Running with the Kenyans

by Adharanand Finn

  “Your feet are not used to the terrain here,” the massage therapist tells me, pressing my toes to a pulp as I lie on the treatment room table in Lornah Kiplagat’s training camp (Lornah actually walks in mid-grimace and shakes my hand). “You need more cushioning on your shoes, because of all the stones,” the therapist tells me.

  So I’ve come full circle. To run like a Kenyan, it seems, I need to go back to where I started, and get myself a big, padded pair of sneakers. I can’t quite bring myself to do it, though.

  That afternoon we all walk down to the local mitumba, a weekly market selling mostly secondhand clothes shipped over from Europe and America by aid charities. The clothes are piled high on sacks laid out on the floor. Everything from mainstream brands to designer labels. For bargain hunters it’s a bonanza of cheap clothes, a jumble sale of epic proportions. Marietta loves it, and she and the children head down most Saturdays to rummage through the bounty. “I could clothe us all for the next two years,” she says, not joking.

  My family causes quite a stir in the mitumba. Marietta disappearing under armfuls of clothes, bartering hard with a woman sitting up high like a queen on a throne of piled-up clothes; Lila drawing giggles as she tries on a pink, faux-fur waistcoat, looking at herself in a shard of broken mirror; Uma, following on, holding tightly to a Barbie tracksuit, folding it up and squashing it under her arm. Even Ossian likes to get in on the act, sitting down on the ground and kicking off his shoes so he can try on endless pairs of high heels and flip-flops.

  This being Iten, a couple of the stalls at the mitumba are selling running shoes. Lines and lines of scrubbed-up shoes, glistening in the sunshine. I scan them, looking for the pair with the thinnest sole, and stop on a pair of orange Asics. “Yes, my friend,” says the seller, sensing I have my eye on a pair. “Which country are you from?” The shoes are slightly worn, but that’s all the better, right? I’m confused now. Do I want to be near the ground, or protected from it? They’re the only pair in my size that don’t have a huge wedge of sponge built in under the heel, so I buy them.

  But on my very first run in my new shoes, I land heavily on another stone. I can feel the pain shooting up my leg. After a few minutes it subsides, but the whole barefoot issue is clouded yet further. Clearly my feet are still not tough or strong enough to run forefoot first, even in shoes. But I can’t go back now. I’ve gotten to the point where forefoot first feels completely natural to me. And I’m still convinced it’s a more efficient way to run.

  I remember the day, back in Exeter, when I went to buy my racing flats, just before we left for Kenya. I’d been practicing my barefoot style for a few weeks and had managed to run two miles without my legs aching too much, but I was nervous about the shop assistant asking me to get up on his treadmill so he could analyze my gait. He might tell me that I shouldn’t be buying flats as I needed more support, padding, and everything else. I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible while I picked out the flattest shoes, with the least support, that I could find. But I was the only person in the shop.

  “Do you have these in a nine?” I asked.

  The man took the shoe from me. “Do you pronate?” he asked.

  “Er … I don’t know,” I said, wary of lying outright in case he could tell that I did just by the way I walked.

  “Hop up on the treadmill and we’ll take a look,” he said.

  I considered bolting out the door, but decided against it. Instead I obediently put on the sneakers and clambered aboard the treadmill. The machine whirred slowly into action. Lead with your chest, I told myself. Legs like a unicycle. It started to get faster. Pad, pad, pad. The shop assistant was crouching down trying to look under my feet. I tried to look casual, like this was my natural running style, not something I was working hard to maintain. He was checking me out from the side now. After about thirty seconds, I hit the Stop button and the machine came to a halt.

  “You’re lucky,” he said. “You have a lovely forefoot style. It’s the most efficient way to run.”

  Occasionally, during my solitary runs here in Kenya, I try changing back to heel first, just for old times’ sake. It’s like a car changing down gear suddenly, as I feel my whole body slumping back into a slower motion. No, I’m convinced the barefoot style has to stay. I just need to strengthen my feet. Toby Tanser told me that it was too late, that the Kenyans’ ankles and the arches of their feet were so much stronger and more flexible from years of running barefoot that we couldn’t hope to compete. But I’m not trying to compete with them. And I’m not actually running barefoot. Just in a forefoot style. Surely that’s possible.

