“How are the others doing?” I ask him, my voice sounding surprisingly composed, as though we were just walking along the road in Iten. My breathing is steady. It’s just my legs that are holding me back, and my overpowering thirst.
“Shadrack is pushing on in about eighth. He can still catch the leaders, but I told him he has to push hard now.”
“And Japhet?”
“He’s just behind him.” He looks at me, worried. “How do you feel?”
“I feel exhausted. My legs just won’t move.”
As we crawl over the brow of the hill, I see Lila standing at the water stop, holding out a bottle of water. When I reach her, I grab it. “Thank you,” I say, smiling at her.
“First mzungu coming through,” Jophie announces to everyone else gathered there.
I don’t know how much longer I can hold out. I’m getting slower and slower, surely someone must be catching me. But I push on, refreshed, feeling back in control of my senses, for the moment at least. I try to focus on my form, keeping my legs in order, leaning forward. It’s as though my body is desperately trying to shut down and I have to do everything I can to keep it in operation.
Between each magic marker, I lose track of how far we’ve gone, and I’m not sure which number to expect next. They seem to count erratically: 34KM, 36KM, 35KM, 36KM. But even if I’m losing count, each one represents progress, proof that I’m still moving.
And still no other mzungu passes me. Beatrice has long since disappeared into the distance, but amazingly nobody else comes by. I’m passing the slowest half-marathon runners now, still on their first lap, most of them walking. I try to weave past them, but I’m barely moving faster than they are.
At thirty-nine kilometers we reach the last water stop. I don’t know what happens. I reach for a drink, and then stop, completely stock-still. My legs, charged with sweet relief, feel as though they’re singing hymns. I pick up an energy drink and suck it down. Half-marathon runners, their big bellies hoisted up over their shorts, are standing around drinking and joking. This is the greatest party ever. I feel like a gatecrasher, my eyes wide. This is where it’s happening. At the back of the field. This is where the real action takes place. Just when I think life couldn’t get any sweeter, a man comes over and squeezes about eight wet sponges over my head. Ice cold water. I’m in heaven.
But I have to get on. I tell myself to stop having fun, to pull myself together. I start off again, into the dry wastelands, the dust sticking now to my wet shoes. The taste of dirty water running into my mouth. I wonder whether I could walk the rest of the way and still be the first mzungu. No, it’s too risky. I have to keep going. Just one foot in front of the other, no matter how slow, just keep running. I look down, watching them, my feet moving back and forth.
Finally, miraculously, I make it to where Ray is sitting on his plastic chair. He leaps up. “Come on,” he bellows. “What’s wrong with you?”
I can’t help grinning at him. It’s half a mile to go from here. “Thanks, Ray.”
Then Godfrey, the omnipresent, appears. “Come on, Finn, you’re going to win.”
He means the mzungu race. It’s a victory of sorts, I suppose, although it’s hard to fathom how right now. I feel more pathetic than heroic as I lumber along. Godfrey, the real hero of the piece, runs beside me, encouraging me. Somehow, with his help, I begin to get moving again, to move my legs once more like a runner. As I round the last corner, the beautiful, arched finish rises up to meet me. The clock ticks on to 3 hours 20 minutes. And then I’m there. I’ve done it. I’ve won. I’ve finished. I’ve survived. I’ve finally stopped.
Marietta is there, smiling, proud, holding my hand. The children are there. It’s beautiful. I want to cry. I can hardly stand. A man is moving me on, directing me to a chair. I hold on to it, to stop myself from collapsing. The girls are buzzing around me, offering me a cupcake they’ve baked for me, a beautiful mess of melting chocolate. But I need water, an energy drink, anything liquid. I collapse into the chair.
Hands are reaching down, wanting to shake mine. Paul is there, his big grin. “Fantastic,” he says. Chris walks over. Lila runs up and gives him a big hug. Godfrey is smiling under his hat. I have to look away, to stop myself from crying. I’m overcome with emotion. I get up, to try walking around.
