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LONG

DISTANCE

LOVE

by Tim Vanderpool

he first time Abdi Abdirahman ran with a track team, he was
wearing boots. Not the athletic gear you’d expect of a future
Tstar — but, then, Abdirahman’s story is anything but typical.
He and his family came to the United States as refugees in 1990,
fleeing the Somali civil war. Six years later, he was attending Pima
Community College when a friend suggested that he try running.
The next day, he approached Pima’s cross-country coach.
“He asked me if I’d ever run before,” Abdirahman recalls. “I said,
‘No.’ But I ran with those kids for five miles, and I came in second —
wearing my jeans and Rockport boots.”
Around that time, acclaimed UA cross-country coach Dave
Murray started noticing a skinny kid dashing through the hills west
of town. A light went off. “The best runners in the world are from
Africa — Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia,” Murray says. “There is a grace
in their running that’s just beautiful. I started talking to him and
said, ‘Hey, why don’t you come to the UA?’”
Murray concedes that Abdirahman’s times back then were
nothing spectacular and that he had to convince his associate
coaches to trust his hunch. “They thought I was crazy,” he says.
“I had offered Abdi a scholarship. That was unheard of at the UA’s
level of competition.”

Photo: Abdi Abdirahman celebrates after finishing third in the U.S. Olympic
42 ARIZONA ALUMNI MAGAZINE Trials Marathon on Jan. 14, 2012, in Houston. David J. Phillip/Associated Press