Tom asks me what time I’m hoping to run in Lewa. After my last few training runs, I’m secretly hoping to get somewhere near three hours, but after my half marathon in Ethiopia, and with the heat, the hills, the altitude, and the off-road terrain in Lewa, perhaps I’m being too optimistic. Tom thinks 3 hours 30 minutes would be a more realistic goal.
The other Iten Town Harriers are less circumspect about their chances, of course. When they hear that the race is usually won in around 2 hours 21 minutes, they look happy. “Two hours twenty-five minutes will probably win you some money,” I tell them, having studied the previous years’ results in detail.
“I will try,” says Japhet, struggling to contain his excitement. They all think they can run at least 2 hours 15 minutes, even in Lewa.
Beatrice, too, is hopeful when I tell her that anything under three hours could win her a prize. It seems a very slow time for a Kenyan athlete, but I’m doubtful she can do it. One evening just a few days before, she joined me, Japhet, and Henry on a slow jog. It was the sort of easy run that is not meant to be testing, but just to keep the body ticking over, and ease out any stiffness. Sometimes on these runs the pace gets quite fast for me, but that evening it was very gentle. We chatted as we jogged along past endless small fields, Japhet asking me about England and how slow people run there. After a while, though, Beatrice started to drop behind. We slowed down but she told us to go on. She had a cramp, she said, holding her side. She was still smiling, but it was the first time I’d ever seen a Kenyan athlete struggling with a cramp, or at least admitting to it. As we ran on, I told Japhet that I was worried about Beatrice, that she might struggle even to finish Lewa, but he was as optimistic as ever. “She is strong,” he said. “She will be fine.”
Mama Kibet is bringing out a huge bowl of fruit salad for dessert. She has made us quite a feast.
“Where’s Godfrey?” Japhet asks, putting down his half-finished bowl of beans.
It’s a good question. I call him up on his cellphone. “Finn,” he says. “I’m just coming.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in western Kenya,” he says. “My wife has got malaria.”
“Is it bad?”
“Yes,” he says gravely.
“Shouldn’t you stay with her?” I’ve been worrying for weeks that he won’t make it to Lewa, that something else will happen at the last minute to prevent him from coming. With Godfrey, something else always happens.
“Yes, I might not make your lunch,” he says.
“That’s fine,” I say. The food would be cold, anyway, as he’s about a three-hour drive away. “But what about Lewa?”
“No, no, I can’t miss Lewa,” he says. “No way.”
“But what about your wife?”
“She will be fine.” It’s only two days until we leave. I hope he’s right.
I go back to the lunch. It’s a happy scene, even without Godfrey. Beatrice is chatting with Raymond, who is dressed neatly in a white shirt, holding his bowl carefully so as not to spill anything. Japhet is chatting with runners from the camp. I’m glad he’s getting a decent meal a few days before the race.
Someone outside is beeping for us to open the gates. Two of the athletes from the camp unbolt the lock and hold the gates open as Chris’s car slides into the yard, almost bashing into the table. He climbs out of the car, a big, mischievous grin on his face. “Sorry, man,” he says. “I had to sort some things out at school.”
Twenty-four
“Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.”—Mahatma Gandhi
My alarm goes off at 5:45 A.M., as it has many times over the last few months. I reach out from under the mosquito net and switch it off. I get changed into my running clothes and head out into the darkness. Although I felt I should rest my foot until the race, everyone has recommended that I go for one last run before we leave for Lewa. It’s a fitting way to say good-bye to Iten.
My foot feels fine as I walk between silent houses, past stinking piles of rubbish, and down to the main road. It has rained during the night, but not too much. A shadow passes by me in the darkness. Down in the town the matatus are already circling, lights on, looking for passengers. “Yes, mzungu,” one conductor says as I walk by. “Eldoret?” I shake my head. I walk up past St. Patrick’s school and start off on a slow jog. Ahead of me, the half moon glows in a lightening sky, flicking between the trees as I run. Some children in school uniforms, walking the other way, watch me pass.
