Running with the Kenyans

by Adharanand Finn

  It’s engrossingly similar to my story. Will I, too, return home transformed, stunning people with my speed as I streak by like a Kenyan? I look around. I’m the last person still watching. One by one the others have gone off to bed. We have a 24-mile run in the morning. I turn off the power and cross the courtyard to my room. Lightning flashes across the night sky. Mutai has left me an extra blanket in case I get cold, but there’s no pillow. I make one using a sheet and my towel, and climb into the bed. One of the runners said he would wake me, but just to be sure, I set my alarm for 4:30 A.M. and turn off the light.

  There’s a quiet knock on my door. I roll over and look at the time on my phone: 4:40. I must have fallen back asleep. “Okay,” I say, swinging my legs out of bed. It’s still dark outside, so I switch on the light. It squashes my sleepy eyes back shut. I sit on the edge of the bed for a moment, trying to wake up, but it’s cold, so I start to get dressed. In ten minutes we have to leave. We head out through the gate just before five and walk under the stars to the main road. Athletes stand around in the shadows while we wait for a bus to come and pick us up. A young man of barely twenty asks me how far I will run.

  “It depends on the pace,” I say. “How fast will you run each five kilometers?”

  “Probably sixteen minutes, maybe seventeen,” he says casually, as though that’s a normal pace for a 24-mile run. At 6:00 A.M. At eight thousand feet elevation. A few months ago I ran a 5K race on a flat course back in England. It took me over eighteen minutes, running flat out.

  A minibus pulls up and the door opens. Sleepy faces peer back at us. The bus is already full and there are about ten of us waiting outside. Somehow we all squeeze in, with people sitting on each other’s laps, or standing bent over, heads squashed against the ceiling. I manage to get on the edge of a seat next to the window and peer out at the passing verge as the driver cranks up the skipping Kalenjin music. Nobody speaks.

  Just before six the bus stops on a lonely dirt road in the middle of nowhere. A few people walk by in the darkness, looking over at us as we tumble out of the bus, some of the athletes disappearing off into the blackness for a last-minute pit stop. The rest of us stand around like early-morning workers about to start a shift. I’m fretting about the pace. I won’t even last the first five kilometers. A thin, sickle moon hangs in the sky as an orange glow starts to seep in from the east. It’s a beautiful, still morning.

  We seem to be waiting for something. “What’s going on?” I ask one of the other runners.

  “We’re waiting for the ladies,” he says, nodding over to the road where three women are standing holding their watches, getting some last-minute instructions from the two coaches. “They get a ten-minute head start.”

  A head start is what I need. I run over. “Perhaps I should go with them?” I say to the coaches. “Sure,” they say, and a few seconds later I’m running. The pace is gentle at first, but we’re soon moving steadily along. Kenyans are brilliant at slowly cranking up the speed on long runs so you almost don’t notice you’re getting faster. By the third mile we’re overtaking bicycles, as streams of people make their way to work. At each corner the road stretches off again far into the distance, and we keep going, without speaking, our feet pat, patting, the miles passing as the day rises into the sky.

  At about the tenth mile the men come past us. First the sound of rushing feet, then they go by, their strides strong, their shoulders leaning forward, little puffs of dust kicked up by their feet. One by one they go. At the front is Emmanual Mutai and an Ugandan athlete named Stephen Kiprotich, who came in sixth at the recent world cross-country championships. The others are not far behind.

  As they race past, I feel suddenly worse, as though the harsh contrast in speed has stripped away the belief that I was feeling strong. The women are also getting away from me now. They, too, are running thirty-eight kilometers, but the pace is still picking up. Behind me I hear the motor of the bus. As it passes me the side door slides open. The coach, a former Olympic silver medalist, grins at me. “You want a ride?” he asks. It’s a beautiful offer. I leap in through the door and sit down on a long empty seat. My heart is pumping, my body tingling to have stopped.