  Once an aspiring runner arrives in Iten and finds a group to train with, his next aim is to run fast enough to attract the attention of a manager, who will sign him up and send him abroad to race. In return for his services, the manager takes a percentage of the prize winnings. Virtually all the managers are foreigners who have set up training camps in Iten and the surrounding area. When an athlete gets signed up, he usually lives in the manager’s training camp, where he receives food and lodging and gets to train with the rest of the athletes in the camp. Most camps also have a massage therapist on hand to revitalize tired limbs and treat any niggling injuries. It’s amazing how some heavy-duty thumb pressing can usually fix an injured athlete, as though he’s simply made of modeling clay.

  Although I’m never going to impress a manager, after a few weeks of running around Iten I’ve gradually gotten to know some of the other athletes, and one of them invites me to spend a day at his camp. The imaginatively named Run Fast camp is one of Iten’s newest training centers. There are ten athletes living at the camp in five small dormitories, each with a shower, a sofa, and a bunk bed. Nine of the athletes are Kenyan and one is the British runner Tom Payn, whom I saw competing in the Iten cross-country race. Tom was a technical sales engineer for a filtration company in Portsmouth when he decided to give it all up to come out to train in Kenya. With a best marathon time of 2 hours 17 minutes, he’s hoping to get himself into shape to make the British team for the Olympics.

  To start my day in the camp, I’m told to meet Tom and the other athletes at 6:20 A.M. outside a hotel on the main road in Iten. When I arrive, quite a big group has already gathered there. As well as the ten athletes in the camp, Run Fast has a group of second-string runners who live outside the camp but come to the training sessions. A few days before I turn up, two of the runners in the camp were told that they had to leave because they weren’t training or racing as well as expected. They got quite upset. Two runners from the outside group were invited to take their place.

  The Run Fast manager is an Englishman named Peter McHugh. He has told the group that by the end of the week he will pick six runners to travel to Europe to compete in a series of races. Once they get there, all they have to do is run like Kenyans and watch the money start rolling in. Last year the camp’s star runner won enough prize money to buy himself a plot of land in Iten when he got back.

  There’s a lot of tension in the camp right now as the runners wait to find out if they will be among the chosen six. Most of them have never raced abroad before. They stand on the threshold of the promised land. This is what they’ve been training for, dreaming about. But if their name is not on the list, they’ll be left standing outside in the cold, watching as their friends head off without them. One of the athletes, Eliud, has been running for twelve years and has made a total of one thousand Kenyan shillings—about twelve dollars—in his entire career. Even a small race abroad could net him two thousand dollars. But only if he gets picked.

  The problem is, Peter tells me, that finding races for Kenyans is getting harder and harder. With the global recession, prize money at races is down, and people are getting bored of watching Kenyans win everything. Race organizers are desperate for top runners from other countries. When a manager calls up a race director with the offer of a few unknown Kenyans, the response is usually a bored shrug. “Is that all you’ve got? More Kenyans?”
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  Peter set up his Run Fast camp only recently, but the other managers I speak to don’t think he has much of a chance of making it a success. It’s not that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, but that the landscape is dominated by a handful of über-managers. “The governing body passed a new rule recently,” explains one American manager, who is pulling out of Kenya after twenty years of working with athletes here. “Contracts need to be renewed every year. It’s good for the athletes, because it means they can move on if they’re not getting a fair deal. But it makes it easy for athletes to get poached by other managers.”

  He says that once a smaller manager like Peter discovers a promising talent, the bigger names will simply move in, offering short-term incentives to the athlete to switch. “There’s no loyalty anymore,” he tells me. “The Kenyan runners don’t understand the longer-term view. So if you offer them five hundred dollars up front, they’ll jump at it, even if the terms of the contract mean they’ll lose out in the long term.” When I mention this to Peter, he just shrugs. “Hopefully that won’t happen,” he says. “If they’re happy with me, I don’t think they’ll feel the need to change.”

