Running with the Kenyans Read online

  Copyright © 2012 by Adharanand Finn

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  All photos in this work are by the author except the following:

  Chapter opener photo for chapter 1: Courtesy of John Finn

  Prologue, chapter opener photos for chapters 5, 11, 12, 13, 20, 23, 24, and 25:

  Courtesy of Marietta d’Erlanger

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Finn, Adharanand.

  Running with the Kenyans : passion, adventure, and the secrets of the fastest people on earth / Adharanand Finn.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-53352-4

  1. Runners (Sports)—Kenya. 2. Running—Social aspects—Kenya.

  3. Track and field—Social aspects—Kenya. 4. National characteristics,

  Kenyan. I. Title.

  GV1061.23.K4F56 2012

  796.424096762—dc23 2012009641

  Jacket design: Catherine Casalino

  Jacket photographs: Marietta d’Erlanger

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  When the divine is looking for you,

  that’s a pretty powerful force.

  —PREM RAWAT

  Prologue

  On your marks …

  I hear someone else’s alarm go first. I’ve been waiting for it, in my half-sleep. A shallow, impatient slumber under the thin sheet, the name of the hotel stamped across it in green ink: BOMEN. The light from the hallway makes the room visible: bare walls; a dark, pink color in this light, but in the day an intoxicating bright peach. An energy-saving lightbulb hangs from its wire above my head.

  A phone rings. Godfrey, in the other bed a few feet away, answers it immediately, as though he’s been waiting for it to ring. He speaks in calm, wakeful Kalenjin, and then hangs up.

  “Chris,” he says in the darkness. He knows I’m awake. “He wants to go down for breakfast.”

  My alarm goes off, buzzing meekly on the bedside table. I reach over and turn it off: 4:00 A.M. Time to get up.

  The hotel is a clatter of pots and pans and people talking. Some of the guests must be turning over in their beds and wondering what is going on, checking their watches. I head out along the corridor. The leaves of a palm tree bristle at one end. At the top of the stairs I meet Beatrice, standing in the shadows, unsure whether to go down. She smiles, her teeth white against her black skin.

  “Let’s go,” I say.

  Without replying, she follows me down.

  In the dining room the waiters are ready. They’ve been pulled out of their beds in the middle of the night and pressed into their waiting suits. They don’t look pleased.

  “Tea? Coffee?” asks the headwaiter, holding a tray of pots and cups. We both shake our heads. I sit down at the table. Beatrice follows, sitting down opposite me. Outside, the street is silent.

  I look at Beatrice. “Ready?” I ask her.

  She smiles. “I will make it,” she says, nodding.

  Japhet and Shadrack walk into the room. Two young men in their early twenties. Neither of them has ever been this far from home. Japhet is all big, toothy smiles, excited; while Shadrack, his eyes staring straight ahead, looks permanently as though he has just seen something both shocking and incredible.

  The waiter is back at the table with his tray. “Tea? Coffee?”

  “Chai,” says Shadrack so quietly he has to repeat it twice before the waiter understands. Japhet just nods. The waiter pours out the tea.

  “You both feeling ready?” I ask.

  Shadrack looks at me confused, as though I’ve just asked him if he has ever been in love.

  “We’re ready, yes,” says Japhet, grinning.

  The waiter, on a roll now, brings us all a plate of fruit. Shadrack pokes his watermelon nervously with a fork and offers it to Beatrice. Then the waiter brings plates of bread and fried eggs for everyone.

  “Whatever you do,” Godfrey told us the night before, “don’t eat eggs for breakfast.” I look at the others.

  “You like eggs before a race?” I ask them. But they’re already tucking in. I decide not to make a fuss, but I leave mine untouched. Two slices of bread and butter is enough. I eat quickly and return to my room.

  I had planned to go back to sleep after breakfast, but I’m too awake, so I pack up my bags and sit on the bed. My foot feels fine. I rub it to make sure it’s all right, pressing my thumb into the sole where the injury was. I pull out a bottle of Menthol Plus, a balm from the pharmacy back in Iten. I rub it on my foot, then pull my socks on and sit back on the bed. Slow, deep breaths. An hour later, it’s time to go.

  The dawn is casting a faint light across the parking lot as we all stand around beside the minibus, waiting for Godfrey. I left him combing his hair in the bedroom. He has a grade-one crew cut, but still he spends five minutes combing it each morning. The others stand quietly, patient. Finally he turns up.

  “Sorry, guys,” he says, sliding open the minibus doors. The junior members of the team, Japhet, Shadrack, and Beatrice, climb in to the back of the bus. Chris, Paul, and Philip, all veteran runners, take the middle row. As the sole mzungu, white man, I’m given the front seat next to Godfrey, our trainer and driver.

  We bump our way out of the drive and along the dirt street to the main paved road. People are up walking around, herding goats, carrying large sacks across their shoulders. Crowded matatus, small buses, pull over and more people squeeze in. The day is already under way.

  Inside our bus nobody speaks. Godfrey fiddles with the radio, but he already knows it doesn’t work. He drives on, the road straight, rising up along the edge of the savannah, which spreads out vast and empty on one side. On the other side are makeshift houses, small fields of maize, kiosks painted in bright colors advertising phone companies.

