Running with the Kenyans

by Adharanand Finn

  After the training, we head back to the dining hall for a midmorning snack of jam and Blue Band margarine sandwiches. I sit with Brother Colm and Ian, while the athletes sit at an adjoining table eating dry slices of bread. “They don’t like jam,” says Brother Colm, reaching for another sandwich and then leaning back against the peeling wall, his feet up on the bench. “So these are just for the coaches.”

  We sit for a moment in silence, munching on the sandwiches, the sound of pots clanking in the kitchen. I’m still mulling over his comments out on the field. I ask them if they’ve heard about the born-to-run theory that humans evolved through running.

  “We had Daniel Liebermann here,” says Ian. “He was a nice man.” Liebermann was one of the Harvard scientists who developed the theory. He came up with it in part by studying Kenyan athletes. I feel like I’m at the very source of the story. This retired Irish priest and his twenty-five-year-old Kenyan assistant are an unlikely pair of sages.

  “After Mike Boit won his Commonwealth gold medal,” Brother Colm says, sitting up and putting his feet back on the floor, “they held a big celebration in his home village.” Mike Boit, a former student at St. Patrick’s, won an Olympic bronze medal in the 800 meters in the 1972 Olympics. In 1978 he won gold in the Commonwealth Games. “At the celebration, his childhood friend came up to him. The two of them used to run around together as children. He shook Boit’s hand. ‘That’s all very well,’ he said, pointing to his gold medal. ‘But can you still catch an antelope?’ ”

  Brother Colm is leaning forward, watching me, a half smile across his face. Chairs screech across the floor behind us as the athletes all get up and head back outside. They had been so quiet, I had forgotten they were there. Brother Colm sits back against the wall, as though snapping shut a book. That’s it, my lesson is over. He has seen many people over the years coming to discover the secrets of the Kenyan runners. Even that morning, a camera crew from Ireland has been setting up, preparing to spend the week following him, no doubt wanting to discover the Kenyan secrets.

  “We even had one man from Sweden who wanted to analyze the ugali,” he says, pulling plastic wrap over the tray of sandwiches. “I told him to bring some of the flour home to test it, but he said he needed to cook it at altitude, in Kenyan water, in a Kenyan pot.” Brother Colm is incredulous at the stupidity of it.

  “Did he discover anything?” I ask.

  “Absolutely nothing,” he says, almost spitting in delight.

  “You people come to find the secret, but you know what the secret is? That you think there’s a secret. There is no secret.” I haven’t mentioned a secret, but he’s fuming now, his arms folded across his chest.

  Ian, sitting opposite him, as serene as a poet, suggests that we head outside to see the athletes again before they disappear for their midday naps.

  Brother Colm may be convinced that there is no secret to Kenya’s running success, but it hasn’t stopped an endless number of scientists from coming to Kenya to conduct studies to try and unearth the magic formula. What intrigues many scientists is the fact that most of Kenya’s top runners come from one particular ethnic group, the Kalenjin. In 2011, sixty-six of the world’s top one hundred marathon runners were from Kenya, almost every one a Kalenjin. Long distance running is one of the most popular participation sports in the world, and Kalenjins account for just 0.06 percent of the global population. It’s such a staggering dominance, one of the most remarkable in all the annals of sport, that most people, particularly casual observers, will just throw up their hands and say, It must be in the genes.

  It is a scientific fact that genes have a significant affect on athletic performance. One person can train for months, getting up at dawn every morning, turning on the Rocky music, eating the right food, and will still struggle to break two hours for a half marathon. While another person, with the same upbringing, can show up with minimal training and breeze around in 1 hour 20 minutes. That’s down to genetics, or, as we usually refer to it when we’re not talking about East African runners, talent.