  Despite promising murmurs, Eliud doesn’t get picked to travel. It’s all too much for him. “An athlete can’t keep in good shape forever,” he tells me. “I’m in good shape, but what for? I don’t have a race.” He looks close to tears. A few days later he leaves the camp and sends a message to Peter to tear up his contract. But where else can he go? He moves in with some friends and continues training.

  “He’s an idiot,” Tom Payn tells me. He likes Eliud and is sad that he has left the camp. “I think Peter was about to give him a race, but now he has no chance.” It may be Murphy’s law, that he left just as he was about to get a race, or perhaps the race would have remained forever a mirage, always about to happen. Eliud was too proud to sit and wait any longer. He would rather face the impossible route of going it alone. Unless he wins a big race in Kenya, though, it could now be game over.

  Although the Run Fast camp is pretty second rate by local standards—there are no Kenyan internationals in the camp, for example—through my eyes it’s still a formidable bunch of athletes standing around outside the tiny hotel in the morning half-light. Each person who arrives shakes hands with everyone else and then stands waiting for the runners from the camp to turn up. I spot my neighbor and Lewa teammate Japhet among the crowd. He shakes my hand nervously, his usually big smile slightly terse this morning.

  We all travel together to the university track in Eldoret squashed in the back of a pickup truck. It’s still only 7:00 A.M. when we arrive, but already there are a few groups of runners hurtling around in midsession. The Run Fast schedule is for them to run lots of 600 meters and lots of 400 meters. I decide to run 400 meters with them when they’re running 600 meters, and 200 meters when they’re running 400 meters. Hopefully, with the shorter distances and the longer rest between each one, I’ll be able to keep up.

  It’s evident right from the first one, however, that that won’t be the case. I find myself almost sprinting around the dirt track, stumbling all over the place trying to run in the trench that has been worn all around the inside lane. A Russian man back in Iten told me that if you run on the track with Kenyans, you feel disabled. I now know what he means. I manage to stick just behind Tom, but the others are far ahead.

  Tom is the slowest runner in the group. But, perversely, he is the only one who is sponsored, by Adidas. And he has the best chance of anyone in the group of making it to the Olympics. It seems unfair, but the Kenyans just grin ruefully when I mention it to them. They’re just here to run. They don’t seem to dwell on whether it’s fair or not. Peter, who has come to watch the training, says that the British runners are usually the ones claiming an injustice. “I’ve been getting a hard time back in the UK,” he says. “The British runners don’t like me bringing Kenyans over there to race. They complain that the Kenyans are taking all the prize money. But it’s an open race.”

  He’s talking to me as I sit on the grass watching the other runners carry on without me. I struggled around for less than a quarter of the session, falling farther and farther behind. Determined to carry on, I switched over to the women’s group; three runners, toiling around at what looked like a much slower pace. They nodded shyly, hardly glancing up, when I approached and asked if I could join them. But they were also too fast. I managed to keep close to the slowest of them for a few intervals, even battling to overtake her once or twice. But she just kept going, lap after lap, until I had to drop out, exhausted. After she finished, I went over to shake her hand.

  “You’re too fast,” I say. She grins. “What’s your name?”

  “Beatrice,” she says, looking away.

  The men’s group is still charging around the track. A few others drop out, and Tom doesn’t get any farther behind. Little Japhet seems to be struggling with the pace, dropping off from the main group. Even Tom is almost catching him. It’s amazing that Japhet has chosen to live and train as a full-time athlete when he clearly has little chance of success. Hope, or optimism, or a lack of alternatives drive many of the Kenyans on. But you can’t eat hope.

  Besides the large groups of Kenyans, I spot the odd Italian athlete and another British runner. The Serbian team is also here; stocky men with big hair grinding their way around the track.

  Finally, the Run Fast group stops, and we head back to Iten for breakfast. At the camp we get a mango and a banana each. We sit down and drink sweet, milky tea and eat dry bread. The food is doled out by the camp cook as people find themselves chairs to kick back in. The remainder of the day, until the afternoon run at 5:00 P.M., is dedicated to resting.

