That evening I head down to the track for a training session with my running club. I try to run like Kirui, staring straight ahead, going as fast as I can right from the start. It’s one of the best training sessions I ever have. Usually, if you run too hard at the beginning, you worry about how you’ll feel later. You can feel it in your body, the anticipation of the pain to come. Usually it makes you slow down. It’s called pacing yourself. But that night I don’t care. I want to unshackle myself and run free like a Kenyan.
The night I spend hurtling wide-eyed around the track after watching Ismael Kirui turns out to be one of the last sessions I ever have with my running club. Just over a month later I pack my belongings into my parents’ car and drive up to Liverpool to begin college. Although I join the college running team, my focus on training is soon lost amid the whirlwind of university life. Like most teenage students, I’m unleashed into a new world in which anything seems possible. Running seems to belong in a previous life, although I never completely let go of it.
The extent to which my training peters out becomes clear by the time the British University cross-country championships come around the following March. The night before the race, I take off on a spontaneous road trip to Wales with three friends, clambering onto the team bus the next morning ready for little else other than sleep. It’s a miracle I make it at all.
A hundred miles away, in the small northern town of Durham, it’s a cold, blustery day. I lace up my spikes and go through the familiar routine of jogging and stretching, but once the race starts, my legs, sucked down by the thick mud, give up without a fight. I jog around, unable to rouse myself to run any faster. I finish in 280th position. My good friend and rival from my running days in Northampton, Ciaran Maguire, comes second. Just a few years earlier we battled neck and neck all the way in the county cross-country championships, until he edged past me on the line to win. And now here we are separated by almost three hundred people. I see him after the race. “All you need is to give yourself one good year of training,” he says consolingly. I nod, but deep down I know it is not going to happen.
Over the years, I’ve met others like me: former runners who still, every now and then, dig out their old sneakers and start lapping the local park in the vague hope of remembering what it felt like. We sign up to a local 10K or half marathon, determined to get back in shape. But something—life, an injury, a lack of dedication—always gets in the way, and we stop training. But the embers refuse to die, and we refuse to chuck our moldy old sneakers away. We know we might need them again, that the urge to run will return.
After I have children, it becomes even harder to find the time to train, that is, until I manage to land a freelance job writing race reports for Runner’s World magazine. Although it doesn’t pay much, it makes the running feel less self-indulgent. It isn’t just me doing something for myself in an effort to revive some lost childhood fervor. It is now work.
With regular assignments from Runner’s World, I start training more frequently over the next few years, although with young children it’s still hard to get out more than twice a week. I descend the stairs from my office to find Marietta with little Ossian hanging off her hip, struggling to get lunch ready, as my two daughters, Lila and Uma, are screeching at each other and tussling over a book. The yard is overgrown, the trash needs to be taken out, and the phone is ringing. It’s not easy to say, I’m just popping out for a long run. See you in an hour or so. So even though I start racing regularly, my times barely improve. I run my first half marathon when I’m twenty-nine, in 1 hour 30 minutes. Seven years later I’ve run three more in exactly the same time.
I keep telling myself that one day I will train hard and run really fast. I’m not sure what that would mean exactly—an under-three-hour marathon, perhaps? But the years are slipping away. Every time an athlete over thirty-five wins a big race on television, I tell myself that there is still hope. It isn’t that I want to achieve any specific goal; I just don’t want to look back one day and regret that I never gave myself a decent chance to see what I could do.
Two
“I think it’s a brilliant idea.”
I sit looking out of the car window on the way to a 10K charity race near our home in Devon. It’s a blustery September morning and I’m not feeling well. If I wasn’t writing about it for Runner’s World, I probably wouldn’t run. I make myself feel better by resolving to start at a slow pace and to just enjoy the scenery. The course loops around the grounds of the lovely Powderham Castle, past deer and along the Exe Estuary. It will be nice to take in my surroundings as I run for a change. As we park the car, I have no idea that something is about to happen that will make me rethink my whole approach to running.
Once I get to the start line, I seem to forget about my illness, instinctively snaking my way to the front. I can’t let myself start behind with all the fun runners, no matter how bad I feel. There are almost one thousand people in the race, but most of them are here purely for the fun of the event or to raise money for charity. The actual running is just an excuse. For many, it’s the chatter of friends, the picnics on the grass, and the general sense of the occasion that brings them out.
It occurs to me afterward, though, when we’ve all finished, that perhaps, secretly, it’s the other way around. Afterward, the race is all anyone wants to talk about. What time did you do? I couldn’t get going. I went off too fast. People beam as they tell each other how tired they feel, their faces flushed, their bodies tingling blissfully as they pull their tracksuits back on. Perhaps, really, all the other stuff is the excuse. If it comes disguised as a charity event, with team T-shirts and picnics, people will have a good excuse to run. In fact, they’ll come flocking. A thousand people, and nearly all of them feeling better for it afterward. One woman tells me, as we sit on the grass, that she thinks running is like getting drunk in reverse. With drinking, it feels great at first, but then you start feeling awful. With running, you feel awful at first, but then, after you finish, you feel great. That sounds like a much better deal.
