Running with the Kenyans

by Adharanand Finn

  The only problem with embarking on this experiment is that by the time we’ve packed our bags and we’re ready to go to the airport, I’m still only up to three-mile runs. I’m hardly in shape to keep up with the Kenyans, but the experiment has to go on. If it really is the secret to their success, I’ll soon catch up to where I was, and then, well, who knows where I’ll end up.

  * In 2011, Vivian Cheruiyot retained her world 5,000 meters title, as well as winning the 10,000 meters gold medal and the world cross-country championships.

  Four

  A zebra wanders past the mess tent

  Our plane touches down in Nairobi on a bright, late-December morning. As we unfold ourselves out of the cramped cabin, the warm, African air feels soft on our frazzled skin. It’s been almost twenty-four hours since we drove away from our cottage in Devon, leaving the garden and surrounding fields covered in a thick blanket of snow.

  We plan to spend most of our time in Kenya up in the Rift Valley, in a town called Iten. I’ve read so much about Iten that it has become an almost mythical place in my mind. Before we left England, I watched a local news report on the Internet in which the town’s taxi drivers were complaining that they couldn’t do their job properly because the roads were so clogged up with runners. It’s only a small town, with about four thousand residents, but I’ve read that at any one time you can find around one thousand top athletes living and training there.

  But before we get to Iten, we head off to spend a week with Marietta’s sister, Jophie, in Lewa, where I will run my first ever marathon at the end of the trip. Jophie first came to Kenya in 2004 to do some volunteer work on a monkey conservation project. One night, in a bar on the coast, she met Alastair. Of Scottish ancestry, but born and bred in Africa, Alastair is a tough man. Marietta’s brothers joke that he is like Crocodile Dundee, at one in the wildness of the bush. In Kenya they call them KCs, or Kenyan Cowboys. Big, strong men in leather boots and denim shorts who sit around drinking Tusker beer and talking in slow, deliberate voices about things like boreholes, hunting, and motorbikes. But even among the KCs, Alastair is tough.

  Jophie and Alastair have two small daughters and live in a tented camp in the middle of the bush. On New Year’s Eve, after the children are asleep, the four of us sit around the fire drinking Tusker. The trunk of a tree lies across the flames, burning in the middle. Alastair said he was going to look for firewood, and he came back with an entire tree across his shoulders. He is sitting there silent, with that wild, quizzical look he gets in his eyes after he has had a few beers. “So those guys up there, they can really run, you know,” he says, talking about the athletes in Iten.

  “I know,” I say.

  “How are you going to keep up? They’re not messing around up there. Those guys can run.”

  I still haven’t worked out how I’m going to keep up. At the moment I can barely walk after hurting my calf on a treadmill in a hotel in Nairobi. But after a few drinks, Alastair doesn’t wait around for answers. His question has already drifted off into the darkness. He is telling a story about when he was a safari guide in Botswana.

  “One time I went on this trip with a wealthy American couple. We’re talking rich, man. Gold Rolex watches dripping from their wrists. The three of us were walking through the bush when, from nowhere, this bull elephant is charging at us. So I push them both to the ground.” He almost falls out of his camp chair demonstrating how he pushed them. “I pushed them and then I turned and I charged at the elephant.”

  I look over at Jophie. She isn’t telling him to shut up.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “If you have a bull elephant charging at you, your best hope is to charge back. I had my arms waving around in the air and I was roaring as loud as I could.”

  He stops to take a sip of his beer. The fire crackles in the night. The stars spill across the sky above us.

  “It stopped,” he says. “Turned on its heels and ran.”

  The next evening, we get our own close encounter. At night in the camp you have to walk quickly from tent to tent, using a flashlight to look out for snakes or other wild animals. However, our cheap windup flashlights can barely light up the ground in front of us, let alone pick out a lion from the engulfing blackness. “Look for the eyes,” says Alastair, swinging his torch’s huge light beam across the darkness. “There.” A pair of staring eyes hovers unblinking in the beam less than thirty yards away. “Buffalo,” he says.

