A long time ago Ser-Od Bat-Ochir became one of the world’s most prolific distance runners, he planted himself at the starting line of the Hong Kong Marathon in 2002. At the time, Ser-Od had never run longer than 20 kilometers — or about 12 miles — even in training.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said.
That hardly stopped him from running with a leading group of Kenyans for the first few miles, after which the marathon imposed its unrepentant brand of hardship. As he trudges to the finish line, which is out of contention, Ser-Od realizes: Marathons are long and hard.
“I just thought, I don’t want this to happen again,” he said. “But here I am.”
Yes, here is Ser-Od, now 41, and there is no one else like him. A five-time Olympian, he has now run 74 marathons and represented Mongolia at every major international competition since 2003.
On Sunday morning in Budapest, with the support of his wife Oyuntuya Odonsuren, who moonlights as his coach, Ser-Od made his 11th consecutive appearance at the World Athletics Championships, in the men’s marathon.
In the process, Ser-Od became a uniquely popular figure in the marathon world: a self-made runner who emerged from obscurity to become a near-permanent presence on the global stage.
“Tough as nails,” says Tim Hutchings, a broadcaster and former world-class runner, “and a gentle, smiling soul.”
Ser-Od, whose 5-foot-7 frame has the smooth aerodynamics of a hang glider, still has outsize goals. He hopes to improve on his personal best of 2 hours 8 minutes 50 seconds. He hopes to finish in the top eight in a major marathon. And he hopes to race next summer at the Paris Olympics.
“I knew it wasn’t going to be easy,” he said.
But when has his path been easy? In an interview over coffee one afternoon, he reflected on his roots, recalling his childhood in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital, where his father taught industrial arts and his mother was a kindergarten teacher.
Ser-Od was not particularly academic-minded when he was young — “There is nothing I hated more than studying,” he said, laughing — but he was a good athlete. His first race was at a school sports festival, where he and his classmates were given five minutes to see how far they could run. Ser-Od won easily.
“I liked that feeling,” he said in Japanese through his agent, Brett Larner, who also acted as his translator.
Ser-Od continued throughout high school and, after entering university, briefly taught physical education. But the pay was low, he said, and the long hours cut into his training. He often has no choice but to run at night, and if you’ve never experienced the luxury of jogging on a cold night in Mongolia, Ser-Od can tell you all about it.
“It’s pretty cold and dark,” he said.
When Ser-Od started, Mongolian culture was lacking, he said. People would see him bundled up in four or five layers of sweat and stare at him like he was juggling cats on a unicycle.
But he already had big dreams, when he watched Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie win the men’s 10,000 meters at the 2000 Summer Olympics on television. Ser-Od began to wonder: How does one become an international athlete? Is it possible for him to compete in the world championships? Or even the Olympics?
“And because there’s really no history of athletics or running in Mongolia, nobody knows,” he said. “It’s a learning process.”
After his marathon debut in Hong Kong, Ser-Od quit his teaching job and joined the national police as an officer, who could win races. The national police have a track and field club, and Ser-Od is a bit of a ringer.
More importantly, Ser-Od now has the necessary funds to train more regularly. In 2003, she made her first appearance at the world championships, placing 63rd in a time of 2:26.39, breaking Mongolia’s national record by about 10 minutes.
“Everyone was amazed that a Mongolian could run so fast,” said Ser-Od. “They said it was crazy, that no one could break it.”
Ser-Od continued to break it — he ran a test event for the 2008 Olympic marathon in 2:14.15 — but he was confident he still had untapped potential when, a year later, he met Gebrselassie at a road race in England. Ser-Od said he had dined with Gebrselassie several times and took full advantage of the opportunity to ask him questions about training.
“I still don’t know what I’m doing,” said Ser-Od. “So I asked him, ‘What does a world-class marathoner have to do to run at that level?’ And Haile said, ‘The most important thing is to recognize what works for you and not worry about what others are doing.’”
After the race, Ser-Od was going down the elevator when he bumped into Gebrselassie again.
“And I will never forget this: He asked if we could take a picture together,” said Ser-Od.
It was a formative moment for Ser-Od, who drew inspiration from their encounter and continued to improve. He had a top-10 finish in the 2011 London Marathon. What works for him? A grueling training program that seems to invite all the atmospheric conditions of the planet.
“I train completely by myself, and I do everything,” he said. “I’m training in the heat. I practice in the snow. I trained in the rain. I trained in the dark. And that produced results.”
It is also taking a toll. In 2014, Ser-Od knew he could use some company — “It’s really tiring to train yourself,” he says — so he moved with his wife and four children to Japan, where he joined a professional that team.
But marathoning is an unforgiving profession, and when Ser-Od found himself without a sponsor after the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, he fell into a funk. He thought his career was over. He reached out to Larner, whom he met by running.
“I was like, ‘Uh, I’m a big fan, but a 40-year-old Mongolian? How am I going to find you a sponsor?'” Larner recalled. “I told him I’d see what I could do , but I thought it was hopeless.”
After making some inquiries out of nowhere, Larner connected with Shingo Oshiro, the president of a solar panel company that had recently started a women’s running team. Oshiro offers Ser-Od a contract and tells him that he will hire him as a coach for the team when he retires from racing.
“I am very grateful that they believed in this idea of going for the sixth Olympics and wanted to support me,” said Ser-Od. “I really want to pay what I owe them.”
However, he knows that making it to next year’s Paris Games will be another challenge. He is, in some ways, a victim of his own success. It’s all relative, but marathoning in Mongolia has become more popular thanks in part to Ser-Od. He recalled visiting Ulaanbaatar this spring — he still has a house there — and stopping for selfies.
“Oh, it’s Ser-Od!” he remembered the shouting of the people.
In a development that would have been unthinkable a few years ago, there are now four Mongolian men competitive enough to race in events such as the world championships. The problem is that the country can only send three of them to major international competitions.
In fact, Ser-Od thought he was in danger of disappearing from Budapest. After she placed 26th at last year’s world championships in Eugene, Ore., injuries hampered her training. As a result, his national ranking dropped to fourth. After an incredible result at the Copenhagen Marathon in May, he braced himself for the worst.
“We kind of thought, Hey, maybe that’s it,” Larner said. “But there is a miracle.”
It turns out that one of Ser-Od’s Mongolian rivals didn’t race well in Copenhagen. The country’s athletics federation awarded its last place in the world championships to Ser-Od.
“It was fortunate,” Larner said. “So lucky.”
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a little luck, especially after years of hard work.
However, Ser-Od did not finish Sunday’s world championship marathon after an unfortunate accident: He went into a pothole early in the race, straining his right leg.
And yet, against all odds, Ser-Od’s end seems far away.