  For Kenyan runners rest is a serious business. None of the athletes have jobs. Even the athletes who don’t live in the camps rarely do anything other than run, eat, and sleep. I met one athlete who had worked in the Hill Side café in Iten, but he told me he had to give it up because it made him too tired to run. Without a job, most of them rely on the kindness of relatives, or other successful runners, to see them through. They don’t require much, living frugal lives, with no electricity or running water, and eating a simple diet of rice, beans, and ugali.

  The athletes in the camps, who don’t have to worry about buying and cooking food, can sit for hours on plastic garden chairs talking or just staring into space. And when they get bored with that, they go to sleep. Lornah Kiplagat is famous for sleeping sixteen hours a day when she is in serious training. I spoke to some top British athletes who had come to Kenya to train and I asked them what they thought the biggest difference was between the Kenyans’ training and their own. “Rest,” they all said unanimously. “In England when we’re not running, we go shopping, cook food, meet up with friends. Here they just rest.”

  It could also be called focus or dedication, and, like barefoot running, the scientific research is playing catch-up with the intuition and simplicity of the Kenyan approach. If you ask a Kenyan athlete why he sleeps so much, he won’t quote the recent paper from Stanford University that found that its basketball players ran faster in time trials and had a 9 percent improved shooting accuracy after increasing the amount of time they slept. No, the Kenyan athlete will tell you that he needs to sleep more when he’s in training because his body gets tired.

  Stanford researcher Cheri Mah says that this wisdom isn’t unique to the Kenyans. “Intuitively many players and coaches in the United States know that rest and sleep are important,” she says. “But it is often the first thing to be sacrificed.” But in Kenya, where the daily schedule is simply run, sleep, and eat, there is nothing to sacrifice it for. I note “rest” on my list of possible secrets. “Barefoot running, training camps, running to school, rest …” The list is growing.

  At some point in the midafternoon, after we’ve eaten lunch, I find that I’m the only person still sitting out in the garden. One by one the athletes have gotten up and wandered off, disappearing into the short row of
dormitories. I get up to see where they’ve all gone. Some are sleeping. In Tom’s room I find four of the runners watching music videos on a fuzzy television.

  After lounging around all day, by 5 P.M. the Run Fast athletes don’t seem too keen to do their evening run. A few of them decide that they are too tired, while the rest of us head out for a forty-minute run. It’s a lovely time of day out along the lanes around Iten, the air just cooling, the light turning yellow. It’s a rare thing for me to train twice in one day, but I feel surprisingly good. For the others, of course, it’s only an easy run, but in my head we’re racing along, the wind in our hair. People watch as we fly by, tightly bunched. I may be bursting my lungs, but here I am, a month after arriving in Iten, running with the Kenyans, and keeping up.

  Gradually, achingly, but just about perceptibly, I begin to get into shape. Shortly after my day with Run Fast, I return to one of the big early-morning group runs.

  I meet Japhet again one evening while I’m watching Lila and Uma playing with the other children from the neighborhood in the dirt strip of a street outside our house. (Uma, who loves to unbolt the gate and run outside like a celebrity mingling with her fans, has caused great excitement by bringing out an inflatable beach ball.) Japhet sidles over with one arm outstretched, his other hand resting on his wrist as a sign of respect. We shake hands. “They are having fun,” he says. “It is good.” He asks me when we’ll go on our first training run with our Lewa team. I tell him I’ll talk to Godfrey. I’m still not quite sure how the team training is going to work, so for now Japhet offers to join me on one of the early-morning runs. He says he will stay at my pace the whole way. It’s a kind offer. It means I won’t have to worry about getting lost. We agree to meet at the kiosk at 5:50 A.M. the next morning.

  It’s pitch black as Alex, our guard, unbolts the gate and lets me out. In the darkness, I can just about make out two figures, waiting. It’s Japhet and his friend Henry, the brother of the man who owns the kiosk. They look cold as I walk over and shake their hands. There’s no moon, so we walk carefully and slowly along the bumpy path down to the meeting point, feeling the way with our feet. Today we’re going to run with a group known as the mwisho wa lami, or the End of the Road group, because they meet at the point where the paved road ends. Wilson Kipsang, one of the fastest marathon runners in history, is part of the group, Japhet and Henry tell me. I stop, and pretend to turn back, making them laugh.