  “You know,” says the coach, “it is very high up here.” He’s giving me an excuse, which is generous of him. But it’s for him, too. The offer of a lift was more of a command than a question. The bus has to keep moving from the back of the group to the front, handing out drinks, giving out times, and offering encouragement. The farther behind I get, the harder that is to do. But it’s okay, I’ve done enough. In fact, I’m exhausted. I’ve run just over ten miles in 1 hour 14 minutes, at altitude. That’s slightly faster than my first runs with the Iten Town Harriers. Just over a three-hour marathon pace. Could I keep it going for another fifteen miles over similar terrain? I doubt it.

  I sit in the van doing my mental arithmetic as we skirt back past the leaders to the twenty-kilometer point. They’re really flying now, and still looking effortless. Mutai is racing away at the front, leaving behind at least five or six world-class marathon runners. As we drive along beside him and hand him his water, he seems calm, as though he’s out for a morning stroll. He drinks some, pops the lid back on, and hands it back. Only eleven miles to go.

  I’ve been reading previews of the upcoming London Marathon and nobody is mentioning Mutai as a possible winner, despite the fact that he came second the year before. Why is that? I ask the coach.

  “That’s because people who write for newspapers don’t know what they’re talking about,” he says, turning around to me, grinning. He knows I work for a newspaper. “But Emmanuel is ready. For sure.”

  Mutai gets to the end of the 38-kilometer run before us, and is walking around beside some wooden buildings, hands on hips, when we arrive. The coach hands him his jacket. A gentle mist drifts between two picture-book hills rising up behind the wooden houses. The red road winds on beyond them.

  The other runners come through one after another. Bernard Kipyego, who a few weeks later will come in second in the Paris marathon, followed by Kiprotich, the Ugandan. They all come to a stop and grab their drinks without saying anything. A twenty-four-mile run is a tough session even for these guys. One of the last to arrive is Thomas. He is clearly a junior member of the camp, perhaps not in age but in terms of success. He doesn’t have a car, but when he’s bored at camp, he likes to wash the cars of the other runners.

  “Do they pay you some money?” I ask him.

  “No, I like doing it,” he says.

  Thomas is excited to hear that I’m running the Lewa Marathon.

  “I ran Lewa in 2008,” he tells me. Confident he could do well, he managed to scrape together the entry fee from family and friends. He then traveled to Lewa the night before the race and managed to stay in some community housing at the wildlife conservancy. In the race he came in third, winning more than enough to pay back the money he borrowed. The One 4 One camp’s manager, Michel, signed him up as a result.

  Rather than stopping by the van, though, he runs straight past us and off between the two pointed hills. We catch up with him waiting by the road a few miles farther on.

  “I wanted to run forty kilometers,” he says, looking at me with serious eyes. He hasn’t had a race since he joined the camp and is desperate to compete again.

  Back at the camp, the athletes are in chirpy spirits. The day’s work is done. All that is left now is to rest. Tea is served by the cook, but hardly anyone eats anything. After all that running, on nothing but the ugali from the night before, breakfast is a solitary cup of tea. For anyone who is hungry, like me, there are slices of dry, white bread. It’s not much, but it tastes delicious.

  Mutai, more relaxed now after his run, stands looking at my car with a few of the other athletes. I walk over. “Where did you get it?” he asks.

  “It’s my brother-in-law’s. You like it?”

  He nods thoughtfully.

  Bernard Kipyego is smiling. “KXE,” he says,
shaking his head.

  To me, it looks like an old banger, next to their collection of brand-new 4×4s. But it seems to hold grown men enthralled wherever it goes. The camp’s track coach, Metto, didn’t recognize me when I turned up the day before. Then he saw the car, and he spun around with a delighted grin on his face. “Oh, you, with the car.”

  Mutai is still looking at it.

  “Do you want to see the engine?” I ask. It sounds almost suggestive. He nods, so I pop open the hood. They all crowd around, talking to each other in Kalenjin. Then Mutai looks at me.

  “Do you want to sell it?”