I head out past the edge of town and into the countryside. Mist hangs blue in the dips, thick and magical. Pointy-roofed huts and neatly sown fields rise up here and there, the red track stretching out before me. I run on, like Dorothy, through a strange, Technicolor world. And who is that I see now, running toward me, his bright yellow jacket glowing in the first rays of sunlight? The scarecrow? It’s Japhet, grinning to see me. He turns and runs beside me, back the way he came.
We run together, easy, passing bigger groups, people running hard, the sweat beading on their anxious foreheads, pushing themselves on in search of the elusive Oz, sure that someday, if they just keep running, they will get there.
Japhet tells me he has a calf injury, but he doesn’t seem too worried about it. “I’ve had it for a long time,” he says. “But it will be okay.” I guess you have to be prepared for a few niggles if you’re going to train for a marathon, even if you’re a Kenyan.
It’s interesting to note that the runners here still get injured despite their barefoot upbringing, but the types of injuries they get are different. “I don’t see many impact injuries,” the physiotherapist at Lornah’s camp tells me one day. These are common injuries in the West, and are usually the most serious and debilitating; things like runner’s knee, shin splints, plantar fasciitis, and stress fractures. In my time in Kenya, I haven’t met a single athlete suffering from any of these problems. If someone is injured, it is always something less serious, such as a tight hamstring or a pulled calf muscle. Or a cut leg.
Chris turned up at my good-bye lunch at the Kimbia camp with a huge gash in his leg. He said he fell while out running. It looked nasty and was heavily bandaged. After showing me his leg, he started telling me he had been getting up at 4:00 a.m. to train. It’s a strange thing to do. At that hour it’s too dark to run. No wonder he fell over. And why did he need to run so early? “To get extra training. I might surprise you and finish in the top ten,” he said, as though it was some wild boast. When we first started training, he was talking about winning the race. This is a man who has run the New York marathon in 2 hours 8 minutes. He doesn’t need to prove anything to me.
A few nights earlier he invited me to his house for dinner. He lives in a small compound near St. Patrick’s school in Iten with his wife and five children. Inside, it’s like any other Kenyan runner’s house. The walls are covered in Christmas decorations, bright posters of Alpine landscapes and inspirational quotes, and free calendars. On the shelves are bulbous, supersized trophies from Boston, San Diego, and other places.
He takes me out into the yard to show me his room for relaxing. It’s a former garage with a few battered old sofas in it, a massage table, and a beautiful mahogany chaise longue. Next door are the staff rooms, although they all seem empty. All the buildings are on top of one another, crammed into his small bit of land, with little space around them. He shows me one of the rooms. A shabby bed is hidden behind a huge cabinet in the middle of the room, its back to the door. “You see how nice it is kept?” he says.
As we sit waiting for supper, he hands me his photo albums. Pictures of him and his wife in Nairobi. He looks young and innocent, his tracksuit waistband pulled up high as he poses proudly beside some tall buildings. For all his slipperiness, Chris is a good man. His talent for running has lurched him from a simple life of farming into an infinitely more complex world where he is expected to be a role model, a picture of success. It’s a tough act to hold together.
He sits un
der the flickering fluorescent light like a king in his big armchair, the pink velvet curtains folded up behind his head. His kids bustle around the cramped room, dark, handsome faces, polite and quiet, wearing thick overcoats. His wife serves up a feast of rice, lentils, baked bananas, meat, and freshly made mango and pineapple juice.
“I might surprise you, man,” he says, grinning. “You never know.”
After the last morning run, I pack up my things, say good-bye to Anders and the other athletes at the Kimbia camp, and roll the car out of the drive to collect Chris. “You’re late, man,” he says when he sees me.
Then we head back into town to find Japhet and Beatrice. Japhet is nowhere to be seen. We try calling him on his phone but there’s no answer. Chris spots him in the garage. He’s getting some last words of encouragement from his uncle.
“Come on, you’re late,” says Chris, pretending to be annoyed.
