I'm very close to my mum since we got in touch again.. no child should have to go through what I did

MO FARAH AT 40.. TRAINING FOR MARATHON

Sir Mo Farah eats a lot of pasta.  Tonnes of the stuff. But not birthday cake, even though the London 2012 hero turned 40 yesterday.

I'm a Celeb star Mo has ditched any showbiz trappings and is back in full bootcamp mode ahead of the London Marathon on April 23, after being forced to pull out last year with a hip injury.

So every week - even birthday ones - he runs 125 miles through the beautiful Ethiopian mountains, where he's been training for the last month.

It's a gruelling existence, but that's the life of a double-double gold Olympian.

"I feel all right," he says. "I'm getting there. My hip is taking a while to recover.

But I'm back, I'm not in any pain at all.

"Last year, I was training with Bashir Abdi, who finished third in the Marathon; I wasn't in bad shape. But injuries come as part of what we do." It is something his mum Aisha, who still lives in Somaliland where Mo was born, likes to playfully nag him about.

He says: "She asks me, 'Why you running?' She doesn't quite understand it. She's like, 'Why are you hurting yourself?' I say, 'I do enjoy it, even if it's painful at times. It's just Mum being Mum.

The true story of Mo's close relationship with his mother was only revealed last year in the BBC documentary, The Real Mo Farah.

They lost contact for years after she sent Mo to live with relatives in Djibouti to save him from the Somali civil war in which his father was killed in 1987.

Shockingly, and unbeknownst to Aisha, little Mo was trafficked to the UK aged eight or nine on false papers and forced to work as a domestic servant for a family in West London.

His birth name, Hussein Abdi Kahin, was dropped and he was threatened by the traffickers not to tell anyone about his past, if he wanted to "keep food in his mouth".