Alastair comes over. “Man, that was some run,” he says, offering me a big handshake. I can’t look. I totter off, unstable, toward a sign that says RECOVERY TENT. Inside it’s like a war zone, with exhausted people collapsed everywhere. Those on bales of hay are getting massages, while those on the floor have simply been left to die, it seems. I slide down next to a hay bale, out of the sun, among the pungent smells of sweat and Deep Heat, hidden from the emotions running wild outside. I need a moment to breathe.
I hear a voice I recognize. It’s Ray. I need to stand up, at least. He wants me to meet someone from the charity that runs the event, but when he introduces me, I can’t speak. I can barely blubber my name. I’ll come back, I tell the man. I just need to get my breath back. He smiles knowingly. He’s seen it before, of course.
When I finally remerge, composed, the others are all still there. Beatrice is talking and laughing with Flora. She ended up finishing fourth, in her first marathon ever, and she won forty thousand Kenyan shillings. Enough to pay her rent for more than three years. Where did she get the strength from?
“It was very hot,” is all she can say when I congratulate her. From just after the halfway point, which was around the last time I saw her, she managed to stick with a Masai runner from Isiolo. His encouragement kept the other women runners chasing her at bay, until, at around sixteen miles, amazingly she began to pick up the pace. “I left the Masai runner,” she says. She can’t stop smiling. “But it was very tough. At forty kilometers my legs felt so weak.” She had no idea that she was in the top five, but she kept on pushing. “I thought I was number ten,” she says, which makes Flora laugh. They say something to each other in Swahili and start giggling.
Japhet and Shadrack are not there. Godfrey says they’ve gone off to get showered and changed. I ask him how they did.
He shakes his head. “Not good,” he says, disappointed. “It’s my fault. I should have told Shadrack to drink more.”
Shadrack and Japhet spent most of the race moving up through the field, but they had left themselves too much to do. Shadrack had not taken enough water, and despite getting up to eighth, he almost fainted from dehydration with less than a mile to go.
“Japhet passed him, and told him, ‘Let’s run together,’ ” Godfrey tells me. “But he was doubled over. ‘Go on without me,’ he said.”
In the end, Japhet finished in tenth place in 2 hours 28 minutes, with Shadrack struggling home in eleventh, a minute later. Paul, who had malaria only a few weeks before the race, ran 2 hours 45 minutes, while Philip, who was the first over-forty runner after all, won a brand-new cellphone.
We stand by the bus, waiting for Beatrice. They’ve decided to head straight back home to Iten, while I’m staying here in Lewa with Marietta and the children. Little Japhet, our star man, gives me a hug. “When are you coming back to Iten?” he asks.
I shake my head. “I don’t know.”
Chris, impatient to leave, slides open the minibus door. “Finn, it has been an honor,” he says, his voice as smooth as ever. The saga is over, he can get back now to his school, to building his legacy.
Philip shakes my hand and climbs into the bus.
Paul talks to me in a hushed, wistful voice, telling me to greet my family, and to come back to Iten one day.
Beatrice is here now. “Thank you so much,” she says, the envelope of cash tucked into the waistband of her tracksuit.
“Look after that money,” I tell her. Her life is going to change after this, at least for a while. Everyone is going to want a piece of her prize. “Talk to Godfrey if you need some advice.”
She smiles. “I will,” she says. “Thank you.”
The
last one is Godfrey. “Good-bye, Finn,” he says quietly, a tear in his eye.
“Godfrey, we couldn’t have done this without you. I’ll be in touch, I promise.”
He nods. “Good-bye” is all he can say. He climbs into the driver’s seat and puts the bus in reverse. They all look out, waving.
I wonder if I’ll ever see them again. It has been an honor to have known them and run with them. I stand watching as the bus drives off through the dust, bumping along the track, taking them back to Iten, back to the land of runners.
Epilogue
Four months later
It’s eerily quiet as we chase like ghosts across the sky, 130 feet up on the Queensboro Bridge. If I could lift my head long enough, I’d see the skyscrapers of Manhattan jutting up along the edge of the East River below me. But I’m focused on the patter of feet, on my breathing. Eventually the steep climb tips and we start running down the other side of the bridge. Making use of the slope, I start snaking my way through the other runners. I went through the halfway point in 1 hour 23 minutes, a half-marathon personal best by over three minutes, and I’m still feeling strong. A sign up on the bridge reads: IF EASIER MEANS TEN MILES TO GO, WELCOME TO EASIER.