  Later, as we’re walking to our tent to go to bed, we hear a terrible grunting sound. It starts off far away, but with each grunt it gets louder and fiercer. It sounds like something running at us. We rush for the tent and I throw Lila through the opening before Marietta and I both dive in and zip up. Uma and Ossian are already fast asleep in their beds.

  “What was that?”

  “A lion,” says Marietta. She has heard the noise before on other nights, but from much farther away. It starts again. It sounds far away at the onset, but by the end of its roar you can almost feel the air vibrating. Lila is terrified, but she is trying not to cry.

  “I’ll get in your bed with you,” I say, as if I could fight off a lion.

  Alastair has told us that lions don’t know the difference between a tent and a rock, and that we are quite safe once we’re inside. But with all the ferocious grunting noises going on just outside, I start having doubts. Surely the lions can smell us. There are no people inside rocks. Then I remember that the zipper at the back of the tent is broken. The tent is actually open, partly, at the bottom. I try to forget I’ve just remembered that.

  It’s a ten-hour taxi ride from Lewa to Iten, so we decide to stop for the night in Nyahururu, another big running center. We book ourselves in at the town’s most exclusive hotel, the Thomson’s Falls Lodge, which employs a local athlete to take guests out running. His name is John Ndungu and he agrees to take me out for a run at 7:00 A.M. before we continue on our journey. I get the impression it’s a little late for him, but he gives me a crooked smile and says it’s fine.

  So on a bright, crisp morning at 8,000 feet, I head out for my first run with athletes in Kenya. I find John waiting for me at the main entrance to the lodge with another man, a serious-faced eighteen-year-old from John’s village called Lucas Ndungu. The two are not related, they tell me, surprised that I think they might be.

  I need to go slow and not too far, I tell them. I’m not only worried about keeping up, but I’m concerned that my new barefoot-running style might give me an injury if I push it too far too soon. To give my calves some added protection, I decide to wear racing flats rather than my barefoot shoes. It also means that I won’t have to feel embarrassed wearing new-fangled shoes designed to mimic the Kenyans’ running without shoes. Somehow, now that I’m here, that seems an odd thing to want to do.

  As we jog out along the hotel drive, two baboons ambling across the lawn turn to watch us briefly, before scuttling away. The security guard at the hotel gate gives us a salute. Once we’re out of the hotel complex, we turn onto a dirt track and head up into town toward the main road.

  The first thing I notice is that Lucas is wearing big, chunky running trainers and is landing heel first. John is wearing racing flats, a bit like mine, and is landing forefoot first. It’s far too soon to be drawing any conclusions, of course, but Lucas’s heel-first foot strike is unexpected.

  As we run, we pass streams of other athletes coming in the opposite direction, and none of them are barefoot. Most of the runners are wearing normal training shoes with lots of support around the heel. It’s hard to tell, running toward them, if they’re landing heel first or not, but it looks like some of them might be. I’m confused. Where are all the barefoot runners?

  The run in the end feels surprisingly gentle, considering the altitude. We run for thirty minutes, with the pace picking up slightly over the last mile or so. I’m just congratulating myself for keeping up with them when they tell me that they have already run six miles from their village to meet
me, and they plan to train again a few hours later.

  “You?” they ask.

  I’m not planning on running again for a few days.

  “I’m still adjusting to the altitude,” I say. “I don’t want to overdo it and get injured.” My calves feel fine, however, even though it’s the longest run I’ve done since I switched to my barefoot style.

  After we cool down, Marietta and the children come out to find us. Lila and Uma are all sleepy smiles and sticking-up hair, shaking hands with the two men and showing off their dolls. John turns to me and tells me that I now have four children. I give him a confused look. “Me,” he says, smiling. He’s older than me.

  Five

  Our house in Iten

  At the bottom of the Rift Valley the road to Iten crosses over a deep gorge. The driver stops for a rest and we all get out. Far down below, basking on a sandbank, their mouths fixed wide open, are four crocodiles. Ahead of us the road shimmers in the baking heat. On the roadside is a rickety honey stall, the bottles lined up in rows, glowing in the sun. In the distance the land rises up over four thousand feet to Iten, which sits perched on the edge of the Kerio escarpment.

