We start off easy in a big group. Beatrice, looking feisty, seems to be pushing the pace at the front. She has a tenacity that’s hard not to admire. She rarely speaks when we meet, but when she does, it is always with certainty that she will run well in Lewa. In every training run she starts off at the front, full of confidence. And no matter how far back she drops off the pace, she remains undeterred.
Hill running has never been my strong point, so I’m not expecting to stay with the others long, but to my surprise I make it around the first two switchbacks in the middle of the pack. Then suddenly they change gear, and they’re gone.
Sure and steady, I tell myself as I pitter-patter along, avoiding the biggest stones, trying to take the shortest line around the innumerable corners. I manage to edge my way past Beatrice and her friend, who has joined us again, but the others are farther and farther ahead every time I look up, until they disappear completely.
People stand by the side of the road to watch me as I pass. At first they’re friendly and I greet them happily. I’m feeling fine, just taking my time. But as I go on, I start to feel faint. Godfrey hasn’t appeared yet, and we must have passed the five-kilometer point. The more tired I get, the more piqued I become. Where is he? I imagine Barmasai thinking we are very unprofessional. Come on, Godfrey. I’m not even that thirsty, but it’s becoming a distraction. I keep expecting to see him before the next switchback, but he never appears. I don’t know if I’m imagining it, but everyone I pass now seems to be laughing at me. It’s like a bad dream: the manic laughter, the endless dirt road, the aching in my legs, the pounding sun. And still no sign of Godfrey.
At one point a slow-moving truck comes up behind me. It’s barely moving faster than I am, and so for about five minutes it feels like it’s following me, its straining engine grunting at me to move aside. I keep running, glancing up at the driver as the truck finally grinds past. He looks at me from his cab, expressionless. At least he’s not laughing. Up and up I go, until the mountains that towered above me when I began look like small hills down below. Up and up, back and forth, into the cooler air. Ahead, the clouds cling to the rock face that holds back the highlands.
As I run, my mind keeps speculating how far I have left to go, suggesting that I slow down. I decide to try Paula Radcliffe’s chant. I tell myself that I love my daughter. I love you, Lila, I say to myself. I love you, Lila. Amazingly, I feel suddenly lighter, as though I’ve thrown off a heavy cloak. My feet start picking up their pace, switching back and forth under me with an easy flow. I love you, Lila. But then I feel bad for singling out Lila. I love you, Uma, I say. I love you, Uma. But now something has changed. I’m slowing down again. I’ve been tricked. My mind, like a double agent, has undermined the power of the sentiment by distracting it, mimicking it. I look at the hill rising up, endlessly up. I try again. I love you, Lila. But it feels too calculated now.
For a second, though, the chant worked. Maintaining it against such a slippery adversary, however, was not easy. Perhaps I just need to save it up for the crucial moments, when all hope seems lost and I’m about to give in.
The road goes on, turning around and back, around and back, up and up. Just before the end, Godfrey finally appears in the car. A woman, who turns out to be his sister, hands me my drink from the passenger window. I’ve no idea where she has come from.
“Godfrey, what happened?” I manage to gasp, handing back the water.
“I couldn’t start the car,” he says, looking distraught. “Sorry.”
I push on, refreshed now, until finally I reach the top. My legs are wobbly as I stand there feeling like Edmund Hillary on the peak of Everest. The other runners are all sitting on the grass, drinking lemonade and eating peanuts and boiled eggs as though they’ve just been out for a gentle stroll.
Japhet, it turns out, was the first one to the top, ahead of Barmasai. Little Japhet. We’re going to have to start taking him seriously, I think. He smiles his toothy smile as I tell him how hard I found it. “It is hard,” he says.
In the end it took me 1 hour 58 minutes. The other runners kindly tell me that anyone who can run it in under two hours is “very strong.” They, of course, all ran it much quicker, in just over 1 hour 30 minutes. After all this time in Kenya, I still really have no idea how they do it.