As the starting gun fires, we surge forward across the grass. I’m near the front as we come to the first corner. A sharp bend leads us on to the gravel drive up toward the castle. As we run, a man beside me asks me what my personal best time is. “I don’t know,” I say. I did run a 10K a few years before, in forty-seven minutes, but I’m sure I’m faster now.
We clatter in under the arched entrance to the castle and across a small courtyard. My daughters are standing there with my mother-in-law, Granny Bee. “Here he is,” she tells them, pointing me out among the sea of charity T-shirts. “Come on, Dhar,” she shouts. My daughters just stare at me as I run by. I smile at them, to reassure them it’s okay, it’s still me. And with that, we head out under the arch and off into the countryside.
The course dinks down a short hill and then along by the Exe Estuary, the sailing boats bobbing and clinking out on the water. I’m still near the front, and decide to stretch my legs to make use of the wind blowing behind us. No one else seems to have the same plan, and they let me go, racing off at the front, blown like tinder along the path. The two-kilometer marker seems to appear almost instantly. Surely they’ve put it in the wrong place—we haven’t run that far already, have we? I look back. I’m now a good 40 meters clear at the front. If I keep this up, I think, I could finish in the top ten. In my mind I’m already rehearsing how I’m going to tell the story afterward. I was still in the lead at three kilometers.
As the three-kilometer marker comes and goes, I revise my story. I was still in the lead at four kilometers. And five kilometers.
I keep expecting a stream of runners to pass me at any moment. Where are they? What is going on? It’s strange being out on my own. It’s almost as though I’m not in a race at all, but on a solitary training run, except for the fact that there are a thousand unseen runners massing behind me, chasing me. Like some fugitive, each time I feel my legs slowing I force myself on, bursting up hills, tumbling do
wn grassy banks. I’m running more on some primal survival instinct than any fierce desire to win.
In the end, I finish well clear of the field in a huge personal best time of 38 minutes 35 seconds. My daughters run over as I cross the line and give me a big hug. A reporter from the local newspaper comes up and starts asking me questions. I feel like I’ve won the Olympics.
As I sit in Granny Bee’s car on the way home, I wonder again, for the millionth time since I left school, what would happen if I trained properly. If I did what Ciaran said, and gave myself one year of real training. But how could I fit it in? As the car purrs along, the wipers swishing back and forth, the girls quiet in the back, tired from a morning of running around outside, I begin devising a crazy plan.
A few months earlier, Marietta’s sister, Jophie, suggested I come to Kenya, where she lives, to run the Lewa Marathon. Famous as one of the toughest marathons in the world, the race is run across a wildlife conservancy. “There are lions roaming around,” she said, as if that somehow made it more tempting. “But there are helicopters in the sky to make sure they don’t come too close.” I wasn’t really listening. I wasn’t ready to run a marathon, and besides, I couldn’t travel all the way to Kenya just for a race. Life doesn’t work like that. Right? But now, sitting here weaving our way along the A379 back to Exeter, it seems like a great idea.
For years I’ve been telling people the story of Annemari Sandell. In 1995, when she was a talented junior athlete in Finland, she traveled to Kenya and spent six weeks training in the Rift Valley in the lead-up to the world cross-country championships, which were held in Durham, England. I was there, on a cold, rain-drenched afternoon, watching as the sixteen-year-old Sandell ran away from the Kenyans and Ethiopians to win the title. What had happened to her out there in Kenya? What did she find that had turned her into a world champion? Could I find it, too?
The Kenyans are, quite simply, the greatest runners on Earth. Considering that running, and in particular long-distance running, is the most universal, accessible, and widely practiced sport in the world, it is remarkable that one tiny corner of the planet can dominate it so thoroughly. In virtually any elite road race anywhere in the world, a group of Kenyans will break away within minutes at the front of the field.
The facts and figures attesting to their running dominance are incredible. In 2011 the top twenty fastest marathons of the year were all run by Kenyans. And of the top twenty fastest marathons of all time, seventeen were run by Kenyans. (The other three, incidentally, were run by athletes from Kenya’s east African neighbor, Ethiopia.)
From 1991, at the world athletics championships in Tokyo, to 2009, at the world championships in Berlin, Kenyan men won a total of ninety-three world and Olympic medals at middle- and long-distance running events. Thirty-two of those medals were gold. In that same eighteen-year period, spanning ten world championships and five Olympic games, Britain won precisely zero medals.* Even the United States managed only three gold medals, and two of those were won in Osaka in 2007 by a man who became a U.S. citizen at the age of twenty, having been born and raised and developed as an athlete in … you guessed it, Kenya.