  “Dad, I’m thirsty,” says Uma, standing in the shade of a withered tree. We’ve been on the road for about five hours, the children bumping around in the back, clambering over the seats, spilling their pens and sandwiches all over the floor. But we’re nearly there.

  From the bottom, the road winds up, twisting back and forth, twirling around cone-shaped foothills, the land changing color, turning greener the higher we rise. The driver keeps pointing at the thermometer gauge, which drops down another degree every few minutes. The cooler it gets, the more houses we see, and the more people sitting beside the road or walking along it. They glance over at us, the engine straining with the slope. At a sign for the Lelin Campsite, the car swings off the road onto a dirt track, bumping along, the underside scraping on the stones, until we come to a large, elaborate gate painted in blue and yellow, the word KARIBU (Welcome) in an arch above it.

  Before we left England I tried to arrange somewhere for us to live in Iten, but finding a house to rent in a small Kenyan town from the other side of the world was not easy. Most people who travel to the town stay either at an upmarket athletics training camp run by Lornah Kiplagat, the holder of four world records, or at the Kerio View, a hotel perched on the edge of the escarpment overlooking the valley. However, both of these places are beyond our budget, so instead we’ve decided, rather apprehensively, to stay at the Lelin campsite about five miles down the side of the valley.

  We arrive in the early afternoon. The campsite owner comes down from his house on a nearby hill to greet us. He shakes hands with everyone and shows us to our rooms. We have three rooms in his newly built cottages, two to sleep in and one to cook in. The kitchen room has a camping stove on the table and a few pots and plates on the bed. He is obviously delighted to have us stay, so I try not to look disappointed as he shows us around. The bedrooms are just big enough to fit the beds, the pillows are tatty bits of hard foam, the toilets have no seats, and there is no sink in the bathroom, just a tap on the wall. His smile drops when I ask him where the sink is. I mime brushing my teeth. Washing hands. He points to the tap.

  “Oh, you use that?” I say. “Of course. Perfect.”

  Although I didn’t manage to find a house, I did get ahold of a contact in Iten, a former athlete named Godfrey Kiprotich. He phoned me a few days before we left Lewa to tell me that he had found a place for us to rent. I’m hoping that he can come and get us and take us to see it, but when I call him he says he doesn’t have a car.

  “It’s in the garage,” he says. “But let me see what I can do.”

  He calls back a little while later to say he has arranged a lift for us. Sure enough, twenty minutes later a low-slung white car with tinted windows rolls into the campsite and a neatly dressed man with a gold watch steps out. His name is Christopher Cheboiboch, he says, looking around warily at the campsite, as though it might make his clothes dirty. “Are you a runner?” I ask, thinking he might be too old.

  He smiles. “Yes,” he says. “I have the fifth fastest time ever in the New York marathon.”

  He takes us very slowly in his car up the final stretch of the escarpment to Iten. We glide past a steady stream of people walking along the road. Children with sticks stand watching their cows grazing on the grass verges, or run, barefoot, disappearing into the long grass and undergrowth. At the top of the valley, a rusting sign over the road welcomes us to Iten.

  As we drive into town and up along the main street for the first time, we gaze out at the half-collapsed wooden market stalls, the carts pulled by donkeys, ladies sitting on top of piles of clothes for sale. It’s market day and the place is full of people. Cows and sheep seem to wander around freely, poking their noses into piles of rubbish left on the dirt verges beside the road. People ride by with their bicycles stacked ten feet high with mattresses, crates of chickens, firewood. Ahead of us, a small bus drives away with two people still hanging out the door.

  Christopher calls out to a man in the street, who comes over to the car. They shake hands. Christopher gives the man some money and then drives on. We sail slowly up the road, past a small supermarket with two speakers placed outside blaring crackly music. On the other side of the road sits a pristine, white mosque. Red dirt roads cut through rows of rusted tin roofs rising up the slopes on either side. It looks just like any other roadside town that we passed through on the way from Lewa.

