Darren Campbell, the British Olympic sprinter, was my sprint coach at Middlesbrough - yet the best advice he gave me was to slow down. That might sound strange but he said: 'You have too much speed - you don't always need to run at 100 per cent.' I was used to running flat out every time, but he told me, 'You know how quick you are, slow down.'
A couple of years ago, I had my DNA sequencing done, and it is all anonymous. When the results came back, my musculature type said, 'most likely to be a sprinter.'
I don't have a sprinter's body.
I am a sprinter, and I love to go fast. It's very difficult for me to be patient and follow a race strategy or conserve energy.
When I hit New York in 1972, I thought I was a sprinter. I thought that I would star in a Broadway show and do a movie and win an Oscar by the time I was 25. It turned out that I'm a long distance runner.
As a little kid, not only is my dad Jo-Jo White, but M. L. Carr is involved in the family, Red Auerbach is my godfather, and my stepmother was an Olympic-caliber sprinter. Athletes were all around. I happened to be a natural athlete. If I wasn't, it might have been hell. But I never got any pressure from my mom and dad to be an athlete.
The next great decathlete is going to be a runner. I still feel that a Dan O'Brien, if he was a runner and not a sprinter, could have gone over 9,000 points.
I don't have any close friends that are my competitors. I think that's just the nature of being a sprinter.
We crave instant success these days. If you are a really good sprinter and long jumper, you don't want to spend two or three years on a whole new set of events. You're used to doing well and it's difficult to give that up.
You need to become more than one type of athlete. You have to be a sprinter, a weight man and a distance guy all in one.
