Running with the Kenyans Page 14

  As we drive, my passengers make an effort to speak in English and include me in the conversations, but gradually they slip into Swahili. I let them go, my gaze drifting off into the rainy hills. The grass here is green and soft, with rows and rows of healthy-looking crops rising up the hillsides. People cycle by in rain jackets under gray skies.

  Once we get to Nairobi, we meet Godfrey and Anders as arranged at the YMCA. Godfrey has supposedly booked a room for the three of us, but it turns out that it has only one single bed.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “I know another place nearby.”

  We park my car and hop into a vehicle that Godfrey has managed to procure from somewhere. He drives us farther and farther out of town, past bigger and bigger houses, until we’ve been going for about forty-five minutes. Finally, with night bringing its curtain down, he turns down a side road that leads us to what looks like a deserted conference center. A sign at the entrance says: KCB BANK LEADERSHIP CENTER. It doesn’t look much like a hotel. Anders glances at me, doubtful, but Godfrey is as confident as ever.

  “Trust me,” he says. “You are going to love this place.”

  The guard at the gate looks surprised to see us. Godfrey winds down his window with a big smile. But the guard is nonplussed. He seems to be telling Godfrey that the place is only used for conferences; it’s not a hotel. Godfrey bids the man good night and reverses the car out into the road. “It’s full,” he says. “There’s a conference on.”

  Instead, a few minutes away, we pull in at the Shade Hotel. It has some cheap, quirky rooms and a restaurant. We’re tired and hungry, so we take it.

  Half of Iten seems to be at the race in Uhuru Gardens in the center of Nairobi, sprinting back and forth around the course to get as many glimpses of the runners as possible. Besides enthusiasts like myself, there are the coaches and agents, encouraging their runners along with gruff shouts. When one of their athletes wins, they grin and high-five one another like traders watching their stock rising in value. A few thousand local fans have also turned out to watch. For a cross-country race this is quite a lot, but I can’t help thinking that here, in the capital city of the world’s most passionate running nation, there would be a few more. Some fans are appreciating it, though. One man turns to me with a big grin as the lead women go by, and says: “I’ve just seen Linet Masai [the eventual winner] with my own eyes. Not on the Internet.”

  The athletes parade out to the start at the beginning of each race like warriors, their arms swinging, bouncing up and down on their toes. It’s a warm, wind-swept morning and I spend much of the time rushing around trying to take photographs. I want to somehow capture the majesty of it all, the power and speed with which they charge around. But it seems to get lost amid the wide-open space of the park. Occasional planes sink down across the sky, landing at the nearby Wilson Airport, dwarfing the runners still more. Perhaps it’s because I want to be overwhelmed by it, because I’ve come so far to see it, that I’m straining to fully appreciate just how fast the runners are moving.

  Then in the last race, as the men’s winner, Geoffrey Mutai, hurtles around the last corner right in front of me, he almost goes the wrong way. It’s like trying to redirect a speeding train to get him back on course. We have to leap out of the way as he flies straight at us, heading off on yet another lap, as though he could just keep going forever. Somehow the marshals manage to grab him and send him back along the funnel to the finish. He completes the twelve-kilometer course (7.4 miles)—over rough, hilly terrain, on a windy day, at altitude—in a staggering 34 minutes 35 seconds.

  To illustrate just how tough these races are, the four current world champions—senior and junior men and women—are all running, but none of them manages to finish even in the top ten. Leonard Komon, who in the previous few months has broken the 15K and 10K world records, can manage only sixth place in the men’s race.

  Before I leave, Godfrey introduces me to a young girl from a small village somewhere in the Rift Valley. Her head is shaved like most Kenyan schoolgirls’, and her teeth are stained. She could have just arrived after a day of planting maize in the fields. She offers me an embarrassed handshake as I’m told she is Mercy Cherono, the world junior champion from the year before. Today, though, she came in thirteenth, herself outrun by a host of other girls from small, dusty villages.

