Making the two-lapped race his own, the Afsal way

Bengaluru: At 29, Mohammed Afsal Pulikkalakath realises the clock is ticking. This doesn’t, in any way, suggest that the clam middle distance runner from Palakkad in  Kerala is panicking. If anything, Afsal has now reached a time zone in his life where erasing seconds off his runs feels exciting. 

This positive emotion arises from correcting years of mistakes in training methods and better understanding of injecting tactics. Knowing when to chase or when to accelerate and when to push or when to relax, has taken Afsal to a place he has long desired. 

A big star in school athletics, someone who went through his share of troughs, had his second biggest moment after winning silver at the 2022 Hangzhou Asian Games when he shattered Jinson Johnson’s 7-year-old national record in the 800m last weekend. Afsal clinched silver after clocking 1 minute 45.61 seconds at the UAE Athletics Grand Prix in Dubai to erase Johnson’s 1:45.65 that was set in 2018 at the National Inter-State Championships in Guwahati. 

“He (Johnson) was one of the first persons to congratulate me. I have always looked up to him and it feels great to have broken his record,” expressed Afsal, a Junior Warrant Officer in the Indian Air Force. 

“Since there were athletes from Kenya and South Africa, I knew it was going to be a fast race. I was feeling good before the start and I stuck to the strategy until the end.” 

Trailing at the back of the pack at the end of the first lap (400m), Afsal hit the speed button at the 550m mark before overtaking competitors ahead of him at the final bend. The Indian’s final kick came 30 metres from the finish line that helped Afsal surpass South Africa’s Christopher Swart (1:45.84), who took bronze, but ended a tad bit short of Kenya’s Nicholas Kiplagat (1:45.38) who won the gold. 

While Johnson has been India's flag-bearer of middle-distance events for years, Afsal has now added his name by finding his footing in the two-lapped 800m race. And coach Ajith Markose suggests that Afsal’s quality of being ‘a hybrid runner’ is what makes him distinct from the other Indian athletes in the event. 

“800m athletes are classified based on endurance and speed. Usually one aspect will be more dominant than the other. But Afsal is what we call a hybrid,” said Markose, the middle and long distance coach at the Reliance Foundation, who has been training Afsal since 2021. 

“He responds well to and tolerates both endurance and speed training. This is the best kind of a combination in an 800m runner.” 

The high in Dubai came after the setback at the Federation Cup in Kochi in April. After clocking 1:46.70 in heat 2, Afsal failed to bring out his best in the final where he finished fourth with a time of 1:48.33. The under-performance saw the Kerala man missing an opportunity to book a ticket to the Asian Athletics Championships starting on May 27 in Gumi, South Korea. 

Undeterred, the footballer-turned-runner has reset his year's goal and is now focussed on meeting the automatic qualification time of 1:44.50 for the Athletics World Championship (September 13 in Tokyo, Japan). 

“We are trying to get entries to a few meets in Europe. The 1st Indian Open World Athletics Bronze Level Continental Tour in Bhubaneswar (from August 10) also is another opportunity,” he signed off.