Running with the Kenyans

by Adharanand Finn

  Anders, Beatrice, her friend, and I get a ten-minute head start, running along a straight, flat road that stretches out before us like a thin pencil line, cutting the landscape in two. I’m wearing a cap given to me by Anders’s mother, Joan Benoit. She has just been in Iten visiting him. Not really knowing much about her career, I looked her up on the Internet and managed to find a video of her Olympic victory in 1984. Amazingly she broke away from the field with twenty-two miles still left to run and just kept plowing on, a look of steel on her face as she kept on pushing, unrelenting, until the end. All the while she had her cap pulled low over her eyes.

  I pull my cap down, like blinkers, focusing, ignoring everything else but the rhythm of our feet. We run mostly four abreast, not talking. The miles tick by. Beatrice is doing a much better job of keeping up with us this time. Once in a while Anders pushes the pace a little, but we claw him back each time with our steady, steady patter. We pass the occasional house, but mostly it’s a deserted landscape, drier here than in Iten. The sun is high now, soaking us with its heat.

  Godfrey, in my little car, pops up from time to time, hopping out with his arms full of water bottles, telling us to “Maintain, maintain.” Six miles. Ten miles. Shortly after we pass ten miles, we hear a rushing of feet behind us as Chris and Japhet stride past. Nobody speaks.

  Soon after, Beatrice starts to fall off the pace, and then at twelve miles Anders stops. Chris has stopped, too. I run by, along the dusty road. My head is too hot for the cap now, so I throw it to Godfrey. I feel released, as though everything up until now was only a warm-up. I push on, leaving Beatrice’s friend behind, racking up the miles, feeling like a long-distance runner. The road is more hilly now, but my legs are strong. The car, with the others in it, passes me.

  “Good job, Finn,” says Anders from the window, as they pass and drive after Japhet, who is off ahead somewhere on his own. I see Beatrice looking out of the back window of the car. She must have stopped at twelve miles, too.

  The dust from the car lingers in the air for a while. It’s just me now, in the middle of nowhere, running. I find myself smiling. It’s like I’m on one of my childhood runs, imagining I’m running across the plains of Africa. I feel fine. The road slopes down and I feel myself striding strongly, faster than ever. I can see the car stopped ahead. They’re all waiting. I sprint up to them, grabbing my water bottle as I stop. Eighteen miles. And still standing.

  “Well done, Finn. Good running,” says Godfrey.

  I stand by the car, smiling. “Thanks.”

  I ran the 18.6-mile route in 2 hours 7 minutes. Considering the altitude and dirt road, that isn’t too bad. Another 7.4 miles in under fifty-three minutes and I’d run a sub-three-hour marathon. It suddenly feels within my grasp. Even in Lewa. We’ve run late today. It won’t be that much hotter in Lewa. And the altitude will be lower. I’m suddenly progressing quicker than I had expected.

  Japhet walks over, still looking fresh after finishing in 1 hour 48 minutes. We shake hands, the only two to make it to the end today. Once I’ve recovered, we pile back into the car and begin our slow, bumpy way back to Iten. When we get on the paved road, it’s better, although we still have to watch out for police checks. All around Kenya, police stand at the side of the road waving people to stop. Then they walk around the car looking for something wrong. Anything will do, a broken mirror, a bare tire, too many people in the car. At first I never seemed to get stopped, or when they did wave me down, they’d usher me on when they saw that I was a mzungu. I don’t know if perhaps it was because I began to look more like I belonged here, but after a few months I started getting stopped. One time I was driving with Anders and his mother when a policeman waved us down. He had a serious look on his face as he patrolled around the outside of the car. I sat still, not wanting to annoy him. He circled around, then stopped by my window and told me to get out. He said I’d been driving dangerously, overtaking a truck on a black spot. The road was straight in both directions.

  “How is that a black spot?” I asked, looking around at the road.

  He gave me a tiny smile, as though that was hardly the point.

  As we were driving, Joan had been wanting to stop to use the bathroom, so when I saw her hop out of the car and scuttle away toward the bushes, I knew where she was going. The policeman watched her, a small, elderly white woman with short gray hair. Anders got out of the car and came over to help.

