"Run! Run!" people of different nationalities cheered her, admiring the stamina of the Russian athlete. And she did run. She ran in Europe and Asia, North and South America, and in Africa. Valentina Liakhova conquered the world in the 1980s and was a star throughout the 1990s. Her name has been listed among Guinness World Records. The mileage that she has covered is enough to make several turns around the Earth. And she is not going to stop.
Olymskiy, a small settlement, surrounded by beetroot fields and thin forests, is situated on the banks of the Olym and Castora rivers in the easternmost end of Kursk region. In 1958, people lived a usual collective farm routine life there. VaIia was a second child in a family of a driver and a medical officer. Vasily and Tamara thought about the future for their daughter but even the most daring dreams of theirs did not picture that she would come down in history of the world's sport and would glorify not only her homeland but also the whole country.
…Her father is laughing brightly behind the wheel of an old worn truck while on a trip across Kursk or an adjacent region. Five-year old Valia is often with her father on such trips. She is watching cornfields, trees and houses passing by. The girl is dreaming of far-away countries and continents...
Sport, after all
Studies in school were easy for her. Valia, a romantic by nature, dug into geography and literature books with great pleasure. However, her physical education teacher saw a sport potential in her – being slim and light-weight, she managed to outrun the stronger classmates. In the fifth grade, she was sent to a district track and field athletics competition and then to a regional one. The schoolgirl won again and again to the pride of her coach Nickolai Rykunov.
She should have gone in for sports but she joined the literature faculty of Kursk Teachers College. However, one cannot escape one's fate. Liakhova overtook her fellow students by half a lap during the first physical education class. It did not go unnoticed by their coach. The future champion was trained by Vladimir Pavlov, then by Yuri Kleyev. Her results grew. Valia doubted no longer the chosen track and stayed in her Alma mater to teach physical education.
In the summer of 1980, 22-year old Valentina Liakhova carried Olympic Torch in Kursk for the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Her dream to see the world became closer: in few years she visited Ural, Siberia, and many Soviet republics – Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Armenia and Uzbekistan. At the same time she studied in Moscow State Physical Education Institute and fulfilled the norms for the title of Master of Sports in track and field 3-kilometre discipline.
Women on Start
In the 80s women began running marathons, whereas in the 90s they succeeded in running 100 km distances. When Liakhova just started her sports career, the limit was two stadium laps, which was 800 meters. Well, Yugoslavia, 1990. Here was a 42,195-meter run. The sportswoman scores a victory there, thereby fulfilling the international level norms of Master of Sports. After this, she decided to master a new distance of 100 kilometres.
There were two years till the Spain Championship where she planned to debut in an ultra-marathon. Physical loads were constantly increasing. Valentina's patience and stamina, which she had more than enough, helped her to hold on to a new tempo. Athletes, who exercised in Kursk Trudovye Rezervy ("Labour Reserves") Stadium, continued to be amazed: "We come for the first training – Liakhova is already "cruising" around, we come for a next training – she is still running!" And it was so every day.
The only day off she had did not free her from a cross-country run. But instead of two-three 10-kilometre runs she limited herself to just one in the morning. The largest physical loads took place in the end of a week: an intensive work on long distances (ten one-kilometre runs or eight two-kilometre ones) on Saturdays, and 40 kilometres along a river or a highway on Sundays.
"Some drivers used to pull over to offer me a ride," Valentina recollects, laughing. "It was not a big deal for me to cover such a distance without transport. Even if it was not a training and I was just on a visit to my friend somewhere near Kursk and had to come back home, I ran. So I made some 150-200 km in a week."
My First Hundred
Torrelavega, Spain. The day of truth had come: it remained for Liakhova to stumble and fall or to triumphantly get on the podium. For a long distance run, it is important to maintain steady pace. Valentina inherited an ear for music from her mother who had an excellent voice and loved to sing a song or two in the evening. She counted kilometre by kilometre as a metronome, keeping a required tempo and saving energy for the last spurt.