As we stand around talking, Godfrey pulls up. He has Beatrice in the truck with him. She ran out of steam at about eleven miles, he tells me later. “I’m worried about her,” he says. “How can she run a marathon if she can’t do that?”
Back in Iten, there’s a buzz around town. The circus and pageantry of the Athletics Kenya track series has come to town. For weeks we’ve been reading about the results of the other races in the newspaper, stories of Olympic champions being beaten by barefoot upstarts. The biggest race, the last one on the calendar, is a two-day extravaganza in the Kamariny Stadium in Iten.
I make my way up into the stands, ready to watch the action. Godfrey is milling around talking to all his old athlete friends. I’m sure they all come to races just to chat and socialize, as they rarely seem that interested in watching the running.
The meeting itself is a mixture of haplessness, improvisation, and brilliance. In some of the field events it feels like the organizers have simply plucked a few random passersby to compete. Men in Wellington boots fling the discus, while at the pole vault mat the marshals sit chatting and waiting to see if anyone turns up. Nobody does.
The high jump features a host of tall, skinny athletes who rush at the bar and karate kick themselves over. Despite all lack of conventional technique, they manage to reach the impressive height of over six feet, contorting and twisting their bodies somehow up and over the bar.
It all feels a bit like a school sports day, a commendable effort, a bit of fun. That is until the distance athletes file onto the track. Then, suddenly, this sodden track that sits on the edge of the clouds, the vast Rift Valley spread out far below, becomes the stage for some of the most fiercely competitive racing you could find anywhere in the world.
In the men’s 1,500 meters, there are nine heats with around twenty athletes in each one. When the starting gun fires, they charge off like sprinters. In the 5,000 meters they seem to start just as fast. And there are just as many runners.
But despite this race being the highlight of the series, none of the most famous Kenyan athletes have turned up.
“They know you can’t run fast times on this track,” one former runner tells me. The dirt track sits at an altitude of over eight thousand feet, and, by all accounts, is about ten meters too long. So the stage is left to those looking to make a breakthrough. The hundreds of Iten hopefuls filing in through the gates, string shoe bags on their backs carrying borrowed spikes, weave through the crowds to sign up at a small table.
The 800 meters heats, eight of them in all, are run at a breakneck speed, each won in around 1 minute 49 seconds. The 5,000 meters is won in just over fourteen minutes. These are times that would put these athletes near the front in the British national championships—although, of course, those are run at sea level and on an all-weather track that measures precisely 400 meters in circumference.
Japhet runs in one of the 5,000 meters heats, after arriving too late to enter the 10,000 meters. He looks like a child beside the other runners, his short legs moving twice as fast just to keep up. He seems to be holding his shorts the whole way around, and I hope he’s not injured. He finishes around the middle of the field in 15 minutes 33 seconds. I go over to talk to him. “Are you injured?” I ask him. He seems dazed, surprised to see me.
“My shorts are too big,” he says. “I had to hold them up.” Not owning a pair of shorts, he had borrowed some from a friend. Chris spots us and comes over.
“Hello, my friends,” he says. “What time did you run, Japhet?”
Japhet looks at his watch. “Fifteen thirty,” he says.
Chris looks at me in surprise. “Oh, man,” he says, laughing. “That’s a girl’s time.” Ja
phet smiles, but I can tell he’s hurt by the comment.
“Don’t mind him,” I say. “That’s a good time on this track.” But Chris is already gone, off to talk to another of the former athletes hanging around in the infield. I spot Daniel Komen striding around, looking worried, trying to keep the show on schedule. Japhet, keen to get some clothes on, hurries off, too, leaving me to watch the next race from the inside of the track.
Interestingly, some of the athletes at the back of the races trail home in fairly slow times. I’m amazed to see 1,500 meters runners finishing in times slower than I used to run at school. I know the track is slow, but surely not that slow. The reason is that every athlete sets off as though he is going to win. Even after just two hundred meters, some athletes have started so fast that they are dropping out, sheepish grins on their faces, disappearing off the track and into the crowd. If they don’t drop out, those who went off too fast at the beginning end up jogging around to the finish.
