At age 10, Haftu Knight was an Ethiopian shepherd. Four years later, he found himself as a runner in Tyler, Texas, casually picking up running with midweek 16-milers.
The graduate student distance runner was born in Ethiopia and was adopted by the Knight family when he was 14 years old. Knight had never been exposed to an education system until he arrived in Tyler, where the then 14-year-old was homeschooled 12 hours a day, every day, to catch up on the American education system. The summer going into freshman year was comprised of learning the alphabet and elementary arithmetic on top of preparing for freshman-level classes, but Knight’s breather each day was escaping outside to run.