  “We were trying to catch our friend who was driving too fast,” Anders said by way of explanation, which was true. We were following Godfrey in another car. But it wasn’t exactly a good excuse. The officer looked at Anders’s running shoes.

  “Are you athletes?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, noticing a tiny thaw in his demeanor. “You see that woman who just walked off?” He nodded, hearing me out. “She’s an Olympic champion,” I said.

  He smiled, as though I was trying it on. “That lady? In what?”

  “Marathon.” He could tell I was serious. He was shaking his head, but in wonderment rather than disbelief. She was shuffling back now from the bushes.

  “Joan Benoit. She won the gold medal in Los Angeles in 1984,” I told him. Joan walked up to us.

  “Madam, can I shake your hand?” he said, bowing his head. Joan, unsure what was happening, shook his hand, looking at us for an explanation. “It’s an honor to meet you,” he said. Then, turning to me, smiling like a teddy bear now, “I’ll let you off with a warning.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and we all hopped back in the car and drove off in search of Godfrey.

  Twenty-two

  Track racing in Iten

  Time passes slowly at the Kimbia camp. After their morning training, the athletes sit on plastic chairs as Mama Kibet stands in the kitchen cooking up the rice and beans for lunch. A rooster struts around the garden letting out the occasional belated crow, while Mama Kibet’s sheep forage nervously at the edges, pulling at the short grass with their teeth.

  Mama Kibet is a kindhearted woman, always laughing. You only have to tell her you enjoyed your lunch and she’s off, giggling away. One day I ask her why Godfrey was banned from the camp. It seems unfeasible that anyone could take a dislike to Godfrey. He seems the most benign person on earth, always making sure everyone else is happy. In fact, without a real job, he seems to have made it his life’s work to help people.

  “You know, in Kenya, people are not straightforward,” she tells me. She doesn’t want to elaborate further, but it adds another layer of mystery to Godfrey’s character. Anders and I often sit in the garden and wonder if everything is as it seems with him. He tells us he has a wife in western Kenya who is a police officer. He has a son at the expensive Kip Keino school. He has a house and land just outside Eldoret, and another house down in the valley. However, considering that Godfrey is the world’s friendliest man, neither of us has ever seen anything of his life. Three times he has invited me to have dinner at his house with his wife, and three times he has canceled at the last minute.

  The athletes in the camp are of no help when I ask them about him. They just smile and shake their heads, saying, “Oh, Godfrey, he’s so funny.” So it is with a sense of intrigue that I set out with him one morning on a trip to visit his mother at the family home down in the valley.

  As ever with Godfrey, the plan is a complicated one. We need to drive about two hours out of Iten along the edge of the escarpment, where we plan to meet with Shadrack’s training partner, David Barmasai. The road down into the valley is too steep and bumpy for my car, so Barmasai is going to lend us the truck he has just bought with his winnings from the Dubai marathon. Later we’re going to meet him back at Shadrack’s parents’ house, where it sounds like I’m going to be the guest of honor at a big feast.

  “They were going to slaughter a goat for you,” Godfrey tells me as we sit waiting for Barmasai. We’ve parked up beside a small row of wooden shops pegged onto the edge of the cliff. The sky stretches out above the valley, as people
stand outside the shops watching us. “I told him,” Godfrey says, laughing, “ ‘Before you kill that goat, you should know, Finn is a vegetarian.’ He was so happy he didn’t have to kill the goat. He’s going to kill a chicken instead.”

  Godfrey tries ringing Barmasai, but there is no answer. He should have been here forty minutes ago. A man pulls up beside us on a bicycle. In his basket he has an upside-down sheep. He unties the legs and then hauls it out and ties the rope that’s around its neck to a tuft of grass. Then he rides off.

  “That must be strong grass,” I say, watching as the sheep, without hesitating, simply carries on with its interminable mission in life, to eat. Godfrey tries ringing Barmasai again. This time he gets through.

  “He’s on his way,” he tells me after he has finished talking. “He said they ran later than usual today. I told him it’s fine, we’re athletes, we understand that training comes first.” The man on the bicycle returns with another sheep, which he unties and places down next to the first one. Then he rides off again.