  Genes determine how tall we are, how well we respond to training, the color of our skin, and our gender. The effect of gender on athletic performance is so marked that we split the competitors up. So genetics plays a role in how fast people run, that much is clear. That top athletes are all people with a genetic advantage toward their discipline is also fairly certain. What is less clear, however, is whether Kenyans, and more specifically Kalenjins, have better running genes than people in other parts of the world.

  So far there is no scientific evidence that they do. Yannis Pitsiladis has been working tirelessly on this for at least a decade now, spending months on end conducting tests in a laboratory in Eldoret’s Moi University, and he says he can’t find a single gene or group of genes unique to East Africans to explain their phenomenal running success.

  Without the hard evidence, but in light of the huge discrepancy between the size of the Kalenjin population and its dominance in running, many people have looked elsewhere for indicators of genetic advantage. One theory is based on an outdated Kalenjin custom: cattle rustling. Before the British settled in the region at the beginning of the twentieth century, bringing with them new crops and agricultural techniques, the Kalenjin people were largely cattle herders and, often, cattle raiders. The Nandi and Kipsigi ethnic subgroups were particularly aggressive cattle rustlers. Their raids would often take them hundreds of miles from home, after which they would run back with their stolen animals as fast as they could before the owners could catch them. It was a dangerous game that only the fittest, strongest, and fastest runners survived. The better a young man was at raiding, the more cattle he accumulated. The Kalenjin were, and to a lesser extent still are, a largely polygamous society, and so the more cows a man had, the more wives he could buy, and the more children he was likely to father. The theory is that this reproductive advantage may have caused a significant shift in the Kalenjins’ genetic makeup over the course of a few centuries, leading to them becoming better runners.

  American journalist John Manners, who was partly raised in the Rift Valley, believes that this is the case. “If you weren’t good at running,” he says, “you were more likely to get killed. If you were [good at running], you were more likely to have children.”

  A few years ago John set up a program called The Kenya Scholar-Athlete Project (KenSAP), which sends top students to elite colleges in the United States, such as Harvard and Yale. The idea was based on John’s belief that virtually all Kalenjins can run. He thought that if he picked the top students from the Rift Valley region, the ones with the best grades on their high school exams, perhaps half of them would be good enough at running to interest the track and cross-country coaches at U.S. colleges, who might then help process their applications. The first year he managed to get scholarships for six students, two of whom he thought were good enough to pitch directly to the track coach at Harvard.

  “But it didn’t pan out,” he tells me. “Once they got there, the students weren’t committed enough to the training. They were scared of missing their studies. Essentially, they were duds.”

  So the experiment failed? If anything, it showed that not all Kalenjins can run after all, right? “Not quite,” John says. The next year he put his potential scholars through six weeks of training and got them to run a 1,500 meters time trial, so he had a better idea of which ones to pitch as runners to the American colleges. “In seven years, we’ve sent seventy-six kids to top U.S. schools,” he says. “Of those, twenty-eight were pitched as potential athletes. Fourteen didn’t pan out, mainly through lack of commitment. To be on a team at a U.S. college means around three hours of training a day.”

  Fourteen of his seventy-six A-grade students turned out to be decent enough runners to make the varsity track or cross-country teams. Of those, four were the best athletes in their college, three became All-Americans, and one became a nine-time division three champion. “From what was essentially a random selection
of Kalenjins, these achievements are pretty impressive,” John rightly points out. “It leads to the conclusion that there is something special about the Kalenjin.”

  He’s right, of course. There is something special about the Kalenjin, but I’m not as convinced as he is that it necessarily suggests a genetic advantage. Although none of the students he sent to the United States were athletes before they left—they were too busy studying—they all benefited from active childhoods, no doubt running to and from school, probably barefoot or in flimsy, thin-soled sneakers. They were raised at altitude. They benefited from a carbohydrate-rich, low-fat diet. So they all came to John with a strong, built-in endurance base—their house, as Renato Canova would put it, was already built. So much so that when pushed into running, they were physically ready to go. Of course, some people just aren’t great runners, but if we really were all born to run, as some scientists argue, then to get fourteen good runners from a selection of seventy-six fit, healthy teenagers is perhaps not such a surprise.