Most Kenyan runners that I meet have a strong belief that they can win almost any race regardless of the opposition. They will make outlandish predictions about the times they hope to run, and afterward, when they don’t run them, they will just laugh and say: “Next time I will do it.”
Among the crowd, I bump into Brother Colm’s assistant, Ian. I ask him why everyone starts off so fast. “It’s okay,” he says calmly. “They already know how to train, but here they are learning to race. After this, they can run in Rome or Oslo.”
This is the breeding ground for the great Kenyan runners of tomorrow. They may have natural talent—I see that every day on the roads in Iten—but now, here on the track, the final piece of their apprenticeship is taking place: racing. And it’s interesting to see that this is one area where they still have a lot to learn.
On my way home I bump into Paul Tanui, the runner who has replaced Josphat in the Iten Town Harriers. He has been at the track to watch the racing.
“Hello,” he says, shaking my hand.
“Are you ready for Lewa?” I ask. It’s only a few weeks away now.
“Yes,” he says. “But, listen, what are we doing about visas?”
“Visas?”
“Yes, when are we getting them?”
“Lewa is in Kenya,” I say. “We don’t need visas.”
“In Kenya?”
I feel like apologizing. He obviously thought I was taking him abroad to race. One last payday. The problem with racing in Kenya is that the competition is so much tougher, it’s harder to win. The outrageous depth of talent just milling around in this tiny corner of the world is illustrated by a telephone conversation I have that same afternoon. I’ve been trying to pin down Wilson Kipsang, who leads the End of the Road early-morning runs. He’s a fairly decent runner even in these parts, ranked in the world all-time top ten in the marathon with a time of 2:04.† Godfrey, who knows everyone, gives me his number, except that by mistake he gives me the number of a completely different person, someone called William Kipsang. Not knowing that, I dial the number.
“Hello.”
“Hello, Kipsang?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Finn here, the mzungu writer.”
“Eh?”
“We’ve met a few times. I was talking to you at the track yesterday.”
“Eh?”
“Is that Wilson Kipsang?”
“No, William.”
“Oh, I thought your name was Wilson. The two-oh-four marathoner, right?”
“No. Two-oh-five.”
Even if you dial a wrong number here, you can end up speaking to a person who has run a time three minutes quicker than the British record, set over twenty-five years ago. No wonder Paul was hoping to race abroad.
* A few months later, Barmasai ended up finishing fifth in the world championships in Daegu.
† On October 30, 2011, Wilson Kipsang ran the second fastest time in history, 2:03:42, narrowly missing the world record by four seconds, in the Frankfurt marathon in Germany.
Twenty-three
Market day in Iten
“I guarantee that it’s nothing,” Anders tells me. “It’s just because you’re getting nervous about the race.” I’ve got a sore foot. I’ve tried to ignore it for a few days now, but every time I run it feels worse. I can hardly even walk on it. And this time it’s not a bent toe from standing on a stone, it’s the whole side of my foot. “Then again, it could be plantar fasciitis,” he says.
Plantar fasciitis is every runner’s worst nightmare. It strikes out of nowhere and the only remedy is to stop running. But I’ve got only a week now until the race. I can’t stop. If worse comes to worst, I’ll just run through the pain. I have to make it to that start line in Lewa, no matter what.
The athletes at the Kimbia camp are in no doubt about what I need: a massage. One of the great things about Iten is the ready supply of massage therapists. Some of the former runners retrain in massage after their careers end, or after they fail to take off, and every camp has a man on hand to give the athletes a regular rub down. With very few physiotherapists around to treat injuries, the Kenyans are keenly aware of the value of massages in preventing problems in the first place. Massages release built-up tension in overworked muscles and stimulate the circulation of blood and lymph fluids. Afterward, all the little aches and pains from training are gone, leaving you with a clean pair of legs to punish all over again.
If an injury does set in, a good massage therapist can work on certain trigger points, pressing on them like crazy until you want to scream, to break down knots in the muscles and release tightness. It doesn’t always work, but often it does.
