I definitely wasn't anything special when I first started but I think I adapted quite quickly into racing and it became a bit better slowly. All of cadets, the first four years of karting, I only won one proper race, one! Which was the British Open Championship at PFI and I started 21st and I won.
I'm from Kansas, so there were a lot of vacant lots and open fields to tackle each other in so we could avoid tackling each other on the street. But running on the street and trying not to get taken down on the concrete, that will make you fast, that's for sure.
We are making a little portion of their brains be sprinters; they are 100 percent football players, but for these purposes, they must learn the proper way to run.
What I did at the start of each season, regardless if I was coming back as the champion, was run indoors and take forward steps from the first race.
If you want to be a successful runner, you have to consider everything. It's no good just thinking about endurance and not to develop fine speed.
For 100 m., you have to go out fast but also bring it back, so we've been doing a lot of work on the back-end speed.
If you see me when I first burst onto the scene, you see how quickly I could turn for a big lad and how fast I was up and down the pitch. Then I started picking and choosing my time to go forwards because I was scared of my hamstring going or my knee not dealing with it.
Always that's a goal with everybody who plays a pro sport is to get stronger and faster and work on things that you lack.
My dad being a player. I was never that quick as a kid, so I had to get quicker. I trained hard. I was never that player who could roll out and relax, like Michael [ Owen] or Stevie [ Gerrard], who were natural.
I believe you'll develop speed via strength work which includes hill running, either repeats, or running hilly courses as the Kenyans do on a steady basis.
Obviously, when you're doing fitness work at a club all week and every week, it's all about specific drills for what you need to do on the pitch. So I'd be doing a different drill to the centre-midfielders. It's all specifically tailored for me. For example, my drills are high speed. It's all about trying to break the line with a sharp sprint.
I work on my recoveries, coming back into the defensive line and things like that.
Why should I practice running slow? I already know how to run slow. I want to learn to run fast.
Throughout my career I swam for form. Speed came as a result of it.
Sometimes I can't sleep at night because I'm so excited to work on sprinting the next day, because I'm such a bad sprinter.
I focused solely on the sprints, dedicated my time there, got in the weight room, just really did everything I could to make sure I would be in the best position to run for gold.
When I was young, I was too slow. I thought I must learn to run fast by practicing to run fast, so I ran 100 meters fast 20 times. Then I came back, slow,slow,slow. People said, 'Emil, you are crazy. You are training like a sprinter.'
