By Jack Rathborn

Copyright independent

From the quiet, peaceful surroundings in the build-up to race day in Japan, George Mills’ time is now finally here. The British 5000m runner rarely deviates from a regimented routine. “Eat. Sleep. Train.” They are the fundamentals which have catapulted the son of former England defender Danny Mills into elite endurance company.

But with every box on the track ticked, Mills has been training the brain, too, visualising the legendary Sir Mo Farah and his iconic, raucous championship races, which so often developed into a fierce examination of an athlete’s intangibles, with emotions spilling out on the track. Mills snatched Farah’s British 5000m record in Oslo earlier this summer, slicing off more than six seconds to post a blazing 12mins 46.59secs.

Hoping to replicate his feats on the track, Mills has studied every stride from Farah’s golden moments: The agonisingly close finish to edge out Dejen Gebremeskel in that London 2012 5000m, that second glorious gold in the 10,000m as part of the unforgettable ‘Super Saturday’ and the famous double-double in Rio four years later.

“Of course,” Mills remarks when quizzed on his memories of Farah’s highlights, which also include gold medals at World Athletics Championships in 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017.

“I’ve been watching, I’ve got a lot of saved races, 5k races on my iPad. So I’ve been going through them, watching them, doing a lot of homework. Everything. As many as you can get on YouTube.”

Mills is looking to take pieces from past champions, tactics that could elevate his immense physiology and strength, built from running as much as 200km per week. A strategy that has proven profitable in comparison to 1500m silver medalist Jake Wightman, who sometimes runs as few as 80km per week. From that British record in Oslo, to the audacious run in Paris a week later in a 3mins 28.36secs, making him the second fastest Briton over 1500m in history, Mills has the fitness to compete for a medal this weekend.

But first, it’s Friday’s 5000m heat, with Mills second up alongside some fiendishly difficult competition in the USA’s world leader Grant Fisher, Olympic champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen and France’s 10,000m world champion Jimmy Gressier.

“You can learn anything you could learn. It’s just experience, everybody can watch a race. But if you’re really sat down, you’re watching a specific person, how they move through things and how they respond to things,” Mills explains.

“Obviously, no race is going to be the same, but you can also…You can also have the experience vicariously and add that to your armour.”

If Mills is pushing the boundaries, it is tied to his monastic lifestyle, often spent months at a time in the ordinary South African town of Dullstroom. Plates of food and peculiar recipes, including rice, banana slices, blueberries and fried eggs, and a bottle of kefir. “Flavour doesn’t make you fast,” Mills famously said earlier this year. So will the local delicacies appeal to him in Tokyo?

“Rice and fish, can’t complain. We will have it tonight,” Mills says with a smile, though he maintains there will be no additional soy sauce. Discipline, after all, is everything to the 26-year-old.

Away from training, Mills produces videos for his YouTube channel, as one of the few elite runners competing with a sea of amateurs competing for the sport’s eyeballs and revenue.

“I think the other stuff’s good,” Mills concedes. “But if you’re not performing well, nobody really cares. So I think that [running fast] is definitely the thing that needs to come first. In my opinion.”

Mills is then asked if he can step into the void left by Farah post-retirement.

“I do like to live a very regimented lifestyle and really apply myself as well as I can and see what my potential is,” he says. “I’m here to break records, run quick times and try to win medals. So that’s what I will try to do.

“For now, I see myself as a 1500m, 5k runner. I still feel like I have a lot of unfinished business over the 15 that I would like to attend to. But definitely in the future, I will test myself over 10k. I think there’s a lot of potential there.”

Farah, in fact, has anointed Mills in a way, with the pair sharing words after his record-breaking run in Norway.

“He sent me a text and then we spoke on the phone briefly,” Mills reveals. “So that was really nice. He was just very happy, congratulated me and was proud and offered his help if I needed anything in the future.”

If Mills’ training has been smooth, a tumble at the London Diamond League and a fractured wrist threatened to wreck his Tokyo dreams.

“I had to adjust slightly,” Mills recalls seven weeks on from surgery after a night in A&E in London before returning to his St Moritz camp in Switzerland.

“Running with the wrist is fine. Obviously it does change your form a little bit when you’ve had to have it in a sling for a bit and you’ve lost a bit of muscle mass and stuff and shoulder strength. But all round it’s pretty good.”

The work is now done, Mills hopes he can navigate that first hurdle, then, an almighty battle for a medal.