Japhet looks at us both, his eyes shot with worry. “It’s okay,” I say, sensing that he’s too nervous for jokes. Chris laughs, sniggering to himself.
As we arrive to pick up Beatrice, she seems to be walking off in the opposite direction. “Beatrice,” I call out, “where are you going?” When she sees me, she runs back inside her house then comes out with her bag. She gets in the back next to Japhet. The plan is to meet the others in Eldoret.
“Okay, let’s go,” I say, driving uphill past Lornah’s camp for the last time. “Good-bye, Iten. Thanks for the memories.”
Chris has managed to hire us a matatu for the journey, but he decides that he and Philip will travel with me in my car, while everyone else can go with Godfrey in the matatu. I had planned to travel with Japhet, but I decide there’s no point arguing.
Philip is dressed in a white suit with a Panama hat, while everyone else is in running clothes. We sit waiting in the car while Godfrey arranges the luggage in the bus. His wife seems to have fully recovered from her bout of malaria.
“Let’s go,” says Chris, impatient as ever.
“We might as well wait for them and all go in convoy,” I say.
“No, let’s go,” says Philip. “They can catch us up.”
I don’t have the conviction to argue, so I pull the car out of the garage and start on the road to Lewa. I drive slowly, waiting for Godfrey to catch up, but after half an hour he still hasn’t appeared in my mirror. I decide to call him.
“Finn,” he says. I can hear that he’s driving.
“Where are you?” I ask.
“Sorry. Paul said we had to pray before we left. But we’re right behind you.”
The journey takes most of the day. Chris sits in the front, excited, reading all the signs as we pass. Philip, like a wise old owl, sits in the back twirling his mustache. He used to live near Lewa when he was in the military in the late 1980s, he tells us. As we drive, he explains things to Chris, who sits there like a child taking it all in.
In the van, Godfrey tells me later, they were also staring out the window in wonderment. “It’s like a holiday for them,” he says. “Especially Japhet. You should have seen him. Shadrack and Beatrice, too. They’ve never seen this side of Kenya before. They keep saying, ‘Wow, look!’ ” He chuckles to himself, enjoying their excitement.
We finally arrive in Isiolo, the nearest town to Lewa, at about 5:00 P.M. As soon as we arrive at the hotel, they all get changed and head off for a run. I’m too tired from the journey to join them, and besides, I feel like I need to rest my foot. Instead I take a stroll into town.
Isiolo is a dusty, bustling settlement, with people in ripped T-shirts and flip-flops, hustling and looking for money, motorbikes skirting past. It has an aggressive edge that’s far removed from the relaxed air of Iten. It feels like a frontier town, and in many ways it is. Even though it’s over three hundred miles from the Somali border, it’s the last major town on the road and there are many Somalis living here.
It’s almost dark when, through the chaos, like six arrows, come the Iten Town Harriers. They seem like creatures from another world, mythical beasts, their muscles rippling as they glide effortlessly over the bumpy surface. Chris leads the charge, unsmiling as he shoots past. Beatrice, her arms swinging high across her chest, chases after him, closely followed by Paul and Philip. Japhet and Shadrack, relaxed, follow at the rear, Japhet waving when he sees me.
We’ve arrived in Isiolo a day early to give everyone plenty of time to recover from the journey. It means we’ve got the whole next day just to rest, though it’s not as easy as it sounds. I’m lying on the bed in the hotel room staring at the bright peach walls, the sound of the street rattling by outside the open window. Rather than feeling rested, though, my legs are inexplicably starting to feel tired. Aching, almost. It could be nerves, or the fact that I’m thinking about how tired they feel. I should go to sleep, but I’m too awake. Instead, I lie there thinking.
For six months I’ve been piecing together the puzzle of why Kenyans are such good runners. In the end there was no elixir, no running gene, no training secret that you could neatly package up and present with flashing lights and fireworks. Nothing that Nike could replicate and market as the latest running fad. No, it was too complex, yet too simple, for that. It was everything, and nothing. I list the secrets in my head: the tough, active childhood, the barefoot running, the altitude, the diet, the role models, the simple approach to training, the running camps, the focus and dedication, the desire to succeed, to change their lives, the expectation that they can win, the mental toughness, the lack of alternatives, the abundance of trails to train on, the time spent resting, the running to school, the all-pervasive running culture, the reverence for running.