The athletes outside the camps, such as Japhet, who can’t afford to pay for a massage, have to improvise. Often when I see Japhet, he tells me how he’s feeling good after his weekly treatment. “Who gave you the massage?” I ask him one day.
He looks a little downcast, as though I’ve broken the illusion that he is just like one of the top athletes with a massage therapist on hand. “Henry,” he says. His friend from the kiosk. They massage each other, he tells me. And if Henry is not around, Japhet massages himself. Still, as long as you don’t press too hard, even a backstreet massage, or a self-massage, can help drive fresh blood into tired muscles and rejuvenate them. For runners like Japhet, it’s better than nothing.
At the One 4 One camp, the athletes would go in gingerly one at a time to see the massage therapist and spend an hour or so yelping in pain. At one point when I was there, I went in to see what was happening. The massage therapist was up on the table trying to exert as much pressure as he could on Emmanuel Mutai’s calf.
Since I’ve been in Iten I’ve been mostly avoiding massages, mainly because they’re so painful, but now that I’m hobbling I’m worried that that was a big mistake. I call up the massage therapist who was torturing Emmanuel Mutai. He says he will come over straight away.
Over the next three days I get two intensive treatments. During the first treatment, in the Kimbia camp, my feet feel as though they’ve been in a medieval torture chamber. He presses and presses, chuckling to himself when he hits a pressure point. As I grit my teeth and try to hang in there, he asks about England or my family as if he’s simply giving me a haircut. Just when I think I can’t take any more, he finally stops. I feel mentally exhausted, and my foot still hurts. He tells me not to worry, that it will be fine for the race. I hope he’s right, because a few days before we’re due to leave, I’m still limping.
For the second massage, he asks me to come to a house in Eldoret near to where he lives. I’ve arranged a good-bye lunch with the athletes in the Kimbia camp on the same day, but I’m sure I can fit it all in. Mama Kibet is cooking up pots of beans when I leave. “I’ll get back as soon as I can,” I tell her as I reverse the car out of the gate and onto the muddy road.
The house where I’m to meet the therapist belongs to a runner. It’s a small concrete box down a waterlogged side road. The runner ushers me into a tiny sitting room,
chasing his sister and a young child out the back door at the same time. We all sit down around a table.
“First we must eat,” says the runner. “As you are the guest in my house.” One by one, his sister, mother, and wife carry in large pots of beans, rice, and meat and place them on the table. I’m hosting my own lunch in an hour and I haven’t had the massage yet. Next come the plates, a flask of tea, cups, forks, and napkins.
By the time we eat and I get my massage, laying facedown on the sofa, while the runner sits talking to me between my grimaces, it’s past one. I make my excuses and head out, refusing, reprehensibly, another round of tea.
As I leave, the massage therapist gives me a small jar of Menthol Plus balm to rub on my feet. On the box it has a picture of a man rubbing it on his head. “This will help?” I ask skeptically.
“Yes, yes,” he says, smiling. “You will be fine. For sure.”
And so, with my hobble and my jar of headache balm, I get back in the car and return to Iten.
The Kimbia garden has been laid out with a long table surrounded by plastic chairs. Japhet and Henry are there, wearing puffy overcoats and sitting awkwardly among the other athletes. They both get up as soon as I enter and shake my hand. They seem a little startruck to be in the camp, even though none of the athletes here are particularly well known. Beatrice is also there, sitting in the corner sheepishly, trying to blend into the background. She gets up and shakes my hand and then sits back down.
There’s a knock on the gate. I open it and Tom Payn walks in with Raymond, Mary Keitany’s brother-in-law. Anders is helping Mama Kibet bring out the food. I’m still full from my first lunch, but I can hardly refuse to eat at my own farewell meal. Mama Kibet piles the food up on one of the biggest bowls and hands it to me. “Thank you,” I say, raising my eyebrows at the size of it, which sets her off giggling as she starts ladling the food out for the others.
Running with the Kenyans Page 20