Up ahead the sound of the crowd is building. As we come off the bridge, we emerge into sunlight, warm on my neck. A huge cheer goes up from a crowd five-people deep. I feel a surge of energy and can’t help smiling. Around the next corner the course turns onto First Avenue, a wide, empty street that seems to stretch on forever, a huge space cut through the middle of everything, opened up for me to run along. People cheering are lining both sides of it, waving flags and handwritten cardboard signs. It’s a long way from the silent heat of Lewa.
After returning from Kenya I’m keen to see what I can do in a race at sea level. Toby Tanser manages to get me a place in the New York marathon, running for his Shoe4Africa charity team. But first I have a showdown with my 10K personal best down by the river in Exeter.
The race is flat and I spend most of it running on the heels of two other athletes, feeling comfortable, gliding over the ground, riding light on my toes. As I turn the last corner, a big clock over the finish shows thirty-five minutes, the seconds ticking along to fifty as I cross the line. It is a best time by almost three minutes. In one fell swoop I’ve moved to a whole new level. I can feel it as I walk around after the race, glowing with satisfaction, shaking hands with the other finishers. Thirty-five minutes. The Kenyan training has paid off after all. I’m now a 35-minute 10K runner. I feel excited as I head off for a warm-down jog. This is just the beginning. Next, a half marathon. Then New York.
But when I wake up the next morning, I can hardly walk. I seem to have injured my thigh muscle.
It’s four weeks before I can start training again, so I turn up in New York two months later, on a bright November morning, worried that I’m not in shape. In the days before the race, I head out to Central Park for a few last easy runs. The place is swarming with runners. There are more here than in Iten.
“This city is running crazy,” Toby Tanser tells me. He lives in New York, and two nights before the race, he holds a pasta party at his friend’s apartment for all the Shoe4Africa team runners. I arrive at the building and look again at the directions. He hasn’t given me the apartment number, I realize. It just says eleventh floor. I tell the doorman I’m here for a pasta party.
“Eleventh floor,” he says, opening the lift.
There is no apartment number. It’s the entire floor. Toby’s friend is a famous actor, and his apartment is huge.
In the kitchen a group of Kenyan women are cooking ugali. Toby is full of life, hopping around and talking to everyone. I walk into another room and there, among the clinking of glasses and excited New York chatter, are three Kenyan athletes. They’re sitting in silence, still wearing their coats and waiting patiently for the ugali. I go over to say hello. The man in the middle is Geoffrey Mutai. I tell him I saw him win a cross-country race in Iten back in January. He looks surprised. “How?” he asks me.
“I used to live there,” I tell him.
It seems like a long time ago now, even though it was just a few months back. Those long, red trails full of runners, the children laughing and racing along to school. A few days before I left for New York, I called Beatrice to see how she was doing.
“I am good,” she said. She sounded happy. I asked her what she had done with her winnings from Lewa. She said she had bought a TV and paid her rent for five months. “The rest I gave to my mother,” she said.
Someone comes in and whispers in Geoffrey Mutai’s ear. He looks at me. “The ugali is ready,” he says, getting up. The woman beside him, Caroline Kilel, gets up, too. Both Geoffrey and Caroline were the winners of the Boston Marathon back in the spring. The third Kenyan, another woman, stays where she is. I don’t recognize her. She says her name is Caroline Rotich. She’s a Kenyan runner, so she must have won something, I suspect.
“What races have you won?” I ask her.
“I won the New York half marathon this year,” she says.
But of course.
I decide to wear a watch for the first time in my life and set it to beep every six minutes and forty seconds—the average mile pace for a two-hour fifty-five-minute marathon. That would mean running close to my half-marathon PB twice in a row, but I feel I can do it despite the injury. That half-marathon time predates my Kenya trip. Things are different now.
