But as Renato Canova said after one of his Kenyan charges won a big city marathon in the United States recently: “If you want to be a top athlete you have to be a little bit wild, not be an accountant.” Wild like Ismael Kirui in Stuttgart in 1993, who went with his feeling, spurred on to a crazy pace with seven laps still to go. He wasn’t calculating his average lap times that night, he just felt good and went, and he ended up as world champion.
So what I can learn from the race in Hawassa is that next time I need to be mentally prepared, to find a way to keep my focus and willpower locked in on the target, and to keep my distracting and debilitating thoughts at bay. I don’t want to end the Lewa Marathon dawdling home like a tourist on safari, telling myself that I’m too tired to run, that I should just watch the wildlife and not worry about the minutes rushing away, the people streaming past me. I didn’t come all this way, and do all this training, to flake out right at the end.
But without the same driving forces pushing me on as the Kenyans, what should I do? I’ve heard people say that they have their own special chant that they use. I remember Paula Radcliffe once saying that she managed to outrun the great Ethiopian Gete Wami to win the New York marathon by chanting “I love you Isla”—Isla being her baby daughter—over and over in her head. Maybe I should try that next time, although I can already hear my mind reasoning that my kids don’t really care about my race position or what time I run. But then, I’m sure Isla didn’t care either. What really pushed Paula on was her love for her daughter, not her daughter’s approval. But why should love make her run harder?
The actor Sean Connery was once asked in an interview what, if anything, made him cry. After thinking for a few moments, he replied, “Athletics.” I often feel the same way. Watching runners racing for the finish line, relying on nothing but themselves, their own willpower, fighting their own limitations, their eyes fixed ahead in complete focus, the dedication of years of hard work etched across their faces, it can bring tears to your eyes. Running is a brutal and emotional sport. It’s also a simple, primal sport. As humans, on a most basic level, we get hungry, we sleep, we yearn for love, we run. Just watch small children left to play unsupervised. They can’t stop running. It is part of what makes us human.
Perhaps it is to fulfill this primal urge that runners and joggers get up every morning and pound the streets in cities all over the world. To feel the stirring of something primeval deep down in the pits of our bellies. To feel “a little bit wild.” Running is not exactly fun. Running hurts. It takes effort. Ask any runner why he runs, and he will probably look at you with a wry smile and say, “I don’t know.” But something keeps us going. We may obsess about our PBs and mileage count, but these things alone are not enough to get us out running. We could find easier ways to chart and measure things. We could become accountants. No, the times and charts are merely carrots we dangle in front of our rational mind, our overanalytical brain, to give it a reason to come along for the ride. What really drives us is something else, this need to feel human, to reach below the multitude of layers of roles and responsibilities that society has placed on us, down below the company name tags, and even the father, husband, son labels, to the pure, raw human being underneath. At such moments, our rational mind becomes redundant. We move from thought to feeling.
Except our mind doesn’t just stop. Many runners say that they become aware of their thoughts when they run. All day our thoughts churn away, turning us this way and that, but this doesn’t bother us in the slightest. Yet the minute we start moving away from its carefully constructed world of reason, into the wild heart of existence, our mind panics. Our thoughts try to pull us back, to slow us down. But like the marathon monks of Mount Hiei in Japan, who complete one thousand ultra marathons in one thousand days in search of enlightenment, if we push on, we begin to feel a vague, tingling sense of who, or what, we really are. It’s a powerful feeling, strong enough to have us coming back for more, again and again.
Love, too, connects us with a primal feeling deep within us, far from the realm of reason, which is why Paula’s chant worked. The love she felt for her daughter and the raw emotion of running come from the same source. Evoking love helped push her on, even though rationally it shouldn’t have made any difference. Her daughter couldn’t hear her internal chant, and even if she could, at nine months old she was oblivious to the whole concept of marathon running. But by calling on such a strong emotion, Paula was able to bypass such reasoning. Her rational brain, which was telling her, no doubt, to slow down, was overcome.