As a teenager I used to imagine I was running across the plains of Africa, as I skirted around the edges of the Northampton housing estates. I used to love to run on hot days, when the heat would visibly shimmer across the road, because it was how I imagined Kenya to be. Of course I had no idea. I was just daydreaming. But the thought of doing it for real is intoxicating. Not just running the Lewa Marathon, but going and training with the Kenyans, too. To discover their secret, as Annemari Sandell did. But first I’ll have to sell the idea to Marietta. If I’m going to go, I want her and the children to come, too.
I first met Marietta in college in Liverpool. Her hair was cut in a boyish crop, she ate a diet of nothing but rice and seeds, and she liked techno music. I could have never guessed she was from an aristocratic Devonshire family. She had a self-contained air that intrigued me, and we ended up becoming good friends, before I finally realized I had fallen for her. It took one of my friends to point it out.
“I think you’re in love with Marietta,” he said in a bar one night.
“What?” I said. “Are you mad?” But he was right.
Breaking the news to her was awkward, since we were both living in the same shared house with three other friends, and she had a boyfriend. At first she wasn’t keen, but I was consumed with teenage love, staring forlornly out of rain-splattered windows, sitting up late at night writing poetry. For about a month I couldn’t get her out of my head, I was thinking about her constantly. And then, suddenly, it was gone.
I felt relieved, like a weight had been lifted from me. I walked inside the house one afternoon and saw her standing in the kitchen. It’s okay, I wanted to tell her, I’m cured. But she ran over and kissed me. Eight years later, Lila, our eldest daughter, was born.
Ever since we had children, Marietta and I have wanted to take them traveling, to give them an adventure, open their eyes to the immensity of the world. When I first met Marietta, she had just come back from traveling around South America for a year. I was impressed. I’d never been outside the British Isles.
After we got together, we took time out from school to travel to Venezuela together, and a few years later we both went back there again. So we figured South America was our stomping ground. Marietta was always suggesting we take the children there. “You mean for a holiday?” I’d ask. “No, for longer. Six months. A year. Imagine it, they’d learn to speak Spanish, it would be an incredible education for them.” I was always the one coming up with the excuses, afraid to leave the safety of my job, our little house, our families.
So I don’t think Marietta will be fazed by the idea of an extended trip. And why not Africa? Her brother lives in Tanzania. Her sister lives in Kenya. In some ways our visit is well overdue. The only snag may be when I tell her I want to go there to run. Marietta has no interest in running. In our last year at school I tried to get her enthused about it. We lived beside a park, which was about two miles around on the outside. I used to take her out every few nights, at a slow jog, and by the end of a few grueling weeks we made it the whole way around without stopping. That night Marietta developed a huge migraine and lay in bed cursing me and my training regime. Her running career, it seemed, was over.
Years later I decided that perhaps she would be better at middle distances, such as the 800 meters. Perhaps the lap around the park was just too far. By then we were living in London, so I somehow managed to convince her to come to the local track for a 400-meter time trial. If she could run it in under ninety seconds, I thought, we’d have something to work on. She obviously thought I was mad as I took her through the warm-up routine and got her to stand with her toes just behind the start line. I held the watch up. Ready? Go.
We started off, jogging. “It’s only one lap,” I said. “Can you go any faster?” She looked like she was going to punch me.
No, running is not for her. Sometimes we sit across from each other at the table in the evening and I find myself recounting some new world record and telling her how the athletes were lapping in under sixty seconds, or how the winner ran a fifty-two-second last lap, and I see her eyes glazing over. So I’m not sure what she’s going to make of my plan to move us all out to the land of runners.
One night, after the children are in bed, I put forward my idea. Six months in Kenya. We’ll have an adventure. She’ll get to visit her sister. We’ll see elephants, zebras, go riding across the bush in the back of a jeep—the kids will love it. And I’ll get to run. Really run. With the greatest runners on earth. And if I find their secret, I can bottle it and make a fortune.
She looks at me across the table. “Are you serious?”
“Yes,” I say. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s a brilliant idea.”
* In the 2011 world championships in Daegu, Somali-born Mo Farah won Britain’s first medals in the middle- and long-d
istance events in over twenty years, with gold in the 5,000 meters and silver in the 10,000 meters. Kenya, despite no medals in either of these two races, ended the championships with seventeen medals, its biggest medal haul ever.
Three
It’s as though my feet are afraid to touch the ground.
“You’re brave,” says a neighbor in our village when she hears we’re off to Kenya. “But then, you lot are like that.” She’s trying to be nice, saying brave, but she means mad. We get quizzical looks from people whenever we mention our plan. But we’re pressing on with the preparations. The children, of course, take it all in their stride. One evening, as I’m putting them to bed, I conduct a mock television interview with Lila and Uma, pretending that they’re famous explorers. Ossian, picking up on the general sense of excitement, is running around in his pajamas yelling like a lion and laughing. I ask Uma what she thinks it will be like in Africa.
“Hot,” she says.
“And what else?” I probe.
She pulls a thoughtful face, looking up at the ceiling. “And not cold.”
Right now, that’s about as much as any of us know.
Running with the Kenyans Page 2