  After about twenty minutes we reach the main entrance gate to Lewa, a 55,000-acre wildlife conservancy 170 miles north of Nairobi. A long line of 4×4 cars is filing through. People are walking beside the road. We join in the line of traffic. The savannah spreads out on both sides now, filling the world. This is the classic African landscape. Dry, grassy plains dotted with spiky acacia trees.

  In the back, they’re all getting excited suddenly, pointing out the window.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Look,” says Godfrey, pointing to one side, where an elephant is standing, as still as a statue, just a few feet away.

  “Is it real?” Philip asks, craning over
my shoulder to see.

  We bump on through the clouds of dust from the other cars. The elephant has lightened the mood in the bus. Godfrey starts out on his pep talk.

  “Okay, guys. Here we are. I know we have a winner in this car. You’ve all done the training, now it’s time to run. Remember that this is a marathon. You mustn’t go too fast at the beginning. But you need to stay in touch with the leaders. You know you can do it.”

  Godfrey pulls the bus to a halt. Even though it’s still barely past 6:00 A.M., hundreds of people stand lined up behind a rope, being pushed back by security guards. Runners in shorts and vests, numbers pinned to their chests, are streaming along the track toward the start. Before I know it, everyone is off the bus and has disappeared.

  “They’ve gone straight to the start,” says Godfrey. “You go, I’ll meet you there.”

  It’s already warm, so I strip off my tracksuit and throw it in the bus. I’m wearing my yellow vest. My number, 22, is pinned to the front. Along the back are the words: ITEN TOWN HARRIERS.

  The start is buzzing with over a thousand runners. Among the melee I spot a group of yellow vests, the rest of the team. They’re with my wife, Marietta, and my two-year-old son, Ossian. My two daughters are somewhere watching from the sidelines. Marietta’s waiting for me so she can take a group photograph.

  We huddle together. Godfrey doesn’t want to be in the picture, but we haul him over. We couldn’t have done this without him. He stands at the back, his face lost under the shadow of his hat.

  “Okay, thank you,” says Marietta, releasing us from our pose. “Good luck.” And with that we’re lining up. We all shake hands, but there’s nothing left to say. This is it. Months of training on the line. The wild plains of Africa lying before us. Waiting. Still. Helicopters hover overhead. The man with the microphone doesn’t say it but we’re waiting for some lions to move off the course. The helicopters are swooping low over them, trying to force them on. It seems a long time to stand there. I stretch my arms. Twenty-six miles; forty-two kilometers. But they are just numbers. One step at a time. One breath at a time. The morning heat rises from the spiky grass. My children, with big smiley faces, are waving at me from the side. And then we’re counting. Five. I feel my breath filling me with life. Four. People hold their watches, crouching. Three. Two. This is it. One. Go.

  One

  Running in the Northamptonshire County Championships, 1988

  We’re running across long, wavy grass, racing for the first corner. I’m right at the front, being pushed on by the charge of legs all around me, the quick breathing of my schoolmates. We run under the goalposts and swing down close beside the stone wall along the far edge of the field. It’s quieter now. I look around. One other boy is just behind me, but the others have all dropped back. Up ahead I can see the fluttering tape marking the next corner. I run on, the cold air in my lungs, the tall poplar trees shivering above my head.

  We go out of the school grounds, along a gravel path that is normally out of bounds. My feet crunch along, the only sound. An old man pushing a bicycle stands to one side as I go by. I follow the tape, back down a steep slope on to the playing fields, back to the finish. I get there long before anyone else and stand waiting in the cold as the other runners come in, collapsing one after the other across the line. I watch them, rolling on their backs, kneeling on the ground, their faces red. I feel strangely elated. It’s the first PE class in my new school and we’ve all been sent out on a cross-country run. I’ve never tried running farther than the length of a football field before, so I’m surprised by how easy I find it.

  “He’s not even breathing hard,” the teacher says, holding me up as an example to the others. He tells me to put my hands under my armpits to keep them warm as the other children continue to trail in.

  A few years later, at age twelve, I break the 800 meters school record on sports day, despite a few of the other boys attempting to bundle me over at the start in an effort to help their friend win. Five minutes later, I run the 1,500 meters and win that, too. When we get home, my dad, sensing some potential talent, suggests that I join the local running club and looks up the number in the telephone directory. I hear him talking to someone on the phone, asking directions. From that point on, a course is set: I am to be a runner.

  It all begins rather inauspiciously one night a few weeks later. I put on my shorts and tracksuit and walk across the bridge to the shopping mall next to our suburban housing estate in Northampton, England, a town of 200,000 people sixty-five miles north of London. The precinct is half deserted, save for a few late shoppers coming out of the giant Tesco supermarket. I head down the escalator to the car park, and then across the road to the unmarked dirt track where the Northampton Phoenix running club meets. It’s a cold night and all the runners are crammed into a small doorway in the side of a huge redbrick wall. Inside, the corridor walls are painted blood-red and covered in lewd graffiti. Down the hall are the changing rooms, where men can be heard laughing loudly above the fizz of the showers. I give my name to a lady sitting at a small table.