I decide to try it the next time I’m struggling on a run.
Twenty-one
Preparing the ugali
It’s Easter Monday, and a beautiful, lazy afternoon in Iten. All morning the streets were deserted as the entire town crammed into the tin churches that sit on virtually every corner. The preachers did their best to outdo one another, their sermons blaring through speakers placed out in the street in an effort to spread the gospel as far as possible.
It’s the last day in town for Marietta and the children. For the next few weeks they are going to stay with Jophie and Alastair in Lewa, leaving me to immerse myself in my running. Marietta asks me to take a walk with her through the neighborhood one last time, down to the viewpoint that looks out across the valley. Lila and Uma are off playing with their friends, running along the rows of houses, laughing, and disappearing through doorways. So we take Ossian and wander off down the lane that runs along our high metal fence, past the little kiosk. A lady is digging a small square of earth with her daughter. She stands up as we go by, dropping her hand plow and mopping her brow.
“Marietta,” she says. “Where are you going?”
“Just for a walk,” says Marietta. “It’s my last day in Iten today.”
The woman looks shocked. “Why?” she asks. “You should stay and buy a plot here.” The woman is a single mother with two children who works at the hospital, runs a little shop, grows maize, and owns two cows for milk. She asks us if we have a cow back home in England, and gives us a look of disbelief and pity when Marietta tells her that we don’t. “Then you must buy one when you get home,” she says.
As she’s talking, one of her cows lumbers across the mud toward the fence, which gets Ossian excited. He has a stick in his hand and is poking it through the stakes and making a noise like a cow herder. “Rarr, rarr,” he says, hitting the fence with his twig. The woman laughs as we start to walk on.
“Leave me to my struggle,” she says, waving us on our way.
All along the path, we pass small homesteads with families sitting outside preparing food or just drinking tea and talking. Each time, the children run over, giggling and reaching out their hands, while the mothers wave at us.
“Iyamune?” we say. It means “how are you” in Kalenjin.
“Chamage,” comes the reply. Everyone is fine.
“It seems a shame to be leaving now,” says Marietta. “I feel that we’re just settling in. It’s starting to feel like home.” We turn the corner and the sky opens out before us. Small houses continue to dot the landscape farther down the slope, dropping away into the hazy distance. “It’s beautiful,” she says, stopping to admire it as Ossian ambles along behind us. “I love the way that when you wake up in the morning here, the first thing you do is step outside. In England we’re always cooped up in our houses and cars, like in little bubbles, removed from everyone else.”
“You think you could live here?” I ask her. Even though she is right, and there is something enviable about the simplicity of life here, I’m not sure I could make the leap to living here. I don’t really know why, but somehow I feel tied to my life back in England.
“I don’t know,” she says.
Despite feeling settled in Iten, we stick to our plan and I return from Lewa alone, racing Alastair’s little car up the Uganda highway, dodging the trucks and matatus, winding my way up the patchwork slopes, past the scenes of numerous accidents, and back to the
little town of runners.
As usual, the first sight that greets me on arriving in Iten is scores of people running alongside the road. On and on they go, day after day, tearing up mile after mile, in the hope, as Brother Colm puts it, that some eejit will send them to a race. Well, for a few of them, that eejit is me.
I call up all the other Iten Town Harriers to see how they are and to arrange another long run that weekend. We’re running out of days now, so it’s time for me to make it to eighteen miles.
I’m going to spend my last few weeks in Iten at the Kimbia training camp. This is where Godfrey works, and he has invited me to stay. I’ve gradually realized, however, that he doesn’t really work there. It’s a complicated story and different every time, depending on who tells it. The camp was originally set up by a U.S. agent who employed a German coach to train the athletes. But the coach started to become an agent himself, so they split the camp in two. Godfrey was a multipurpose operator—part coach, part scout, part facilitator. But the German coach took a dislike to his laid-back style, and banned him from the house. Neither of the agents live in Kenya, however, and all the athletes like Godfrey, so he comes back surreptitiously now and then when he needs somewhere to stay in Iten. He also invites his friends to stay.
