Meet Canada’s next big distance runner

Farah Abdulkarim is an Ottawa, Ont. native who currently attends the University of Mississippi. The 22-year-old is a junior in college, studying political science.

He ran a 28:39.66 at the Mt. SAC Relays in Torrence, CA on the weekend to shave nearly three minutes off of his previous 10,000m personal best of 31:21.00. And to top it all off, that race was his 2019 season opener. That time would have placed him among the fastest Canadians in 2018, behind NCAA champion Ben Flanagan and Canadian record-holder Mo Ahmed. That’s keeping good company.

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Abdulkarim knew he was in for a big race, but he didn’t know that a 28-mid was in the cards. “I was focused on running the World University Games [FISU] standard, which is 29:30. My teammate Mark Robertson ran 29:00 a few weeks ago and since I train with him every day, I figured I could run that too.” The runner beat the standard by almost a minute and exceeded his own expectations for the race. It’s looking like Abdulkarim will make the FISU team, with the qualification period closing only three weeks from now. He’s going to take another crack at a 5,000m in Portland and then start focusing on the 10,000m again.

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The Ottawa native was a good runner in high school, with several top-eight finishes under his belt, but he wasn’t the best. He was coming through the OFSAA scene at the same time as Justyn Knight, so he had someone to chase. The runner decided to do a fifth year of high school because he hadn’t looked into running in the US very seriously. After being dropped by a school due to a poor performance at Canadian outdoor nationals in 2015, he signed with Morehead State University in Kentucky in October of that year, starting a semester late. “My first season at Morehead wasn’t great. I didn’t know if I wanted to run any more, after taking a semester off. I didn’t run high mileage in high school and thought I could get away with taking three months off running. Once I came back in the fall of 2016, I trained harder, did the miles and saw improvements.”

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After two and a half years at Morehead and some improvements but never the breakthrough he was hoping for, Abdulkarim had a conversation with his parents. “I wanted to make nationals, be recognized on the NCAA stage and Ole Miss felt like the natural next step. I wasn’t looking for a giant program, but somewhere good.” He reached out to lots of American schools based on who he thought might take him and who their alumni were. He admits that Mississippi felt like an outside shot, admitting, “I didn’t even think they’d talk to me.” But Ole Miss was one of the first to respond and also his first and only visit. He made the decision quickly. “The school is a runner’s paradise. There’s nowhere with more than 800m of pavement to run on. So you’re almost always on a soft surface or big, wide dirt roads.”

The runner’s next race will be a 5,000m in Portland while he waits to see if he’s qualified for his first senior national team.