  Rather than head out onto the track, as I had imagined, I’m taken back across the road with a group of children my age, to the shopping mall’s delivery area, a stretch of covered road with shuttered loading bays all along one side. The road itself is thick with discharged oil. A man in tights and a yellow running jacket gets us to run from one side of the road to the other, touching the curb each time. Between each sprint he makes us do exercises such as pushups or jumping jacks. I begin thinking, as I lie back on the cold, hard concrete ready to do some sit-ups, that I’ve come to the wrong place. This isn’t running. I had imagined groups of lithe athletes hurtling around a track. My dad must have gotten confused and called the wrong club.

  I’m so convinced this isn’t the running club that I don’t return for another year. When I do, they ask me if I’d like to train in “the tunnel”—which I take to mean the shopping mall loading bays—or head out for a long run. I opt for the long run and am directed over to a group of about forty people. This is more like it. As we set off along the gravel pathways that wind around the council estates of east Northampton, I feel for the first time the sensation of running in the middle of a group of people. The easy flow of our legs moving below us, the trees, houses, lakes floating by, the people stepping aside, letting us go. Although most of the other runners are older and constantly making jokes, as I drift quietly along, I feel a vague sense of belonging.

  I spend the next six years or so as a committed member of the club, running track or cross-country races most weekends, and training at least twice a week. Much of my formative years I spend out pounding the roads. Even when I grow my hair long and start playing the guitar in a band, I keep on training. The other runners nickname me Bono. One night, when I’m about eighteen, I pass a bunch of my school friends coming back from the pub. We are going at full pace in the last mile of a long run. My school friends stare at me open mouthed as I charge by, one shouting, incredulously: “What are you doing?” as I disappear into the distance.

  I first become aware of Kenyan runners sometime in the mid-1980s, around the time I join the running club. They seem to emerge suddenly in large numbers into a running world dominated, in my eyes, by Britain’s Steve Cram and the Moroccan Said Aouita. I’m a big fan of both of these great rivals. Cram, with his high-stepping, majestic style; and the smaller Aouita, with his grimacing face and rocking shoulders, who is brilliant at every distance—from the short, fast 800 meters right up to the 10,000 meters.

  But by the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, it is all Kenyans, winning every men’s middle-distance and long-distance track gold medal except one. What impresses me most about them is the way they run. The conventional wisdom is that the most efficient method, particularly in the longer distances, is to run at an even pace, and most races are run that way. The Kenyans, however, take a more maverick approach. They are always surging ahead, only to slow down suddenly, or sprinting off at a crazy pa
ce right from the start. I love the way it befuddles the TV commentators, who are constantly predicting that a Kenyan athlete is going too fast, only to then see him go suddenly even faster.

  I remember watching the 1993 world championship 5,000 meters final on a warm mid-August evening in our living room in Northampton. My mum keeps coming in and out, suggesting I go and sit outside in the garden. It’s a lovely evening, but I’m glued to the TV. The television cameras are focused on the prerace favorite, the Olympic champion from Morocco, Khalid Skah, and also on a young Ethiopian named Haile Gebrselassie, who won both the 5,000 meters and the 10,000 meters at the world junior championships the year before. The athletes stand side by side at the start line, looking back into the camera. They smile nervously when their names are announced, and give the odd directionless wave.

  The race sets off at a blistering pace, with a succession of African athletes streaking ahead one after the other at the front. Skah, who has taken on and beaten the Kenyans many times before, tracks their every move, always sitting on the shoulder of the leader. Britain’s only runner in the race, Rob Denmark, soon finds himself trailing far behind.

  With seven laps still to go, the BBC television commentator Brendan Foster is feeling the strain just watching. “It’s a vicious race out there,” he says. Right on queue, a young Kenyan, Ismael Kirui, surges to the front and, within a lap, opens up a huge gap of more than 150 feet on everyone else. It’s a suicidal move, Foster declares. “He’s only eighteen and has no real international experience. I think he’s got a little carried away.” I sit riveted, screaming at the TV as the coverage cuts away to the javelin for a few moments. When it switches back, Kirui is still leading. Lap after lap, Skah and a group of three Ethiopians track him, but they aren’t getting any closer. The camera zooms in on Kirui’s eyes, staring ahead, wild like a hunted animal as he keeps piling on the pace. “This is one savage race,” says Foster.

  Kirui is still clear as the bell sounds for the last lap. Down the back straight he sprints for his life, but the three Ethiopians are flying now, closing the gap. With just over 100 meters left, Kirui glances over his shoulder and sees the figure of Gebrselassie closing in on him. For a brief second everything seems to stop. This is the moment, the kill is about to happen. Startled, frantic, Kirui turns back toward the front and urges his exhausted body on again, his tired legs somehow sprinting away down the finishing straight. He crosses the line less than half a second ahead of Gebrselassie, but he has done it. He has won. Battered and bewildered, he sets off on his lap of honor, the Kenyan flag, once again, held aloft in triumph.