When I first arrive, the only person staying in the house is Anders. He seems happy to have some company, and shows me to my room. “You’ve got the best room,” he says. “It has a great painting on the wall.” The painting is a map of the world, painted by some Peace Corps volunteers who stayed here once. Otherwise the room is fairly sparse: a blood-red, chipped concrete floor; two single beds with mosquito nets tied up above them; and a piece of string running from one end of the room to the other for hanging clothes.
A few days later, three of the camp’s athletes return from a spell of racing in Germany. They come bustling in one evening, shaking my hand and settling down quickly in front of the television. They’ve been missing their Mexican soap opera. The TV room is more like a storeroom than a place to relax. There’s a fold-up table right in front of the television, a massage table shoved into one corner, three stacks of plastic chairs, and piles of running shoes by the door, next to an empty glass cabinet. The athletes pull out enough chairs for everyone and place them in a circle around the television as Mama Kibet, the camp’s cook, brings in a small charcoal stove, which she places on the floor in the middle of the room. The three of them are in heaven when she brings the ugali. As they eat hungrily, I ask them if they missed the ugali while they were in Germany. They all nod vigorously, their mouths too full to speak.
While we had our own house in Iten, we ate a mixture of Kenyan food and food that the children were more familiar with, such as pasta and soup. We had ugali occasionally, but now it is part of my daily diet. I tuck in, trying to will it on, telling myself to enjoy the frugal blandness of it. Mixed with the stewed kale that Mama Kibet has given us it’s nice, but on its own, especially after it has gone cold, it feels fairly pointless. The other athletes, in their excitement, try to get me to eat more, but really, I’ve had enough.
The Kenyans are always joking that it is the ugali that makes them so fast. It’s not as far-fetched as it might seem. While this staple by itself may not be the secret of Kenyan running, it is a small part of the puzzle that I’m gradually putting together. As Yannis Pitsiladis says, after years of research: “It’s not any one thing. But all of them.” As well as the physical, active nature of a typical, rural Kenyan childhood, the altitude, the barefoot running, and the intense dedication, the diet of the athletes plays a role, too.
In the Rift Valley, everyone grows up eating a diet full of carbohydrates, with very little fat. Beans, rice, ugali, and green vegetables are the staple foods. Occasionally the runners will eat meat or drink milk. It is very hard, in Iten at least, to find cakes, ice cream, cheese, burgers, pizzas—all those fatty foods that we love so much in the West. They just don’t exist. When our neighbor Hilda had a party for her tenth birthday, her mother had to get a cake driven in from Eldoret.
Dr. Pitsiladis tells the story of a group of German scientists who wanted to study the Kenyan physiology, but rather than conduct the research in Kenya, they brought some runners back to Germany. “The interesting part for me is that after just two weeks in Germany, the athletes all put on eighteen pounds,” Dr. Pitsiladis says.
When I visited the house in Teddington before leaving for Kenya, one of the athletes asked me, as he stood stirring the ugali, how much I weighed. The others were sitting in the kitchen listening to our conversation. The last time I had weighed myself, I was 175 pounds, but I’d been training quite hard, so I knocked off a few pounds. “Seventy-seven kilos,” I said. (That’s 170 pounds.)
The runner looked at me surprised, and even stopped stirring for a second. One of the other athletes said something in Kalenjin, but I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was asking for confirmation from his friend that what he had just heard was really true. “Seventy-seven kilos?” the athlete asked me, to be sure.
“Yes,” I said. “Is that a lot?”
He nodded, still unsure he was hearing me right. He said he was 130 pounds, while one of the other athletes was only 112 pounds.
Two weeks before we leave Iten for Lewa, I manage to find a scale in the gas station where Japhet’s uncle works. I’m 152 pounds. I’ve lost eighteen pounds since leaving England. Of course, all the running is a significant factor, but so, too, is the diet. With hardly any fat in the food I consume, I’m now fighting weight.