  My meeting with Mercy Cherono gets me thinking. Something about her seemed to encapsulate the Kenyan running phenomenon. There was something accidental, unconscious even, about her brilliance.

  One evening, weeks earlier, in the Kerio View hotel in Iten, Marietta and I met a couple drinking wine on the terrace. The man, an executive with the country’s biggest telecommunications company, Safaricom, in Nairobi, was from the Eldoret area. I asked him what he thought was the secret to the Kenyans’ running success. He looked at me over his glass. “Ask any top runner about his background,” he said, “and you will find out he comes from a poor family.”

  At the time I thought it was a slightly crass observation, but the more I think about it, the more significant it seems. Talking to Mercy Cherono, it was clear that her success hadn’t come as the result of years of dedication, being driven to training sessions and races by her parents. Her school probably didn’t even have a track to train on. Instead, simply from the inherent physical toughness of her daily life had come a talent to outrun the world.

  Brother Colm nods when I put this theory to him, that all the Kenyan runners come from a poor background. “I’ll add something else,” he says. “They all come from a poor, rural family. We’ve yet to have a good runner from a city.”

  The life of the rural poor in Kenya is tough. From a young age children have to work hard, herding goats or digging in the fields, and they run or walk everywhere. You see them at dawn shuffling along the trails on their way to school. It’s the perfect groundwork for an endurance athlete.

  I remember the day I had lunch with Daniel Komen at the Eldoret Golf Club. He wore a dark green suit. It was a hot day, children were playing in the pool. A buffet barbecue was in full swing. Waiters in crisp white shirts carried trays of sunburst drinks across the lawn. “Every day I used to milk the cows, run to school, run home for lunch, back to school, home, tend the cows.” He didn’t smile as he spoke. It wasn’t a happy memory. “This is the Kenyan way.”

  Chris Cheboiboch once told me a similar story. “We were training already without knowing it,” he said. “Every day running, running, running.”

  Not only are they training from a young age, but they’re doing it at high altitude. There is a broad scientific consensus that training at high altitude helps endurance athletes to run faster by increasing their blood’s ability to carry oxygen around the body. Virtually every international distance runner will include spells of high-altitude training in their schedules. But the Kenyans are born and raised at altitude, running around everywhere from a young age, which gives them a big advantage.

  I head back to the Kerio View in search of Renato Canova and find him sitting in the same seat, his glass of milk on the table. He motions for me to sit down when he sees me, and orders me a glass of passion fruit juice. I ask him about this theory that it is their tough, rural upbringing that makes Kenyans such good runners. He thinks for a moment, measuring his words as though he could answer the question in a hundred different ways. “It’s true,” he says. “In the West, we have a good quality of life, no? But if you think about what ‘quality of life’ means, it means less fatigue. Making things easier. Running, on the other hand, is about how much fatigue can you do.”

  My list is growing, but all the reasons—the secrets—that I’m discovering are beginning to join up. The tough, physical upbringing, the barefoot running, the altitude, the running to school, they all arise naturally from the Kenyans’ daily lives. None of it is done with the intention of becoming an athlete. It’s just how they live. Simply through growing up on the slopes of the Rift Valley, far from cities and the technologies that the West has
invented to make life more comfortable, they have found themselves excelling at the world’s most natural sport.

  When my children turned up in Eldoret for the cross-country race, it was unlike the fun runs they had enjoyed before in England. There were no pudgy legs or flushed faces, children running at a cute waddle, happy to be doing something active for a change. In Eldoret the children were all charged with energy, rushing, darting back and forth on the start line. Something was already afoot, long before any athletic training had started to take place. Lila and Uma took one look and were terrified.

  “To build your aerobic house, to have enough of an endurance base to run long distances, takes about ten years,” Canova tells me. “By the time a Kenyan is sixteen,” he says, smiling, as though this, my friend, is everything boiled down to one small, neat point, a little sound bite that you can take away with you, “by the time a Kenyan is sixteen, he has built his house.”

