Running with the Kenyans Read online

  As well as making all the travel arrangements, I need to get as fit as I can if I’m going to stand a chance of keeping up with the Kenyan athletes. One evening I read an article in the newspaper about a group of Kenyan runners who live and train in Teddington, in southwest London. I decide to look them up. Perhaps they can give me a few insights before I head out to Kenya.

  So a few days later, at eight o’clock on a Tuesday morning, I find myself standing outside a small suburban house. I check the details again. It’s definitely number eighteen, opposite the Tesco supermarket parking lot. An unassuming 1960s terrace house with gray blinds. Weeds are coming up through cracks in the concrete parking spot in front of the house.

  The front door is set back into the wall, so I have to venture into the dimness of the brick doorway to ring the bell. I wait for a few minutes, stepping back outside onto the quiet street, but there is no answer. The athletes’ manager, an Irishman named Ricky Simms, told me that they would be expecting me. He even said that they’d take me for a run. I try the bell again. After another few minutes, the door opens slowly. A slim man in a tracksuit opens it and looks at me with sleepy eyes. I explain who I am. He nods and lets me in.

  Inside, he takes me upstairs to an untidy living room and spends about five minutes absently pointing the remote control at the TV before it finally turns on. He doesn’t say anything other than that his name is Micah. Once the TV is on, he turns and leaves the room.

  Micah, it turns out, is Micah Kogo, the 10K world record holder and bronze medalist at the Beijing Olympics. He has gone to get changed.

  Heads appear intermittently in the doorway behind me as I sit there watching the news. There are six Kenyan athletes living in the house, and they seem to be finding my presence amusing. I can hear them talking to one another in the landing. Eventually Enda, another Irishman who works for the manager, turns up and introduces me to everyone. They offer me limp handshakes and smile at one another as I’m told who has broken which world record, or won which world championship medal.

  “Are you going for a run with them?” Enda asks me.

  I nod, unsure whether it’s a wise thing to do. “You think that’s okay?”

  “Sure,” he says. “If you want.”

  I try to act calm as we head out through the small backyard of the house, a couple of bikes leaning up against the fence, an old bulldog in the next-door garden barking at us hoarsely. We walk to the end of a small cul-de-sac and then on to the main road. The athletes talk and joke with Enda about their recent races. Nobody seems to be in a hurry to actually start running. One of the athletes explains to me that they don’t like to run on concrete, so they walk until they get to the grass. In Kenya, he says, they run only on dirt roads.

  The nearby Bushy Park is a large expanse of flat grassland, complete with deer and a maze of gravel pathways and tracks perfect for running. It’s one of the reasons the Kenyans use this corner of London for their base while they’re away from home. Once we get inside the park gates, there’s a lot of standing around and talking, and some halfhearted stretching. And then, without warning, we’re off. The pace is surprisingly easy, and, initially at least, I can keep up without too much trouble. Because they’re all in between competitions, they’re doing only easy running. I’m secretly hoping that people will stare at us in wonder as we run past. Wow, look, Kenyans! And did you see that white guy? He must be some runner. But the park is virtually empty, save for a few dog walkers who don’t even give us a second glance.

  After about two miles, Mike Kigen (a former Kenyan 5,000 meters champion), Micah Kogo, and Vivian Cheruiyot (the women’s world 5,000 meters champion)* all suddenly speed up. None of them says anything, it just seems to happen. Within seconds, like startled animals they’re gone, their heads bobbing away into the distance. The rest of us keep the easy pace (at least for the Kenyans it’s easy), running in a pack, until we get back to where we started. I’m blowing hard but I just about manage to keep up.

  Back at the house, Micah cooks up some ugali and green vegetables for everyone’s lunch. Ugali is the runners’ favorite food. It’s basically maize flour and water boiled up to make a white, sticky dough. Micah cuts me a huge slab with a knife and lays it on the plate on top of the vegetables. It has a soft, moist texture but doesn’t taste of much. The athletes, however, love it. They tell me, only half-joking, that it’s the secret to Kenya’s running success. Packets of maize flour brought over from Kenya are piled up on the floor in a corner of the kitchen.

  Micah tells me, as we eat, about the day he broke the world 10K record. He says he remembers warming up and feeling light but strong. “So light, but so strong,” he says, almost reverential of the memory. All the athletes perk up when they talk about running. Vivian, a tiny woman who can’t weigh more than eighty-five pounds, tells me about the day she won the world championships, beating the supposedly unbeatable Ethiopians. “It was so much fun,” she says, grinning.

  Later that afternoon, after they’ve all slept and had a massage, Richard Kiplagat, an 800 meters specialist, and Vivian head out for another easy run. I decide to join them again. Afterward, as we stand in the park stretching, a man in his mid-forties, slightly overweight and drenched in sweat, jogs past.

  “In Kenya, do you have runners like that?” I ask, pointing at the jogger. “People who are just running to get fit?” I assume that’s what he’s doing. Hoping to lose some weight, too, no doubt. He doesn’t look like he’s running for the pure joy of it. And he certainly isn’t hoping to make a living from it.