The first two miles of the race are up and down the expansive Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, downtown Manhattan basking in the sunshine on the horizon. By the second mile I’m already ahead of my schedule, but I feel fine so I decide to go with it. I don’t want to be controlled by the watch, I think, wondering why I’m even wearing it. But at each mile I check it again, and at each mile I’m farther ahead of my 2:55 schedule.
All along the course the crowds cheer us. They love it when one of the runners responds, with a high-five or a wave or anything. I’m trying, though, to stay focused on my running. The city’s comedians have been out writing signs. One says: WHAT ARE YOU ALL RUNNING FROM? Another says: YOU’VE GOT GREAT STAMINA. CALL ME. 1-834-555-8756. Yet another reads: IN OUR MINDS, YOU’RE ALL KENYANS.
As I truck along at a good pace, far, far ahead, the Kenyans are putting on another show for the world. Geoffrey Mutai, fresh from his ugali at Toby Tanser’s pasta party, streaks away at the front to win and smash the course record by over two minutes. It completes a stunning year in which every major marathon has been won by a Kenyan in a new course record. If they were good before, they’re even better now.
My old friend Emmanuel Mutai, from the One 4 One camp, finishes second, also beating the old course record. I wonder what Chris is thinking back in Iten. He is no longer the fifth fastest man ever in New York.
In the women’s race, Mary Keitany, who once sat shyly talking to me in her cramped living room, sets off like a crazed matatu driver, running at a world record pace and pulling ahead of the women’s field by over three minutes before being caught and passed right at the end. It’s a brave run and wins the hearts of many people watching.
I’m still well under my target time as we head along First Avenue. The huge buildings rising up on either side make me feel tiny, but it’s good to have firm ground below my feet, and cool air to breathe. Mindful of how thirsty I got in Lewa, I’ve been taking plenty of water, and at the eighteen-mile point they hand us all energy gels. I take two.
As we run on, the mile markers keep coming quicker than I’m expecting, but gradually I start to slow. I’m losing my time cushion, the beeps of my watch getting closer to the mile markers. I treat them like reminders to keep pushing. Come on, I tell myself, speeding up, passing a few other runners, finding someone at a good pace to draft behind, but trying not to tread on his heels. I’m saving my chant of love until I really need it, but before I realize it, we’re in Central Park and nearing the finish. Around the last corner I can’t stop the grin beaming across my face. I close
my eyes and look to the heavens, holding my arms out. I can’t help it. The crowd cheers me, embracing my moment of triumph. I know I’ve done it. The sub-three-hour marathon is conquered as I cross the line in exactly 2 hours 55 minutes.
And then the emotions begin. I can hardly stand; my calves are in agony. A woman takes my arm, hauling me off to the VIP area by the finish—Toby is a good man to know. It’s not much, a few chairs, a box of apples, and some drinks. But the sun is shining. I’ve just run the New York marathon. Bliss is surging like a drug through my veins. A man standing by the gate like a joyous town crier sums everything up, the reason we do it, the reason I’ve put everyone through all this, gone so far, pushed so hard, for so long. In his big New York accent, he looks at me struggling to walk, and declares grandly: “Welcome to heaven.”
To my fellow collaborators
Marietta, Lila, Uma, and Ossian
Acknowledgments
My first and biggest thank-you goes to Marietta. In some ways it feels like we wrote this book together. She was a steadying influence throughout, and her sense of adventure, her perseverance, and her kindness were all invaluable.
Secondly, to my wonderful children for taking everything in their stride like three little superheroes.
Also, to my guide and mentor, Godfrey Kiprotich, the most helpful man in the world, a true friend.
To the rest of the Iten Town Harriers, particularly to Chris and Japhet, for all their help and for coming along for the ride.
To Jophie and Alastair for encouraging us to come to Kenya, for looking after us when we first got there, and for lending us the most coveted car in East Africa.
To Ray and Doreen, for their immense hospitality, letting us stay in their wonderful Flea House in Nairobi, and for putting me in touch with Godfrey.
Running with the Kenyans Page 23