  Meanwhile, in Nairobi, I’m preparing to set out on another run. I’m training almost every day now, as the Lewa Marathon gets closer. Training is starting to become a daily practice like it is for Japhet, Beatrice, and all the other runners in Iten. Except that here in the city, things are very different.

  “Right everyone, stop wanking and gather round.”

  It’s a motley crew that assembles around the big, red 4×4 in the parking lot of the Nest Hotel in Ngong, a satellite town just north of Nairobi. The majority of the forty or so people in the group are overweight. A few are drinking fizzy drinks. One lady, with a face like a snarling dog, is smoking a cigarette. Everyone is wearing running clothes. “Today’s long route is ten kilometers,” says the man in charge. “The short route is eight kilometers. Enjoy.” Most of the people here look like they’d struggle to make it up the stairs to the bar. But with good-natured smiles and jokes, we all file out of the parking lot, on to the road, and start jogging.

  Before I return to Iten, I go visit some old friends of Bruce Tulloh’s, Ray and Doreen Meynick. Ray told me he was good friends with two of Kenya’s greatest running legends, Catherine Ndereba and Paul Tergat. They live just around the corner from his house in the leafy suburb of Karen, he told me. They often come for dinner. I was hoping they would have something to add as to why Kenyans are such good runners, but unfortunately neither of them is answering the phone.

  Ray insists that instead I meet up with some of the non-elite Kenyan runners in Nairobi—fun runners, mostly, which in Kenya is an unusual concept. “Running with the Kenyans?” he says, giving me a pointed look. “Well, they’re Kenyans, too.”

  With over 1,700 groups meeting in most major cities around the world, the Hash House Harriers is an international phenomenon. More a social club than a typical running club—they like to describe themselves as “a drinking club with a running problem”—they nevertheless head out on regular runs all across their respective cities. Rather than run along a set route, the Hashers follow a trail marked out in advance with white chalk.

  The pace is excruciatingly slow at the back of the group as the runners heave themselves along the Ngong Road, almost being knocked over by buses crammed full of commuters heading home after work. At the head of the group, a few lean runners are getting away. I chase after them, but as soon as I catch them, they step behind a wall and stop. They’re all grinning.

  “What’s going on?”

  One of them, an elderly man with one of his front teeth missing, points at two white chalk lines on the ground. “That means it’s a false trail,” he says. But he doesn’t want the others to realize it, at least not until they have come all the way down the dusty side road as we have. This is going to be very different from running in Iten.

  Once we get back on track, returning en masse to the main road and taking a different chalk-marked side road, the same few runners hurtle off at the front again, and I stick with them. We soon find ourselves running through the backyards of some collapsing wooden houses, ducking under clotheslines, leaping over small children playing in the mud. But we seem to have lost the trail. As we stand around deliberating, a man in a doorway points down a narrow gap between two of the houses. Without thanking him, we rush down it, and sure enough there are more chalk marks.

  “On, on,” the others shout at the top of their lungs, as the slower runners begin to catch up. And so it goes. Every time we get stuck at a turning, it gives the other runners a chance to catch up. When we find the right way, we yell “On, on,” and the charge resumes.

  Despite having initial reservations, I’m finding it all quite exhilarating. We’re running like loonies through tumbledown backstreets, looking for white chalk marks. I even find myself yelling out when I find one, “On, on.” Two women sit in a doorway watching me run by. Behind comes a long line of plodding Kenyans in tracksuits and florescent bibs.

  At about halfway we find a car parked with the trunk open. Inside are cups of water, slices of melon, and chunks of sugarcane to suck on. Sitting in the front of the car is the woman who was smoking at the start. I’m one of the first to arrive, but soon everyone has caught up. As we stand around eating and getting our breath back, someone says, “Let’s have a song.” Spontaneously, everyone breaks into a hearty version of “Singing in the Rain,” with actions like wiggling bums and sticking out tongues. The people living down this particular backstreet, with its dusty hair salons and mango stalls, stand around in groups, agog.