  If you took a comparable group of English or American students, chances are that they would have spent their lives doing very little physical exercise and eating bad food. Stuck on a track and asked to run 1,500 meters, most of them would probably look at you as if you were mad. They would probably never have run that far in their lives, except perhaps on some forced cross-country race in first grade. Would it be such a surprise to find that only one or two of them, if that, could run?

  Yannis Pitsiladis says that he has heard the cow-herding theory, but that it doesn’t add up. “There just isn’t enough time,” he says. “Genetic adaptations take thousands of years, and besides, the Kalenjin are not an isolated gene pool, they have been mixing with other ethnic groups. It’s a nice story, but that’s all.”

  Of course, just because the hard evidence hasn’t been found yet doesn’t mean that Kenyans, and more specifically Kalenjins, don’t have a genetic advantage. But I don’t think we should hypothesize that they do simply on the basis of their performances in races. Not only is that unscientific, but it seems that there are enough other contributory factors that, when taken together, explain Kenya’s running dominance. Presuming a genetic advantage also diminishes the incredible achievements of the Kenyan athletes. If they do have a built-in genetic advantage, it changes the way we perceive their victories. It lessens our admiration for all their hard work, determination, and fortitude. It also changes the way other athletes feel about their own chances of competing, of even trying to compete. It’s dangerous to conclude that because so many people from one ethnic group win so many races that they must therefore have a genetic advantage. If that’s the case, the rest of the world might as well give up.

  Twenty

  “If we push on, we begin to feel a vague, tingling sense of who, or what, we really are.”

  “Finn,” says Godfrey cheerily when I call him up. “Great to have you back.”

  I’ve been to Ethiopia, Kenya’s northern neighbor and the world’s other great running nation. I ran a half marathon there in the town of Hawassa, about 170 miles south of Addis Ababa. The race was organized by Haile Gebrselassie, who has a luxury hotel on the shores of Lake Hawassa.

  The night before the half marathon, I bumped into the former British marathon runner Hugh Jones in the hotel lobby. He told me he was now an IAAF official and was there to measure the course. “It’s not a PB course,” he told me when I said I was hoping to run a personal best time. “It goes off-road along by the lake and the path is quite bumpy.”

  Still, after all my training, even with the bumpy trail and the altitude (around 5,500 feet), I was hopeful. I’d been training harder than I’d ever done. I felt leaner than I had felt in years. I had visible calf muscles for the first time in my life.

  At the start, I was relieved to find the competition less intimidating than the cross-country in Eldoret. The field had been split into two races, an elite race and a mass race. I was in the mass race, along with lots of other foreigners, mainly aid workers based in Addis Ababa. The Ethiopians in the race were mainly aid workers, too, as far as I could gather.

  Almost immediately after the horn sounded for the start, I found myself running on my own, with a lead group of about six runners pulling ahead, and everyone else disappearing somewhere behind me. The course headed along a road into town and then detoured down along a dirt track by the lake. Fishermen stopped their work as we ran by, frozen like photographs, their nets half drawn in. A herd of glistening horses hauled themselves up out of the water, crossing the path. The runners in front of me managed to skirt around one side, making the horses skip back. I spotted my chance and nipped through the same gap. I was feeling strong, and starting to reel in the leaders.

  Halfway around the second of three large laps, I caught a glimpse of my shadow on the paved road and was surprised to see that I actually looked like an athlete, striding along the wide avenue. Seven miles done and I was feeling great, running at a good pace. “Good, good,” people said as I cruised past.

  By the time I passed the same point on the third lap, however, it wasn’t such a glorious sight. My stride length had shortened, my arms had stopped moving. I was struggling with cramping, which forced me to stop for a moment by the lake and do some stretching. It kept coming and going. The slower I ran, the better it was. Or was that just my mind playing tricks on me? I was caught in a battle of wills between my desire to run as fast as I could, and my body’s desire to slow down.