  Just over two weeks later, I’m sitting in the Grand Pri restaurant in Eldoret waiting for the start of the London Marathon. The owner, former half-marathon world record holder and world 10,000 meters champion Moses Tanui, has promised a London marathon party, and the whole place is decorated with red balloons and posters. Moses and his friends are all wearing red Virgin London marathon jackets, smiling and handing out whistles.

  Downstairs in the underground bar area, hundreds of people are awaiting the start on the big screen. The only problem is that there is no power, and the race is about to begin. Moses seems unperturbed. He has a generator, he says. Things will be up and running in a minute. But when the power eventually comes on, about forty-five minutes later, for some reason the only thing any of the TVs can tune in to is a program called Gospel Sunday.

  We sit and wait. Moses has invited me to watch the race in his personal office, which has the biggest TV I’ve ever seen. Also watching the race here is a host of other former star runners, including Emmanuel Mutai’s coach. Nobody else seems upset that we are missing the race. They sit chatting calmly as the minutes tick by. After a while I decide to see what the atmosphere is like downstairs in the packed bar. On the way down, I pass Moses on the stairs.

  “Sorry,” he says as he goes by, talking urgently on his phone. He looks slightly traumatized. The bar is completely empty, the last man just leaving.

  “The Klique hotel,” he tells me. “It has screens.”

  I leave Moses fretting with a team of engineers and head to the Klique hotel around the corner. It is rammed to the rafters with people cheering and blowing whistles.

  By the time I arrive, Mary Keitany has a big lead in the women’s race. A few weeks ago I was sitting in awkward silence in her cramped living room drinking orange drink. Now here she is on the television, racing away to win the London Marathon.

  The men’s race is just beginning to heat up, with Emmanuel Mutai still in the lead pack, running with the same fluid form and easy air he had on the dusty tracks of Kaptagat just weeks before. A big cheer goes up as he surges to the front of the field at around mile eighteen and starts leaving the others behind, and I find myself cheering and blowing my whistle like everyone else.

  He seems to be floating through the streets of London. I can see the people standing by the road there marveling, wondering where he came from, how he can run so fast, so easy. His burst is quite spectacular. He puts in the fastest 10km ever run in a marathon (28 minutes 44 seconds) to leave the rest of the field flailing far behind, winning the race in the fourth fastest marathon time in history and setting a new course record. He really was ready.

  After the race, I feel a warm glow of connectivity as I tumble out of the bar with everyone else. Outside in the street, I bump into a few of the other runners from the camp. They smile and shake my hand. “Emmanuel ran well,” they say calmly, almost expectantly. He has just run one of the greatest marathons ever, but to them it’s just another day’s work.

  Nineteen

  Brother Colm watches over the runners at his Easter training camp

  Brother Colm says he has been in Kenya so long that he feels Kenyan now. And like a Kenyan he can be difficult to pin down. One morning I call him to see if I can come and watch his star athlete, David Rudisha, training. He says he doesn’t know what time Rudisha will run, and when I push him to see if I can come by another day, he gets suddenly annoyed.

  “I don’t do schedules,” he says, spelling it out for me in the overly pronounced way he talks to his athletes. “Rudisha told me last night he had a cold so probably won’t train today. But maybe he’ll run in Eldoret. Maybe he’ll turn up here [in Iten]. I can’t say, ‘At ten o’clock we’ll be doing so and so.’ My athletes are elite athletes. They don’t need to be in peak shape until August [for the world championships]. They’re not like all those runners you see in Iten, running around hoping some eejit will see them and send them off to some race somewhere. I mean, it’s a good thing they’re out there running, it’s better than sniffing glue in Eldoret, but half of them don’t know what they’re doing or when they’re racing or what.”

  He’s less curmudgeonly about his Easter camp. He tells me to come along at 10:00 A.M. any time during the holiday. These camps were among the first training camps in Kenya, and certainly the first in Iten, set up by Brother Colm in the 1980s to help develop the region’s junior talent. Japhet went to one of these camps when he was seventeen. He has a treasured photograph from it on the wall in his house. I ask him what he learned there.

