Running all his life: B.Ser-Od has run 74 marathons to date

Maybe you never noticed him before, but chances are you’ve seen him – pitched in among the world’s best marathoners, fighting against outrageous odds.

B.Ser-Od of Mongolia has never won a world or Olympic medal. He’s never broken 2:08 for the marathon. He’s never made the top 15 at a global championships.

But enough about what he hasn’t done. Because what the 40-year-old has done is far more significant.

Since the 2003 World Athletics Championships, he’s been ever-present at major championship marathons, 14 of them in total: Paris (63rd); Athens (74th); Helsinki (61st); Osaka (55th); Beijing (52nd); Berlin (29th); Daegu (19th); London (51st); Moscow (35th); Beijing (38th); Rio (91st); London (48th); Doha (54th) and Tokyo (DNF).

B.Ser-Od has run 74 marathons to date – he thinks – but he continues to epitomise the mantra made famous by former Boston Marathon champion Desiree Linden: keep showing up.

Ser-Od Bat-Ochir at the 2019 World Athletics Championships in Doha (© Getty Images)

At the World Athletics Championships Oregon 22, he will show up for his 10th straight World Championships marathon. No one in his event has come close to that record, while across the entire sport only two race walkers – Portugal’s Joao Vieira (11) and Spain’s Jesus Angel Garcia (13) – have surpassed it.

But in the marathon, this most attritional of events, how has B.Ser-Od not burnt out after a period of world-class racing – 20 years – that forces so many others to fade away?

“It’s two things,” he says. “One: I love to run, it’s a real source of enjoyment. When I run long, I am happiest. The other is having my wife there with me. She’s been acting as a functional coach for 17 years. Having her watching me, having my back, makes it all worthwhile.”

If Mongolia seems like a place that doesn’t produce many world-class distance runners, well, there’s a good reason. In winter, temperatures might rise to -15°C/5°F on a good day. At night, they can drop to -40°C/-40°F.

For B.Ser-Od the only way to train for much of the year was by doing long, steady runs, with interval training impossible given the conditions. In those icy months, he’d cover himself in four or five layers and head out on the freezing roads, arriving back to his car an hour or two later – the engine left running to ensure an immediate source of warmth.
Mongolia’s Ser-Od Bat-Ochir carries his country’s flag at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London (© Getty Images)

He grew up in Govi-Altai – a region in the west of Mongolia that sits at about 2000m of altitude – and his family moved to the capital, Ulaanbaatar, when he was 12.

B.Ser-Od discovered running in elementary school, winning his first race at a sports day. “Ever since then, it’s what I wanted to do,” he says.

He took the sport seriously from the age of 14, competing in middle-distance races on the track (which was a 400m oval with a hard, paved surface).

He made his marathon debut in 2002. A year later, he lined up at the World Championships in Paris, clocking 2:26:39 to hack 10 minutes off the Mongolian record. He competed at his first Olympics in Athens in 2004, clocking 2:33:24 to finish 74th, but getting to a second Games in Beijing required a significant improvement.

Between 2009 and 2012, Bat-Ochir spent much of his time in the UK, where his wife’s sister and her husband lived. Keen to find a training group, he reached out to Morpeth Harriers, where he earned the nickname ‘Ziggy’ – an Anglicised, pop-culture take on his Mongolian nickname – which was coined by club secretary Mike Bateman.

In 2014 he moved to Japan, starting a new chapter by running professionally for the NTN Corporate Team. In December that year, he lowered the Mongolian record to 2:08:50 and in the years that followed he kept showing up at every major championship – no matter what came his way in preparation.

He had injury issues before the Rio Games in 2016, which worsened in 2018 and 2019, the problems stemming from the training he was doing at the insistence of his corporate team coach.

He qualified for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics with a 2:09:26 clocking in Lake Biwa in February last year, and B.Ser-Od was in flying form ahead of the Games. His last training camp was in Chitose, Japan, but that was where things went downhill. (world athletics)