Felimon Henok: Born to run

Felimon Henok has been a sprinter since his earlier years in Ethiopia, from running to and from the local markets to playing games with the other kids in the neighbourhood.

The Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) Bold track and field sprinter recalls picking up fresh groceries for his family almost everyday, at eleven or twelve years old.

"The stores would be 200-300 metres away, so your family would give you some money and you would buy some stuff and come back," he says. "And if there's something missing, you always go back and come back. I'd do at least two to three trips a day."

Often, Henok says there would be other kids hanging outside, nearby.

"Sometimes, just for the fun of it, we'd give the teenagers a nudge to get a rise out of them and they'd chase us all the way back home," he says, with a grin. "You get to do a lot of sprinting when you're the youngest child and getting assigned the grocery run regularly."

During those days, however, Henok hadn't yet discovered his passion for track and field. Instead, he had his sights set on playing in the NBA.

When the athlete was 15 years old, he moved to Canada to play basketball. Living with his aunt and uncle in Toronto, he trained at his local school and through the Medcan power project — a mentorship program aimed at leveling the playing field in sport by providing high-level young athletes with professional training, education and more.

As his performance on the court developed, Henok began looking into colleges and basketball programs in the States, and they were looking right back at him with scholarships in hand.

And then in the sprinter's senior year, he had just been accepted to Columbia University when a knee condition he had previously been struggling with called patellar tendonitis, acted up.

"Basically, I just have extra stuff in my knee. My knee was like growing extra bone, which I needed surgery for," he says. "I used to get taped up before games all the time and it just kept getting worse and worse, to the point where I was limping."

He didn't want to do surgery. And that left him with only one other option: to quit playing until his knee had fully healed. "So I stopped being an athlete for a while."

Henok says the transition was tough at first. Instead of playing in the states, he opted to stay in Toronto and shift gears. He felt lost for a while, he says, but he never gave up faith that he'd find himself again.

He began going to the gym and focusing on his physical skill in that way. With an overwhelming passion and love for sport and a dream of helping other people achieve their dreams, the athlete began to study food and nutrition at TMU.

"I thought, 'How can I help athletes in a different way? Because I still wanted to be in the realm of sport," he says.

Alongside his full-time studies, Henok became a certified fitness trainer and began working at the Mattamy Athletic Centre. In his third year, the pandemic hit.

"I couldn't work at the gyms because they were closed. Couldn't go to school anymore, so that just brought me down to doing nothing," he says. "And during that time, I filled that little basketball void with going to the gym and stuff with my friends – and I didn't have that anymore."

So he began to run.

"My friend and I started this little challenge of seeing how fast we could run a 5K," he said. "During that challenge I was pretty much running every day consistently. One day we decided to try a hundred meter and two hundred meter."

Henok ran the 100m in 11.4 seconds.

"For context, that's pretty good for a person who's never run before."

Recognizing his newly discovered skill, the sprinter joined a track team and started training as soon as he could.

"It just gave me a sense of identity again," he says. "I'm always the type of person who constantly wants to push myself and track and field is pure athleticism. So when I was able to do that again, it just gave me a vision, like a goal of going to the Olympics and I ran with it."

Today, Henok is an Athletics Canada athlete, training at Extreme Velocity Track Club and continues to push himself everyday. He is also a fifth-year food and nutrition major and a Bold athlete.

"I'm basically going to take track as far as I can go and I'm cool with that," he says. "Sequentially I do like sports nutrition very much and I'm excited for where my post-athletic career will take me as well."

Until then, he will keep pushing himself, keeping the faith and taking life 200m at a time.

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Players Mentioned

Felimon Henok: 2

Players Mentioned

Felimon Henok
: 2