Hurdles
The Norwegian history-maker approaches the 400m hurdles with humour and dedication. This is how Karsten Warholm balances training, pressure and his quest for perfection.
He has a world record, two Summer Game medals and two World Championship golds to his name, been named European Athlete of the Year, played Street Fighter with the Norwegian Prime Minister and became a viral sensation. So, at 28-years-old, what’s left for Karsten Warholm, the 400m hurdles sensation?
“In our sport, they call it the man killer and there’s good reasons why,” he explains of his event, which is renowned for the horrible lactic acid build-up as athletes stagger through the final metres of a race. “It’s a nasty feeling, but you learn to work with it. I love how the rhythm works the first eight hurdles, and the last 100m is all about getting home. It’s a tough one, but it’s also what I love about it.”
When he isn’t flinging himself about, he takes his mind off his sport by building Harry Potter Lego (“I’ve worked with Lego a lot… It’s recreational, it’s after practice, a way to relax.”) and dreams about jumping over Max Verstappen’s car (“I’ve always dreamt about hurdling over a car, but it needs to be the last thing I do as I need to not injure myself.")
Before he can make his last, final big jump, there’s the tiny question of Paris to overcome…
I would lose all the other races just to be able to win in Paris
01
Starting out
As a kid, Warholm always knew he was fast. “I remember my first race,” Warholm begins. “A friend of mine was in the athletics club. We were probably seven or eight years old, and he got me into that race. So, I was there in my jeans and my sneakers and running. And I won the race! I was always very competitive, of course, but that's probably the one moment where I knew that I was fast because you can see that you're faster than the others.”
His first passion, however, was football, particularly Manchester United. At an early age, Warholm thought he’d follow the path of heroes like Ole Gunnar Solskjær , and played as number nine for his local team. The problem was, he wasn’t necessarily a team player: “I was a goal-getter, I used my speed and that’s everything that I had. I never got very far,” he says.
Instead, he focused on running, excelling in the decathlon and even winning the Under-18 World Championships before pivoting to the 400m hurdles at the behest of his coach, who thought this was where he could really excel.
Not that it was an instant success: “One of my first training camps doing the 400m hurdles I crashed really badly into one of the hurdles and it was a brutal start,” says Warholm. His first year in hurdles was 2015, the next year he was repping his country in Rio.
Then, he won the World Championships in London in 2017 and “everything blew up and life changed for me overnight,” he says. “After that, I could really call myself a professional athlete.”
02
Proudest moments
It’s been a long and illustrious career over those past seven years, years filled with “many good memories.” The standout, though, is setting the world record of 45.94 in Tokyo. “Even I was very amazed by that time,” Warholm says. “I didn't even think it was possible at that time. I really got my potential out. That was the race where I was as close to perfect as possible.”
03
Handling pressure
Warholm comes across as a cool character at the top of his game. But of course, being at the top is to be under constant pressure. It’s something Warholm has had to learn to deal with as his success – and fame – have increased.
“It's a difficult thing,” he says of pressure. “I think everybody probably handles it very differently. I think because of my successes in recent years, it actually takes some pressure off because I have a lot of the things that I want to have, but I'm still hungry for more.”
As well as these honest reflections, Warholm is honest about sport's place in life, too. “What I try to tell myself is that the 400m hurdles is not that important in the big picture – I'm not curing cancer or saving anybody's life, it's just me and my team who have chosen to make it important. And somehow, that takes off the pressure a little bit.” Win or lose, life goes on.
That said, Warholm believes that by putting the work in, he often feels like he does deserve to win – a feeling he sees as vital for competition. “I think that's a very important feeling,” he explains. “If you're standing there thinking that somebody else deserves to win more than you, I think the odds will be against you.”
His biggest flaw? “Maybe my weakness is that I don't know my weakness,” he muses. “It is for somebody else to find.”
04
Around the world
As one of the most famous and successful athletes in his field, Warholm gets to travel and compete across the globe. Over the course of his travels he’s lucky enough to have found some favourite tracks.
“I like the Bislett track, which is the track that hosts a Diamond League in Oslo," he says. "I train there at least once or twice each week during winter and summer. I also have very good memories from the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London. It’s a very nice track. And of course the Tokyo Track where I broke the world record.”
05
Training days
When it comes to dedicating himself to the life of a professional athlete, Warholm says the hardest thing is “finding the balance between going all-in on something like this with everything you got, but still balancing it with a normal life.”
Conversely, the easiest thing is how much time he's willing to invest in his sport. "It's a very nice lifestyle; we get to go out for many hours and just play, to do something that you like. If you don't like it, you probably should stop doing it. But I find it very easy to wake up every morning."
Most days consist of rigorous training – up to six or eight hours. "During this period, we come to the training facility early in the morning, do some warm-ups, run on the curved treadmill, run hurdles on the grass, lift weights, do jumping exercises," Warholm says. "We put a lot into one session, and there's also a lot of breaks because we also need to be very high-quality in the work that we do."
Diet is strict, too. Monday until Friday, meals are cooked and delivered – mostly microwaveable “clean” foods.
In terms of competition, Warholm notes that “you need opponents to stay on your toes and to stay motivated.” At present, he has his eye on American Rai Benjamin, silver medallist in Tokyo, as well as Alison Santos from Brazil, and Kyron McMaster from the British Virgin Islands. “[Competitors are] something that makes my focus even stronger because I know that I can't afford mistakes and I can't afford to be lazy,” Warholm says.
While he’s never worked with a sports psychologist and doesn’t sit down to visualise success, Warholm says he and his coach discuss “everything”, and through his training, he gets the “good feeling” of preparedness that he searches for. “The best advice I can give is to try and enjoy the things that you put a lot of time into,” he says. “We always say in our team: ‘Well done is better than well said.’”
06
Fighting fit
Warholm enjoys some particularly... unique... training methods. such as working out topless in the snow.
“I don't mind the cold,” he says, “although it isn’t something we usually do in Norway; we don't train out in the snow with our shirts off. But sometimes it’s nice to show how harsh nature can be in Norway compared to a lot of other places around the world.”
His training camp, in Tenerife, is usually a little bit warmer. There’s more to a good training regime than temperature, of course. “One of the upsides of being older is that you're a little bit smarter,” says Warholm. “You are more experienced. You can take smarter choices. The downside can be that your body is starting to get tired from all the hard work over many years. But right now, I'm injury-free and I'm training very well, so I feel like I'm in a very good place.”
A good place, of course, for his next biggest challenge…
07
The future
After achieving the greatest accolades in the sport: World champion, world record, Olympic Gold, what’s left?
“When you count it like that, there is nothing left, kind of,” Warholm laughs. “But at the same time, I think the next one is the best one. For me, it's always about the chase. I think that is the reason we're in this, to see how good we can become and the day when we retire we can say that we got the most out of our potential.”
Not that retirement is on the cards. “I hope that in five or 10 years’ time I'm still as passionate as I am today. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the 400m hurdles, but it’s got to be something that drives me,” he says. “I need a feeling that I'm moving forward and doing something that I enjoy, which is probably the most important thing in life.”
08
Between then and now: Paris
“To me, I would lose all the other races just to be able to win in Paris,” Warholm enthuses. “But at the same time, this being my third Olympics, I’ve learned that the only thing you can do is put yourself in a position where normal is enough. You’ve got to do the training, you’ve got to make sure that you're fit and ready, and you have to know that there are a lot of other people who want to win the Olympics as well.”
Want to take a look behind the scenes and see how Warholm is preparing for Paris? Chasing Glory follows him – and five other athletes – on their journey to compete in the planet's biggest sporting event. Watch it on Red Bull TV.
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