  We drive through the town before we realize it, emerging out the other end and pulling off the road, down a rutted track, past a boarded-up wooden bar, to Lornah Kiplagat’s training camp. Christopher pulls in regally as the gates are swung open by the security guard. This is the most state-of-the-art training camp in town, with a gym and a swimming pool. There are no Kenyan athletes living here, the camp catering instead to foreign runners. As soon as we get out of the car, I spot the British international runner Helen Clitheroe. She’s sitting at a table with her coach and I can hear them going over her training schedule on a laptop. A Greek athlete with a long goatee walks by, lost in the music from his iPod. A man with long, blond hair, looking more like a surfer than an athlete, bounds out of the gym. It’s Toby Tanser. I was reading about him in the newspaper in Lewa last week. I’ve also got his book, More Fire, about how to run like a Kenyan, in my bag. I stop him and say hello.

  Toby has an encyclopedic knowledge of Kenyan running and is friends with just about every athlete here. He also heads up a charity, Shoe4Africa, which is building a school and a children’s hospital near Iten. He is full of optimism about everything. When I tell him we’re looking for a house to rent, he says, “Finding accommodation in Iten is not a problem.” As he says it, a group of young Kenyan men walk by.

  “Erastus,” Toby calls to one of the men, who ambles over. Erastus is wearing a neat leather jacket and a big grin. In his hand he has an expensive cellphone. “What’s happening with your house?” Toby asks him as they shake hands. “Is it free to rent?”

  The man nods.

  “There you go,” Toby says to me. “This man has the nicest house in Iten. What did I tell you?”

  Before he rushes off, Toby offers to take me on a running tour of the town. It’s an offer I can’t refuse.

  While we’re talking, Godfrey, my contact with the other house for rent, turns up. He’s dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and must be in his midforties. I call Marietta and the children over. While I’ve been talking, they’ve been wandering around, trying to keep out of the way of the athletes. Godfrey greets us like long-lost friends, crouching down to shake the children’s hands. He’s full of apologies for not having a car. It’s in the garage, he tells me again. Instead he has hired a taxi and is with another former runner, William Koila. Between Godfrey, Koila, the driver, and the five of us, it’s a bit of a squash, but we all bundle in and head out.

  Godfrey tells us the house is in
a “very nice neighborhood,” as we drive along over a bumpy dirt track resembling a dry mogul ski run. It’s the sort of road I wouldn’t even attempt to drive on in England. The weighed-down taxi scrapes over the bumps as we pass some small houses with smashed windows and overgrown gardens. We stop outside a black, corrugated iron gate. The driver beeps his horn. Out on the street, two men are sitting on the counter of a small, wooden kiosk and staring at us. On the other side of the street, a two-story house is penned in close behind a high wooden fence. Pairs of eyes are peeking out between the gaps. Lila and Uma, leaning out of the car window, peer back.

  “See what a nice area this is?” Godfrey says as we wait. He’s sitting squashed in the front seat with Koila. I don’t know what a bad area looks like, so it’s hard to judge. I look over at Marietta and the children. They all look slightly breathless, as though suddenly everything is happening too fast. Marietta holds my hand. Ossian, standing on her lap like the captain of a ship, watches out the front window, an anxious look on his face.

  The gate is pulled open by a workman in overalls, revealing a large, sweeping garden with a bungalow about halfway down. It’s painted blue and white and has a red tin roof. It looks quite nice. Behind the house is a view out across the valley.

  “They’ve built it the wrong way around,” says Marietta, as we walk around it. “Surely the house should face out toward the view.” Instead, all the windows overlook the garden and the eight-foot corrugated metal fence that runs around the perimeter, blocking everything else out. To one side is the roof of a neighboring house.

  “That house belongs to Ismael Kirui,” Koila tells me. That’s the athlete who won my favorite race, the 1993 world championships 5,000 meters, by sprinting away from the field with seven laps to go. Before I get too excited, Koila tells me that Kirui doesn’t actually live there but rents out the house.