When I spoke to Yannis Pitsiladis, I pushed him to put one factor above all the others. “Oh, that’s tough,” he said, thinking hard for a moment. Then he said pointedly: “The hunger to succeed.” After a pause, he continued. “Look, my daughter is a great gymnast, but she probably won’t become a gymnast. She’ll probably go to university and become a doctor. But for a Kenyan child, walking down to the river to collect water, running to school, if he doesn’t become an athlete, then there are not many other options. Of course, you need the other factors, too, but this hunger is the driving force.”
The will to succeed not only motivates Kenyans to become athletes, but it helps them when they are racing. When the crunch comes in a race and your body is shouting at you to slow down, it is the drive to win that pushes you on. I once complained jokingly to Brother Colm’s assistant, Ian, that when I ran with a group of Kenyans, whenever we’d get to a hill, they would all speed up, while my natural inclination was to slow down.
Ian smiled at me. “That’s because they want it more than you,” he said. “When they see a hill, they see it as an opportunity. An opportunity to train harder, to work harder.”
When people in the Rift Valley decide to become athletes, they don’t fit their training in around a job or college course, as we might in the West; they dedicate themselves to it completely. A daily diet of run, eat, sleep, run. In Iten alone there are around one thousand full-time athletes living like this—in a town with a population of just four thousand people. Every morning the lanes are full of people on the move, like commuters in any other city, but all of them in running clothes, flying uphill, training, training, training.
Brother Colm once remarked to me, as we stood watching a team of his athletes charging repeatedly up the long hill leading to St. Patrick’s school, that, “This is the bit people miss when they look for the Kenyan secret.”
Humans evolved as runners over millions of years in order to survive, not because it was a fun thing to do. Catching the antelope meant the difference between life and death. So it makes sense that even in the twenty-first century, if you’re running to survive, then you’ll become better at it.
I’ve immersed myself in the world of Kenyan runners, living and training with them, sharing their commitment, and following their almost monastic lifestyles, in the hope that some of their ma
gic would rub off on me. Hopefully it has, but in truth, at thirty-seven, after years of living an easy, Western lifestyle, and without anything driving me other than the joy of running and the desire to use my talent, I never stood a chance.
There’s a knock at the door. Godfrey comes in. “Finn, it’s getting dark. Shall we go and find some supper?”
This is it, the last supper before Lewa. “Yes,” I say, sitting up. “Where are the others?”
“They’re all downstairs waiting. Chris says he has found the best place. He says it’s cheap, clean, and has lots of vegetarian things.”
“Great. Let’s go.”
They all stand in the lobby, disheveled and bleary-eyed, like they’ve just woken from a deep sleep. I follow Chris and Philip out the door. Godfrey, smiling at everyone, is clearly the only person not running tomorrow. He is relaxed, chatty, while the rest of us walk along in silence.
Chris’s restaurant has two small plastic tables in one corner. The rest of the room is bare concrete. A man with a pencil behind his ear comes over as we crowd around the two tables. He hands us a colorful, laminated menu listing about a thousand different dishes.
“Do they have rice and beans?” I ask Godfrey, feeling too drowsy to ask the waiter myself.
Godfrey speaks to the man. They seem to have a long conversation. “They only have rice,” Godfrey says to me, looking concerned. “Anything to go with it? Any vegetables?” Godfrey asks the man in English, but he shakes his head.
“Do you have anything vegetarian? Anything that is not meat?”
The man looks at me, thinking hard. It’s a painful pause as he rifles through the list of dishes in his head. Then he shakes his head. “Just rice,” he says.
Shadrack is looking more startled than usual. He mutters something to the waiter in Swahili, but the man shakes his head. Another waiter brings two plates of meat over to Chris and Philip, sitting at the other table.
Running with the Kenyans Page 21