askwith’s biography of 2016, Today We Die a Little, he was pushed into a race by a coach at his shoe factory in 1941. The race was a factory-sponsored event intended to promote physical fitness and morale among young workers during the time of Nazi occupation. It was a tool for control and propaganda. It was to develop discipline, productivity, and physical fitness in workers meant to serve the interests of Nazi Germany.
Not at all sympathetic to any authoritarian goals, Zátopek protested, claiming to be unfit, but he was examined by a doctor and told he could and, indeed, had to run. When he came in second, that was the beginning of his running career as something clicked in him. He kept running, but not as part of an authoritarian regime to provide physically fit workers. Running became a private means of exploring his inner strength and tenacity.
Running gave Emil Zátopek insights into the boundless endurance of the human spirit, its capacity to suffer, to strive and still reach for joy. Suffering could be a gateway to transcendence, a way to transform pain into perseverance. Liberation could be found through struggle and self-mastery. On the track, everyone suffers, and greatness is measured by the will to endure. His running eventually made him a symbol of Czech pride and endurance.
Emil didn’t train like anyone else. He invented interval training to increase his speed and stamina before anyone gave it a name. He had no technology and largely coached himself. So it was ten sets of 400 meters. Then twenty. Then forty. He did this in heavy army boots, in snow, after long shifts at a shoe factory. “Why should I practice running slow?” he once quipped. “I already know how to run slow. I want to learn to run fast.”
So that’s how you live as Emil Zátopek ran. You train in chaos. You sweat in the messiness. You don’t wait for optimal conditions. You create greatness in unglamorous places through unglamorous methods even in oppressive circumstances. You do what you want to do, not what they want you to do. You might look and feel like hell, but you do your best, you don’t stop and you often find out you have won something. Once when he was asked why he often looked so terrible while running, he said: “I am not talented enough to run and smile at the same time.”
In the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, he did the impossible: he won gold in the 5,000 meters, the 10,000 meters, and, for the pure hell of it, he entered and won the marathon, which he had never run before. He asked the favorite, Jim Peters, mid-race, if the pace was fast enough. Peters, trying to psych him out, said it was too fast. Emil thanked him and sped up. He won the race by over two minutes.
So live as Emil Zátopek ran. Look and even feel like hell, but keep going. Run through confusion. Smile through exhaustion. Ask the competition for advice mid-battle just to mess with them, and then leave them eating your dust.
Zátopek wasn’t, however, just a machine of endurance; he was also known for his kindness. This is also a big key in living as he ran. When Australian runner Ron Clarke visited Prague in the 1960s, Emil handed him a small box at the airport. Clarke had set multiple world records but never won Olympic gold. Emil knew Clarke deserved a gold medal. Clarke opened the box later and found one of Zátopek’s Olympic gold medals inside. There was no explanation, just another example of Emil’s quiet generosity. Clarke said he was so moved he cried alone in his hotel room.
Emil wasn’t transactional. He gave because he understood that greatness means nothing if you hoard it. If you were a fellow athlete, even a rival, Emil often treated you like family. He laughed easily. He encouraged others constantly. And when he suffered, whether in training or in life, he didn’t make it anybody else’s problem. He endured with grace, even joy.
He survived Nazi occupation in World War II, Stalinism and forced labor camps. He wasn’t perfect, nobody is, but he remained principled and human. Although he is regarded as a true Czech hero, there has been some controversy about him, in a few elite contemporary circles, because he was used for propaganda purposes during the Cold War.
I find it hard to judge a guy who had to survive in an ultra-oppressive society where it was sometimes virtually impossible to say no to the authorities. Zátopek was a good person who resisted corruption as well as he was able to under extreme circumstances.
After supporting democratic reforms during the Prague Spring of 1968, he was expelled from the army, removed from public life, and made to dig ditches. He did it without complaint. His athletic career was closely linked with the military sports system, which was common in Eastern Bloc countries at the time, and he was completely removed from it. He was subjected to “re-education through labor”, a common method of humiliation and control in the Eastern Bloc. For years, he worked menial jobs.
His personal motto was “You must be fast enough. You must have endurance. But you must also train the mind.”
When Communism fell in 1989 with the Velvet Revolution, Czechs began to remember their forgotten heroes and he was publicly honored again. Though his health became worse, he remained kind, generous, funny and humble until the end. Czech President Václav Havel said Zátopek “…embodied joy in sport, the courage of a free spirit and the dignity of someone who stayed true to his conscience.”
So what does it mean to live as Emil Zátopek ran?
It means being unorthodox, unpolished and unstoppable.
It means training like a nut because your dreams are not normal.
It means looking like you’re falling apart to everyone else, while quietly moving forward.
It means giving away your medals without needing credit.
It means finding your own humane and individualistic goals amid corruption.
It means living with dignity, free from bitterness, regardless of everything.
Of course, you don’t have to be a runner to channel Emil. Maybe your race is a life where the odds are rigged against you. Run it anyway. Run it ugly. Run really ugly but run honestly. And if someone tells you the pace is too fast, thank them, and speed the hell up.
You might feel like you’re dying out there, but that doesn’t mean you’re not winning. Live your life as Emil ran, an under-the-radar role model, someone who didn’t just win, but earned victory in ways that are still meaningful.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Wikimedia