  As we wait, Godfrey tells me the story of the time, years ago, when he took an American friend back to his house in the valley. He’d been away racing for quite a few months and arrived back at the house in the middle of the night. “I tried to open the door, but it wouldn’t budge,” he says. “That’s strange, I thought. Then I heard this noise, a hissing noise, and I thought, oh my god.”

  “What was it?”

  “I knew what it was. It was the hissing sound of termites. There was a termite mound behind my door. Inside my house. My friend looked nervous. I told him there could be a snake, because snakes like to sit on termite mounds. As soon as I mentioned snakes, he started running away.” Godfrey chuckles as he tells the story. “He got into the car and locked the door. When I went to talk to him he only rolled the window down a tiny bit, enough to hear, he was so nervous. Then he wound it back up again.”

  Godfrey found a machete and managed to slide it around the door and knock the termite mound over. It crashed down across his bed. “There was mud everywhere. When I went in, I was scared because there could be a snake. I had to sleep on the floor in another room.” His friend was still in the car when he woke up in the morning. “He wouldn’t come out until he saw me,” says Godfrey, shaking his head at the memory.

  Finally, about two hours later than arranged, Barmasai arrives, and after swapping cars, we set off.

  The road down into the valley has to be one of the most spectacular drives I’ve ever experienced. A 4,000-foot descent down the side of a sudden, jagged cliff, giving way to steep, sloping fields that slide out into the dry valley below. The road passes through different climates, from thick jungle air down into the dry, baked sunshine of the Fluorspar mine at the bottom. Toby Tanser once told me that I couldn’t leave Kenya without running Fluorspar. It’s a rite of passage for any aspiring athlete. Moses Tanui claims he ran it every second week before he won the Boston Marathon in 1996. From the bottom, to the shops at the top where we met Baramsai, is exactly 13.1 miles. A half marathon. Uphill all the way.

  “Shall we do it with the team before Lewa?” I ask Godfrey.

  “Sure. We have to.” It takes us almost an hour to drive down, the road is so bumpy. I can’t imagine how long it will take to run up it.

  By the time we arrive at the gates to Godfrey’s family home, it’s almost three in the afternoon. The place has a still, lazy feel to it. People sit under the trees and watch as we drive past, too hot to be surprised. The gates open into a little oasis of green grass and tall pine trees, with two neat little houses that look like Swiss chalets nestled at the bottom. “Welcome to my home,” says Godfrey as we drive in.

  As we step out of the truck, Godfrey’s mother walks over to greet us. She has a proud, weathered face with sharp eyes. She’s wearing a gray two-piece suit, a colorful headscarf, and a pair of running shoes.

  “She always likes to look smart,” Godfrey says. She gives me a firm handshake. “Karibu,” she says, looking straight at me.

  Mama Godfrey worked her whole life in the Fluorspar mine, initially smashing rocks with the men, but eventually as a messenger in the office. She lived with her family in a small company-owned house, and even though her husband left her, she worked hard to send her firstborn, and only, son to St. Patrick’s high school in Iten. He wasn’t a runner, but once there he met Brother Colm and started doing well in races. One day his cousin, the athlete Joseph Chesire, turned up at the school and asked Godfrey for his identity card. Godfrey, not sure what was going on, handed it over.

  “Right,” said his cousin. “I’ve got you a place in the army.” Godfrey didn’t really want to join the army, but it was a chance to live as an athlete and get paid. “He thought it was the best thing for me,” Godfrey explains. Unfortunately, unknown to any of them, Godfrey’s scholarship to study in America had just come through, but it was too late. He was a soldier now.

  “Brother Colm was so mad,” Godfrey tells me. “He’s still mad with me today.” It seems a shame, he would have made a good student. But as an athlete, Godfrey ended up spending a lot of his time in the United States winning races. He also ran for Kenya numerous times and once finished fourth, ahead of both Paul Tergat and Moses Tanui, in the world half-marathon championships. The boy from the Fluorspar mine did good.