As a matter of fact, 100 kilometres is almost eight hours of a continuous run. One needs to think about something. She read to herself Mayakovski’s poetry and imagined as if she had been running not in sunny Spain but in her homeland stadium... 40, 50, 60 kilometres had been covered – it became hard and Liakhova started to count down: 40, 30, 20 kilometres were left. "What a trifle, I run twenty every day, I persuaded myself and spurted to finish with all my might.” She won a silver medal at her first ultra-marathon.
In no longer than two weeks’ time she received an invitation to participate in a competition in France. She read much about these places in books by Dumas: Gascoigne, Champagne and Paris, of course. Needless to say that our athlete ascended Eiffel tower by stairs, not by elevator. And she did not walk in Bois de Vincennes – she ran through it in mornings. In the same sports manner she got familiar with Germany, Italy and Belgium... She conquered Europe.
Ran through Desert for Five Days
Sahara. An extreme 200-km race was akin to a survival test. Leg cramps, haze in the head... She carried a heavy backpack with a sleeping bag and some snacks. Endless dunes and nothing but fluid and scalding sands were all around. It seemed that a 60-degree heat literally melted the air and through the haze Liakhova noticed an American runner. The woman felt bad. She gave her water and helped her to a first-aid post. Valentina herself had prepared well enough. The whole coacher's family of the Kleyevs had prepared her for the journey. Yuri thought up to sew socks to running shoes to keep sand away, his wife gathered freeze-dried products for her, their daughter, a hospital employee, tailored tubes from an intravenous set to her drinking bottles, and their son Misha made a support out of two plates for a cooking pot to speed up water boiling.
The organizers of the cross-country run moved tents to overnight camping sites on camels. They also spread goat hair carpets to keep away scorpions and poisonous snakes. 150 sportsmen and sportswomen who arrived to participate in the dangerous ultra-marathon from different countries could have some rest only in the night. They refilled their water supplies limited to five litres a day, kindled a bonfire using camel thorns and cooked dinner only out of food that they had carried from the start. The only Russian who was among leading runners and who told jokes during rest breaks rapidly became everybody's favourite. Now Japanese, now French or Americans offered a tasty treat to her.
The most frightening thing in Sahara is to lose one's way. Even a compass could not guarantee that it would not happen. When, all of a sudden, a sand storm started and one couldn't see anything two meters ahead, a runner from Italy disappeared. The marathon was suspended and helicopter search was launched but they could not find the man. "An obituary was already published in a newspaper," Liakhova recollects. "Some time later I arrived to a competition to France. And they informed me that our Italian turned up... He ran 100 kilometres in a barren desert until he reached the boundary of another country!"
No rest for us...
In the same year of 1994, Valentina found herself in Africa. Comrades Marathon, the World's oldest one, had been held since 1921. 12,000 participants ran there, most of whom were Africans. Liakhova was the best among women and the 156th in overall ranking. She remembers that event by a picture with the then president of South Africa Nelson Mandela, the Nobel Prize winner.
Sporting luck accompanied Liakhova further. In 1996, she set two world records at once – in 50-mile and 100-kilometre running. In a year she scored a victory in World Championship in Holland, and won many other running events. Thanks to the sport, she had an opportunity to travel to the distant corners of the world, just like she had dreamt in childhood. She had a stroll in Times Square under the lights of New York skyscrapers and saw the Land of the Rising Sun in the most beautiful season of sakura blossom. She swam with sharks in the Indian Ocean and got into a zone of turbulence over the Bermuda Islands, but despite the fear, she was able to calm down other passengers. In Brazil she developed a passion for soccer, and in Mexico she seasoned a corn cake with pepper so much that she set her mouth on fire.
On 16th of January, 2014, Valentina carried Olympic Torch again, this time for Sochi Winter Olympics. She continues to work in specialized department of physical education theory and teaching methods of Kursk State University. Valentina conducts practical lessons, delivers lectures and coaches young sportsmen. There is a lot to learn from her.