  Although there are a few other mzungus in the group, the Hash is mainly made up of black Kenyans. They all drive big cars and are perfectly content to hand over 150 Kenyan shillings ($1.50) just to run, which is more than many people in Kenya earn in a day. After the run, the Hashers drink the night away, with beers at specially reduced prices and rooms booked at the hotel for those too drunk to get home. I’ve heard stories about humiliating initiation ceremonies for “virgins” like me, so rather than investigate further, I cowardly sneak off under the darkening sky.

  In terms of the quality of the running, my sojourn with the Hash House Harriers is like taking a little space capsule to a running club back home for the night. All the bandy legs and beer bellies setting off at a ten-minute-mile pace. One contributing factor in East Africa’s dominance of long-distance running is the fact that in the West we’re getting slower. Despite all the advances in training technology, nutrition, and physiotherapy, in the increase in the quality and quantity of races, and the introduction of prize money, in the West we’re stuck on a conveyor belt going the wrong way. In 1975, for example, thirty-four marathons were run in under 2 hours 20 minutes by American runners, twenty-three by British runners, and none by Kenyan runners. By 2005, however, there were 22 sub-2:20 marathon performances by Americans, 12 by Britons, and a staggering 490 by Kenyans.

  For every reason for Kenyan success, we see the opposite trend occurring in the West. While Kenyans lead incredibly active childhoods, we’re becoming ever more sedentary. A recent study by the University of Essex found that even in the last ten years, the average English ten-year-old has become weaker, less muscular, and less able to do simple physical tasks. They’re not talking about running three miles to school twice a day, but the most basic activities such as hanging from wall bars in a gym. The academics who conducted the study pinned the blame on our modern lifestyles. The study’s author, Dr. Gavin Sandercock, said, “It’s probably due to changes in activity patterns, such as taking part in fewer activities like rope-climbing in PE and tree-climbing for fun.”

  Back in the 1970s we weren’t exactly running barefoot, but the majority of running shoes were thin soled and lightweight, much like the “barefoot shoes” selling like hotcakes today. And what’s more, we were growing up wearing them, which meant we had good form, strong calves, and higher arches.

  Our diets, too, are getting worse. While Kenyans have their carbohydrate-rich ugali, we’re eating more salt and more fatty foods than ever before. Obesity and diabetes rates are rising. According to the World Health Organization, the obesity rates in the United Stat
es and United Kingdom have risen at least threefold since 1980.

  Kenyans also have an abundance of successful role models, which encourages them to try running and makes them believe they can be good at it. The success stories are everywhere. Nicolas, the cycling coach from Singapore, says he doesn’t have this advantage when it comes to his cycling team. “If we pick cyclists at fifteen or sixteen, they don’t want to join us,” he says. “They don’t have the role models like in running. There are no Paul Tergats in cycling.” Of course, the more success Kenyans have, the more that runners from other countries are squeezed out, leaving fewer role models for everyone else.

  Scientists have found that the ever-growing perception that Kenyans are better runners can also give them a psychological advantage during races. If a European runner automatically expects the Kenyans in the race to be faster than him, this has the potential to affect his performance negatively, especially if the belief is supported by everyone else around him. Conversely, if a Kenyan runner believes the same thing, that he is faster because he is a Kenyan, it can have a positive effect on his performance.

  When a runner from another country does break through, the impact can be significant on the subsequent generation. Before Kelly Holmes won the 800 meters and 1,500 meters gold medals at the 2004 Olympics, for example, Britain hardly had an illustrious history in women’s middle-distance running. But five years later, it was a major force, winning 1,500 meters silver and 800 meters bronze in the world championships in 2009.

  With fewer role models and less potential for success, fewer people are willing to give up everything for a career in athletics. The fewer full-time athletes you have, the fewer stars are likely to emerge. Put altogether, it’s a sliding scale of factors that has all the weights pushed over on one side. It’s no wonder the Kenyans are better. The fact that someone like Paula Radcliffe can come through a field so skewed against her to shatter the world marathon record is, in some respects, a minor miracle.