  But the desire to run fast was being drowned out by the internal chatter that told me it didn’t really matter what time I ran, or where I finished, that nobody really cared, not even me, that I should just enjoy the experience. I ended up virtually jogging the last mile, up the long road to Haile’s resort, past a troupe of threadbare white horses grazing among half-built apartment blocks.

  Here at the end, the road was lined with spectators, three-people deep, who clapped quietly or just stared out from under their shawls. The runner ahead of me was too far away to chase, and I couldn’t see anyone else behind. As I reached sight of the finish, I saw the excited faces of Marietta and the children. They were all smiling and clapping and I mustered a little surge to the line in their honor.

  Despite talking myself down from pushing too hard, I managed to finish in seventh place, in a personal best time of 1:26:47. The seconds were important because it was a best time by just seven seconds. The great man, Gebrselassie, was standing there waiting to greet me like a long-lost friend. I gave him a sweaty hug then walked on to collect my medal and free T-shirt.

  “That’s great to run a PB,” Godfrey says when I tell him my time. But it’s hard to know how I feel afterward. After four months of training with the greatest runners in the world, I’d knocked seven seconds off my best half-marathon time. With only six weeks left until the Lewa Marathon, I was really hoping for a bigger improvement than that.

  “You did brilliantly,” says Marietta when I suggest I’m not happy. “You were right near the front.” It was certainly better than my performance in Eldoret, so at least I was moving in the right direction.

  Sitting by the hotel’s infinity pool the next morning, overlooking the dark waters of Lake Hawassa, I was still brooding on the race. I thought hard about how I had lost the psychological battle, running along that long, straight road, my resolve blown away like a silk scarf in the wind. I just wasn’t ready, mentally, when the crunch came.

  “You’ve said this before,” said Marietta, trying to help. “Is there anything you can do about it? Anything you can learn?”

  She was right, it had happened to me before in other races, my mind whispering in my ear, What’s the hurry? Who cares? until I went, Okay, you’re right, and I eased down. Kenyans are not so flaky in races. Partly, it’s simply because they’re usually nearer to the front. During my win in Powderham Castle, such thoughts didn’t bother me. Driven on by the growing belief that I could actually win, I managed to stay focused until the end.

  But it�
��s not just that. For a Kenyan runner, driven on by a will to change his life, the stakes are much higher. Even for top Western runners, winning a race is unlikely to have the same impact on their lives as it will for a Kenyan runner. For someone who has spent years living at a subsistence level, even one thousand dollars can change everything.

  Kenyans are also more used to hardship in their daily lives, so that when it appears rising up at them near the end of a race, they are less cowed by it. One theory about why Kalenjins, specifically the men, are so psychologically tough, comes from the circumcision ceremony that all Kalenjin boys have to go through as adolescents. They are expected to stand in front of the village elders and endure the pain unblinking, without betraying a single flicker of emotion on their faces. One wince and their passage to manhood is forever incomplete and they are cast aside from the community as a coward. Many athletes have told me that after passing through such an ordeal, all other challenges they face in life, such as a sprint finish at the end of a race, seem easy.

  Another reason why Kenyans may be mentally tough is that they seem to spend less time analyzing while they’re running. If you ask a Kenyan runner what was happening in his head during a race, he will usually say something as simple as, “I felt good, so I ran faster” or “I felt tired, so I stopped.” A Western runner, in contrast, will be able to tell you exactly what his thoughts were at each mile, what his time splits were, how his tactics changed during the race. Many of the Kenyan runners I meet tell me that they don’t wear a watch when they’re racing, that they prefer to run on feeling. For most Western runners, this would be a dangerous approach. It would be like going on a long car journey and switching off the speedometer and fuel gauge.