  “Form,” he says, without hesitating. “He taught me about form.” It’s a common answer. Nixon Chepseba, the 1,500 meters runner at the One 4 One camp, also went to St. Patrick’s school and trained with Brother Colm. He says the same thing: Brother Colm taught him about form. It’s an interesting answer, since most Kenyans have a lovely, fluid running form, which I assumed was because they all grow up running barefoot. So how is it that Brother Colm’s secret is teaching form?

  When I turn up at his house, he’s just leaving, full of purpose. This, you can tell, is what he loves doing: nurturing the champions of the future. Before the training begins, he takes me around to the school kitchen where a man is cooking beans in an industrial-sized vat. Brother Colm wants to check that the cooks received the ugali flour he sent them. I follow behind, smiling and shaking hands with everyone we pass as we head on through the dimly lit dining hall. Along one side, beyond the rows of benches and tables, is the school’s Wall of Fame. It’s full of framed photographs of runners. If you look closely, you can spot an incredible array of Kenya’s most celebrated athletes. There’s former St. Patrick’s student Wilson Kipketer (three-time world champion and former 800 meters world record holder) planting a tree on the school grounds, while Richard Chelimo and Matthew Birir sit with Brother Colm on a sofa showing off their medals after the 1992 Olympics. Another grainy shot shows 1988 Olympic gold medalist Peter Rono hurtling around a dusty track.

  Brother Colm passes through the hall and out onto the field at the front of the school. Groups of young athletes are gathering, ambling across the grass from their dormitories. Waiting for everyone to arrive is a young man called Ian. Although he is only twenty-five, Brother Colm has signed him up as his assistant. Quietly spoken and baby-faced, he doesn’t have the air of a coach, but once the athletes are ready, he stands before them and explains the session.

  Brother Colm lets him talk, standing with me a few yards away. “I chose Ian because he has a gymnastics background,” he tells me. “He understands form.”

  Ian sets the athletes off jogging around the small field. They jog slowly, in single file.

  “We’re looking to see which of them have rhythm,” Brother Colm explains. “They should naturally fall into the rhythm of the athlete in front.”

  “What if they don’t have rhythm?” I ask, watching one girl who seems to be struggling to match the easy, synchronized flow of everyone else.

  “Then we work on them,” he says.

  Among the athletes, I spot Rudisha jogging around in the middle of one of the groups. The world athlete of the year, the fastest 800 meters runner in history, taking part in a school holiday camp. Not as a mentor or teacher, but as one of the athletes. That’s the level of professionalism that these schoolchildren are working to. Their faces are focused, serious. Each has been hand-selected for the camp by B
rother Colm, after a winter he spent traveling to school races across the region. An invite to the camp is an honor. But, more important, it’s an opportunity. So many have come here and then gone on to become professional athletes. Brother Colm says he has about a 60 percent success rate. I look around, wondering which of these youngsters will be stepping onto the track at the next Olympics. No doubt a few of them will.

  All the athletes, I notice, are wearing shoes. “What do you think about barefoot running?” I ask. For some reason it feels like a naive, almost stupid, question, as though I’m asking him if he thinks athletes run better with shorter hair.

  “We do all our exercises at the school in bare feet,” he says, looking at me, making sure I’m listening. “In the West we put children in shoes before they can walk. What are we teaching them? We’re teaching them that the ground is dangerous, that they need to be protected from it. But Kenyan children can feel the ground, so they have a better relationship with it. They learn to place their foot carefully when they run, so they don’t hurt themselves. They learn to land gently, lightly, gliding over the earth rather than pounding it.”

  Brother Colm says he works on form not because he thinks the Kenyans have bad form, but because he wants to turn good form into perfect form. Breaking world records and winning gold medals requires fine polishing of talent. Running barefoot is just one part of a formula that produces that talent, he says. A talent completely derived from their upbringing. “It is a hard, physical life, one that makes them strong, disciplined, and motivated to succeed,” he says. “When the athletes come to me at fifteen or sixteen, they are sixty percent already there.” By working on their form, he is giving them the tools to nurture that talent and strength, born out of hardship, and turn it into gold.