Running towards the clouds - Interview with Robert Malseed

His life story reads a bit like Sisiphos in the Ancient Greek tale: Constantly pushing a rock up the mountain but every time he is just about to make it to the top, the boulder eludes his grip and rolls back down for him to push it back up again. Robert Malseed must have felt like that regarding his sporting career. Close to the top but back to zero. Now, after several setbacks, Malseed is literally running up mountains, and he is happy about it.

Born in Cyprus, to a mother from Dublin and a father from Belfast, Robert grew up in England. “I was kicked out of the athletics club for not being good enough,” he explains. “I was 16 when that happened and they told me it was too late for me, that I wouldn't be good enough.”

Fortunately for Robert, an old school coach took him under his wing and said he was going to make him 'tough to beat.' Within a year Robert ran his first international senior race. He went on to become British national cross-country champion and he was on the verge of making it to the Olympics in Atlanta: “I raced Olympians in training, thought I had it.” But a qualification race in Cincinnati would ultimately be his downfall: “I ran the 10,000m conference champs there —heat wave, smog—I won, but got heat stroke and severe anaemia. That knocked me out of the Olympic trials. Recovering took two months; by then it was too late.”

Robert never stopped running but the Olympic dream was over. He had a break and then needed heart surgery: “I had a little hole in the heart. That needed to be repaired for my 30th birthday.“ Robert then moved to Ireland in 2002 and two years later he ended up in Mayo. 

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He kept running, even turned professional in 2005 with the help of a manager. But calamities ensured he couldn't even collect the prize money he won: “They kept misspelling my name. One time in a half-marathon in France my name was spelt as “Rabat Musayyad,” and because the name on your bib has to match your passport, I didn’t get the prize money. The organisers disappeared and I had to hitch a lift back to the airport.”

That happened quite a few times. Robert went through the WorldAthletics.org website searching his results, but couldn't find them. Turned out, since the 1990s, they had spelt his name wrong. “All my college-time results in America are pretty much lost,” Robert admits, “I’ve spent the last few years going through records and newspaper clippings to trace them.” Then by his own accounts, he made a crucial mistake. Against the advice of his manager, Robert decided to go for the marathon, but life kept throwing curveballs:

“I was supposed to run London 2008 but fractured my lower back a few weeks beforehand and had to pull out halfway. Six weeks later I tried Edinburgh, but there was a course mix-up, and I was misdirected twice, very disappointing. I think I finished eighth.”  Then on a holiday in Lanzarote there was a marathon, but the organisers mixed up bib colours and some 10K and half-marathon runners had marathon bibs. They all started together. 

“I thought they were marathon runners, so the first 10km was too fast. And I was running with them and then they all peeled off and then suddenly I was on my own. And then I hit the wall, having overpaced, and I ended up crawling in.” Robert still finished in fifth place but the time was horrendous. It was always going to be a long shot going for a career in marathon running, as Robert had to come to terms with his running style, that he himself describes as 'awkward':

“I look at video clips of myself: I’m swaying; my hips and arms, I sway side to side, and there’s a lot of energy loss. It's not suited for marathons at all.” But he went for it, and found that marathons wouldn't be the way to go for him. A few years later he retired from professional running. He had his tonsils out, which took it out of him, another curveball as he was very unwell at the time. The same goes for a time in  2015, when he had tenitis in both ankles, an inflammation of the achilles. Very painful, and that lasted a few years. He also had a knee injury which made it difficult to run downhill. The curveballs kept coming.

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The holiday in Cyprus, when he visited his birthplace with his partner, changed things for Robert. By that time, he had “figured out, that I was able to run uphill without putting pressure on the Achilles, because it's just the type of incline. There's a difference between running cross-country and mountain running. Like in cross-country, when you approach, you run over a hill, and downwards the other side; in mountain running, you only run up the hill.” 

After a local uphill race in Cyprus, when he was visiting his birthplace in 2022, Robert figured out that uphill races would be the way to go. Just a few weeks ago, he took part in a World Cup uphill competition. One of a series of races, staged in Italy.

One shouldn't be fooled by the short length of 4.5 kilometers: “I went into it thinking it'd be a bit like Croagh Patrick. But to my dismay, it wasn't just uphill; it was called a vertical. There are some narrow sections where you don't want to get stuck behind people. Unfortunately, at the start everyone else went off like a sprint, and then I got caught in the traffic at the first narrow section.”

It was such a narrow trail, the first mile everyone was in single file. Passing through a second village Robert was able to overtake most of the runners.  “Then the last part of the trail was almost straight up—very steep incline. We were actually going up the last mile—a whole mile. You couldn't look down because it looked like a straight drop. So it was single file the whole way, again.”

This vertical race didn't put Robert off. On the contrary, he seems to have found his ideal running event and he is already looking forward to the next challenges. “Just, the steepness took me by surprise, it wasn’t an uphill trail; it was straight up the side of the mountain. I found myself doing a Spider-Man climb.”

He says, next time he will be prepared. Unless further curveballs are coming his way.