Luiza Gega confesses the sacrifices of athletics: I started from nothing, I didn't have an idol

Luiza Gega has shown the sacrifices for her achievements in athletics. Speaking to "European Athletics", the Albanian athlete says that she does the training alone and that sometimes she wants to stop.

"All the time I train alone. I stay away from home, my friends, my family. We don't have that mentally tough group. When I have free time, I don't have friends to eat or drink something. My best friend is my phone. For this reason, I feel tired and sometimes I feel that I should stop, have a life" , says Gega.

The 34-year-old is the reigning European champion in the 3000m steeplechase and holds records at every distance from 800m to the marathon.

Gega says that everything started from nothing and saw an idol.

"I started from nothing. We are not like the big countries. They have idols, great athletes to follow. I only follow myself to try to improve.”

Her running story began at the age of 14. Gega grew up in Durrës, a city of about 175,000 on the Adriatic coast, and first tried athletics at school, winning and qualifying for a competition against students from other cities, where she also went to win.

"But until I was 19 I wasn't a good athlete, I ran just for fun ," she says. "When I got to university I said: 'Okay, now I have to think: do I want to focus more on university or this?'

It was then that she came under the tutelage of Taulant Stermasi, a national team coach who has guided her career ever since. Her first appearance in the championship was in 2011, Gega could not win.

"I was behind all the girls and I said to my coach, 'I'm not going to run like that again,'" she says. "I represent myself, but also the colors of my country, so I wanted to be with the group. From 2011 I started training hard."

Gega continued to improve, continued to work hard, lowering Albania's record to 9:19.93 to finish ninth at the world finals in Doha in 2019 before finishing 13th at the Olympic final in Tokyo.

Last July, she finished a brilliant fifth at the world finals in Oregon in a national record of 9:10.04 and finally stepped up to the top step at a major championship last August, winning the European steeplechase title fashionable from gun to bar. championship record of 9:11.31 in Munich.

In the end, the amount of hard work over the last decade and all the setbacks she had faced were clearly visible as Gega broke down in tears.

"People asked me: 'Why are you crying?' But not everyone knows how difficult it was for many years. Most of them said, "I cried with you at that moment," because they felt so proud."