Godfrey rings me that night to see how I’m settling in at the Kimbia house, and to tell me there has been a change of plan regarding our Lewa team’s long run the next day. The truck has been double booked, and he doesn’t sound as though he has the energy to find another one. I suggest that we drive to Eldoret in my car and run back along the paved road. He sounds distracted as he agrees, telling me it’s a good idea.
We decide to leave at 7:00 A.M. to mimic the start time of the marathon in Lewa, but when I call Chris, he’s not happy. “It’s too late,” he says. He’s also unhappy about the route. “Only mzungus run along the paved road,” he says. I tell him we don’t have a truck to go off road. Reluctantly he agrees to be picked up just after seven, outside his school.
At 6:30 the next morning my phone rings. It’s Chris.
“Hello, sir,” he says. “I’m at the school. I’m ready. We need to get started.”
Anders has decided to come along, too, so after we get dressed and fill up our water bottles, we roll the car out of the gate and head off to find Japhet and Beatrice. Beatrice has turned up with a friend. I guess she’s feeling a little outnumbered by the men on our team. Having a friend will also give her someone to run with, but it means we’re now five in the car. Luckily, the team is depleted today, with Shadrack and Philip not running. Josphat also hasn’t turned up.
“He’s gone to the U.S.,” Japhet tells us.
“What for?” I ask, surprised. “Is he coming back?”
“He’s gone to race. I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
Even though Chris is good friends with Josphat, he, too, is surprised when he hears the news. “That is not good, man,” he says. “He should have at least informed somebody.”
Godfrey as well is full of consternation. “He must respect the team,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s not good.”
Personally, I don’t mind. He was a troubled character, Josphat. One time we went to visit his home down in the valley. He hadn’t seen his wife or children for at least a week, but he just barged into the house, picked up a bag, and left again without a word of greeting to them. His children stood around in bare feet and ripped clothes, watching with their big, silent eyes as we climbed back into the car. I waved a solitary good-bye as Chris started the engine, and we left.
Josphat is certainly no big loss for the team. In fact, everyone is already suggesting we replace him with a good mutual friend named Paul Tanui. Known as The
Preacher because of his religious fervor, Paul is one of the nicest men in Iten. When you talk to him, everything is always “fantastic.” Like Josphat, Paul is a veteran journeyman athlete who has won numerous smaller races around the world. He is excited when I ask him if he’d like to run with us in Lewa.
“Yes,” he says, his voice swooshing the word like a balloon lifting off into the sky. “Of course.”
Once we get to Eldoret, Chris starts remonstrating with Godfrey about the route. Why are we running along the paved road back to Iten? he wants to know. Godfrey isn’t sure.
“Finn, do you really want to run on the road?” he asks. Kenyans very rarely run on concrete, and having driven along the road from Iten just now, I can see that it’s not the nicest run. But I’m worried about the car going off road.
“I know another route nearby,” says Godfrey. “Just a few miles away. It’s very flat. The car will be fine.”
So we pile back in and start out along another paved road. Unfortunately, this road is so potholed it’s like trying to drive across stepping stones. I have to keep to a painful crawl, the morning sun rising higher into the sky with each passing minute. Chris grins at me. “I told you,” he says, “seven o’clock is too late.”
I slalom around the road, left and right, for around twelve miles, with Godfrey telling me at every corner that we’re almost there. His promises begin to become meaningless after an hour or so. Eventually we get there. It’s a relief to get out of the car. We’re in a tiny settlement that’s built up around an intersection between two roads, with just a few houses, a gas station, and a school.
We all get ready as Godfrey talks us through the route. This time I’m doing eighteen miles—my longest run ever. As we line up at the start, Godfrey gives us his now customary pep talk, with Chris doing his customary best to look like he’s ignoring it. “Right, as we all know, this town is called …,” Godfrey begins, glancing around. He looks at Chris. “What’s this town called?” he asks.
Running with the Kenyans Page 18