  Richard, who will go on to win a silver medal in the Commonwealth Games a few months later, grins at me and shakes his head. “No,” he says definitely.

  “In Kenya,” says Vivian, “there are only athletes.” It isn’t a boast, but merely a statement of fact. In Kenya, it would seem, if you are an athlete, you run. If you aren’t, you don’t.

  “Maybe in some areas in the big cities,” says Richard, wanting to be clear, “where rich people live, you may see a runner like that. But not in the rest of the country.”

  It is to the rest of the country I’m headed. When I made my plan, I had imagined running hard across the plains in the midst of a group of Kenyans, the pounding of our feet shaking the dry earth. But seriously, who am I kidding?

  “How fast is the slowest athlete in Kenya?” I ask, looking to find a crumb of hope. Maybe I am an athlete. I won the Powderham Castle 10K race. My time was 38 minutes 35 seconds. “For the 10K, for example, what would be the slowest time?”

  They look at each other. This is obviously a tricky question. “Are we including juniors?” Richard asks me. That’s eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds. I nod. I could train with juniors, why not. Perhaps that’s the solution. “And girls?” I nod again. The more the merrier. “About thirty-five minutes,” he says.

  So I’m three and a half minutes slower over 10K than the slowest junior girl in Kenya. I’ve got less than six months to go before I get there. I’ve got some work to do.

  Things start off well when, a few months later, I manage to finally lower my half-marathon time to under 1 hour 30 minutes with a barnstorming 1 hour 26 minutes in a hilly race in Dartmoor in Devon. But just as my fitness is improving, I set myself back by embarking on an experiment.

  It all begins, as it does for many people, when I read Christopher McDougall’s book Born to Run, about a race in the Copper Canyons in Mexico with a tribe of ultra-runners called the Tarahumara. It’s a fascinating tale, but the most intriguing part of the book, and the thing that has catapulted it onto bestseller lists across the world, is its revelation of the concept of barefoot running.

  McDougall talks about a theory developed by Harvard scientists that humans evolved in the way we did partly because we hunted by running animals into the ground. While we are painfully slow at sprinting compared to most four-legged creatures—say, the cheetah, horse, rabbit, or a thousand others—when it comes to long-distance running, we are the Olympic champions of the ani
mal kingdom. Our key advantage is our ability to shed most of our heat through sweating. This means we can cool ourselves down on the move, while most other animals need to stop when they get too hot in order to pant their heat away. Our ancestors could chase even the swiftest runners like antelope until they literally dropped dead from overheating, and McDougall’s book recounts a story about bushmen in the Kalahari Desert in Namibia who still do this today.

  The scientists claim, in effect, that humans are born to run long distances, that our bodies are designed specifically for the purpose. It’s why we have Achilles tendons, arched feet, big bums—to help keep us balanced when we run—and a nuchal ligament at the back of our necks (to keep our heads still). And we are designed to run, they say, in bare feet. Running shoes only mess things up.

  A few weeks before reading all this, I had bought myself a new pair of sneakers. The shop in London was equipped with a hi-tech system for assessing your running gait. I was asked to put on some sneakers and hop on a treadmill. The man in the shop then filmed my feet and played the footage back to me. I was, like 80 percent of runners, he told me, landing heel first. This made my legs pronate, which meant that they were basically buckling under me with each step. To remedy this, he told me, I needed running shoes with added support on one side.

  I thanked him for his useful advice and bought a pair of shoes with added stability, as he suggested. A week later I broke my half-marathon best time. Unfortunately, I also developed a slight injury at the top of my left calf muscle. Injuries are a common part of being a runner, so I didn’t panic. Depending on which study you read, somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of runners get injured at least once a year. So I’d have to be very lucky never to get injured. A small muscle strain was getting off quite lightly.

  McDougall, however, disagrees. The reason runners get injured so often, he says, is because they land heel first. And the reason they land heel first is because they wear stability trainers. It sounds like a catch-22, but according to both McDougall and the Harvard scientists there is a simple way out: Take off the shoes. Our body is the perfect running machine, they say, developed over millions of years of product testing and fine tuning. We don’t need the modern invention of running shoes to do something we’ve been doing perfectly well for millennia.

  Like most people, at first I think this is an interesting theory, but really, you can’t go around running in bare feet. What about broken glass? What about dog poo? But then I read something that makes me prick up my ears: One of the key scientists cited by McDougall, Daniel Liebermann, developed his ideas through studying Kenyan runners.

  Because they grow up running barefoot, Kenyans have a completely different style of running. Rather than landing heel first, they land forefoot first. Not only does this reduce the risk of injury, but it is a more efficient way of running. In effect, by landing heel first, most Western runners are braking with every stride. No wonder we can’t keep up.

