1 week ago
10
When George Mills is not pushing his body through 120-mile training weeks at his sparse altitude camp in Dullstroom, South Africa, he could teach Benedictine monks a thing or two about abstinence.
Last summer, when he won a European Championships 1500m silver medal in Rome, his celebrations consisted of nothing but a kombucha followed by a lengthy run the next morning.
And as Mills speaks before he competes over 3,000m at the European Indoor Championships in Apeldoorn on Saturday, he is eating boiled chicken and plain rice without any seasoning for lunch. “Flavour doesn’t make you fast,” he says.
The monastic regime does not end there. Asked whether he has any guilty pleasures, he shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’m a simple guy. I love to train, hang out with my friends and teammates if I’m able to. That’s a good life.”
Naturally, he is also in bed by 10pm. “Sleep is when you recover,” Mills says. “You need to try and optimise that. I try to nap most afternoons and obviously get a good night’s sleep. I have blue-light glasses, earplugs, eye masks – all those sorts of things.”
You must have a weakness, someone suggests. A chocolate biscuit perhaps? “No,” comes the one-word reply.
Mills, the son of the former England footballer Danny, is certainly intense. But the way he sees it, he has a limited window to maximise his talent so why shouldn’t he commit everything to succeeding?
The 25-year-old arrives in the Netherlands confident he can win a medal. Even if he knows that beating the double Olympic champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen will be tough, he is not entirely discounting it.
“Obviously he’s a phenomenal athlete,” says Mills. “Everyone’s got a target on their backs and in this sport no one is invincible. If you do everything right yourself and you’re 100% on the day, anything is possible.
“I got a taste of a medal in Rome last year. Now I want, at every championship I turn up at, to be competing for medals. That’s the aim.”
The European Indoors will be Mills’s first major competition since the Olympics in Paris, which did not go as planned. The week beforehand Mills was left severely weakened after he caught Covid. After crashing out of the 1500m in the semi-finals, he was tripped in the 5,000m heats, reinstated and put through to the final, but looked out on his feet as he finished 21st.
“I don’t really look at what could have been,” says Mills. “That’s a negative mindset. That doesn’t benefit you in the future at all. What I’ll say on Paris is that I was able to race five times and have five very different and mentally and physically challenging experiences. That will really benefit me in the next five years.”
But 2025 is a new year and Mills believes that a hard winter’s training with his teammates at the OAC (On Athletics Club) Europe has made him an even better athlete.
“The On team are like a family,” he says. “We spend every day together and do the hard yards with each other. That’s just how it is. I consider them more teammates than just the people wearing the same national flag on your vest because you probably see those people three or four days a year.”
He admits he likes nothing better than being in Dullstroom, which has an altitude of 2,100m – making it South Africa’s highest town – and a population of only 558 people.
“It is a special place,” he says. “I personally love it, hence why I spend so much time there. But there’s not much going on. Maybe a couple of coffee shops, a couple of restaurants. It’s essentially a tourist town with one road, one kilometre from bottom to top. We’ve a gym set up, there’s some good trails to run on.”
He pauses. “And for me that’s all I need.”