  Inside Godfrey’s house, which was the first thing he built with his race winnings, the table is laid out with an array of food. Mung bean stew, rice, chapattis, beans, bananas, ground nuts, and freshly made mango juice. I’m starving.

  Piled up in one corner of the room are six old suitcases.

  “This is my old stuff,” says Godfrey, opening up the top case. It is full of magazines, running vests and shorts still wrapped in plastic, medals, and trophies. Among the early 1990s Puma vests and tights, he finds an old copy of Athletics Weekly magazine. I skim through it, thinking he must be in it somewhere. I find a page listing the year’s world rankings. There he is, Godfrey Kiprotich, ranked ten in the world for the half marathon.

  “So funny,” he says, pulling out an old Kenya tracksuit. “This is from when I was a junior.”

  His mother comes in and speaks to him. He looks around.

  “Come on, we must eat,” he says, realizing where he is. “My mum is worried that we’re not eating.”

  By the time Godfrey has taken me to visit the local school and the mayor of the town, it’s getting late. To get to Shadrack’s home we need to wind our way up another dirt road that seems to skirt endlessly along the edge of the valley, going up and then down, passing through settlements lost in time, with colorful wooden houses basking in the late afternoon sun. Finally the road careens across a clacking bridge and then up an incline so steep that we have to attempt it three times, the truck’s wheels spinning and sliding on the loose gravel.

  Shadrack’s house is back at the top of the escarpment, perched on a narrow ridge sticking out into the vast horizon. It clings to the edge of the world like the home of a wizard in some fantastical painting. All around it the land falls away so it feels as though it’s almost floating in the air. The curves of the distant hills, faded now in the last light of the day, push up from below.

  It looks like we’ve arrived too late to eat. I don’t know if the chicken was saved, or has already been eaten. Children and neighbors crowd around to meet Shadrack’s exotic visitors. His mother, pretty despite a few missing teeth, wears a dirty overcoat, shaking hands shyly, looking down. His father, older, grinning, proud of his son for bringing such visitors, walks over. He looks as though he has come straight from the fields, dust and sweat dried onto his tough skin. He has a wispy beard and is also missing some teeth.

  We stand there awkwardly as the night closes in, chasing away the day’s warmth. The children run around giggling, touching my clothes. Shadrack, not used to being a host, stands to one side watching. Smoke is rising through the grass roof of one of the small, round huts. Suddenly, two car lights come swinging around at us from the nearb
y field. It’s Barmasai with my car. We walk over, followed like Pied Pipers by hundreds of children. I’m ready to get back to Iten. We still have about three hours of driving to do, and I’ve got a morning run to think about.

  I shake hands with everyone and then clamber into my car. Shadrack gets in the front beside me. For some reason Godfrey is with Barmasai in the truck. I follow them out of the field, leaving Shadrack’s parents and the children peering after us at the disappearing taillights, their faces glowing red for a second before the darkness closes in, reclaiming them.

  A week later I’m back in Fluorspar, standing with the Iten Town Harriers posing for a photograph. The road stretches off innocently ahead of us, beginning up a gentle slope. From there, though, it winds and switches back again and again, snaking its way up the side of the valley for thirteen miles. My aim is to keep running the whole way.

  On the way down, the other runners discussed the Fluorspar record. It’s only a training run, so there are no official records, but they seem to think the fastest time ever is in the region of 1 hour 26 minutes. That’s for a half marathon on a route that ascends more than four thousand feet.

  Godfrey, as ever, starts us off with his pep talk. He will be right behind us in the truck, he says, handing out water every five kilometers. “It’s hot, so it’s very important to drink water all the time.”

  Chris seems more impatient than ever to get going this morning. He called me at 4:30 A.M. to tell me he was ready to go. I still had another thirty minutes’ sleep planned before my alarm was due to go off. A few minutes after I spoke to him, I heard Godfrey’s phone ringing in the other room.

  Besides the Lewa team, David Barmasai has joined us for the run, which should be a good test for young Japhet. Barmasai has just been selected to run the marathon for Kenya at the upcoming world championships.* “Okay,” says Godfrey, “Let’s go.”