  I decide to try barefoot running in the local park one evening. I run there in my shoes, but once I get to a clear, grassy patch, I take them off, hide them in some bushes, and then set off around a field of football pitches. My running style instantly changes to a shorter, faster stride pattern, as though my feet are afraid to touch the ground. I go for about ten minutes, before deciding I’ve done enough. It’s fun, but afterward it’s nice to put my shoes back on. They feel warm and comforting, like big soft pillows.

  But I need to find out more. I decide to track down biomechanics expert Lee Saxby. He’s one of the men who taught McDougall to run barefoot. Can he teach me to run like a Kenyan? I wonder. Lee works out of a boxing gym by the railway tracks in north London. I struggle to find it at first, walking up and down the road, evening commuters dashing around me to catch their trains home. I turn my map up the other way, but it still doesn’t make sense. Then I realize his place is tucked down a back alley between two tall, four-story houses. I walk down a narrow passage and find a black, unmarked door. This must be it. I ring the buzzer and the door opens automatically. I step inside a huge room with an empty boxing ring in the middle. High up on a small balcony along one wall I spot a man looking down. He gives me a nod and points to another door at the side of the gym. I walk over and a skinny boy opens it.

  “I’m here to see Lee,” I say. He nods and points up some stairs.

  At the top is Lee’s office. Lee stands at the door, smiling. “Come in,” he says.

  I enter, full of questions. I leave, a few hours later, convinced I have discovered the secret of Kenyan running.

  “With any other sport, to get good you need to learn about technique,” he says. “But with running, people think they can’t change their style. Well that’s rubbish.”

  He has a certainty that is hard to argue with. Why don’t the top African runners actually run barefoot in races? I ask. “A top runner can’t afford to hurt himself stepping on a sharp stone,” he says. “But they wear racing flats. There is no stability or cushioning on running flats. They allow you to run in a barefoot style. They don’t force you to land heel first like most running shoes.”

  He has a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “Sometimes I feel like the Che Guevera of running,” he says. “I’ll show you.” He tells me to hop up on his running machine. First he films me running in my normal style. Then he tells me to take off my shoes and films me again. I immediately and instinctively start landing forefoot first.

  “Your body won’t let you run heel first if you’re barefoot,” he says. “It would be too painful.” With shoes on we have a false sense of security, and feel that we can hammer the road as hard as we want. But the impact from landing heel first is still shooting up the leg, juddering the knees, the hips, the back, regardless of how much cushioning you put under your feet (McDougall describes it as akin to putting an oven mitten over an egg before hitting it with a hammer). In fact, because you can’t feel the ground when you’re wearing shoes, you’re forced to land even harder as your body instinctively looks for stability and a harder surface. Without shoes, however, you’re forced to tread lightly, skipping gently over the ground. Your body just does it naturally.

  According to Lee, however, it’s not only about the forefoot strike. He tells me to keep my head up, lead with my chest, and pull my legs through, as though I’m on a unicycle. If that isn’t enough to think about, he starts a metronome going at a rapid-fire tack tack tack. I have to match it stride for tack, as he films me. Then he plays the three films back to me.

  It is quite shocking to watch. With my sneakers on I look like an overweight office worker out for a slow jog. (Admittedly, that’s perhaps what I am, but it isn’t how I imagine I look when I’m running.) I seem to be sinking backward at the waist, as though I’m half-slouched into an invisible armchair. With the shoes off it looks a bit better; and after Lee’s lesson I look like a proper runner. “You look like a Kenyan,” he says, though that may be pushing it.

  Outside, the evening commuter trains are rattling in and out of London. Do I even need to go to Kenya? Have I found the secret right here in this West Hampstead gym? Part of me is mad that I didn’t discover this years ago, when I was still young enough to put it to good use. In that moment, watching the videos, I have no doubt that this is the key reason the Kenyans are so good at running. It makes complete sense.

  In the following weeks, as the initial excitement of my discovery begins to die down, I realize that the proof will be in the running. The whole notion of barefoot running appeals to me. I love it when, after years of research, we realize that the most natural and primitive way to do something—the way we always did it before scientists and corporations got their hands on it—was actually the best way after all. I love the fact that despite all our technological advancements, poor Kenyans running barefoot have the edge over us. As a notion, it’s brilliant. But as a reality? The only way to find out is to try it.

  One of the reasons so few athletes have tried to change their style, according to Lee, is becau
se it involves relearning how to run from scratch. Since barefoot running uses different muscles, you need to start with short one-mile runs. Once you can do that without hurting the next day, you can start to increase the distance slowly.

  I had hoped to combine barefoot running with my usual style, to hedge my bets and to avoid getting out of shape. But that’s not an option, according to Lee. “It’s all or nothing,” he says. “Your mind will slip into the style it’s most used to. If you’re running heel first most of the time, your body will do that automatically.”

  Before I leave, Lee promises to send me a pair of barefoot shoes to run in. It may sound like an oxymoron, but the barefoot style of running is less about actually being barefoot and more about the way you run. Barefoot shoes have minimal cushioning or support, but they have a firm under sole to protect your feet from the glass and dog poo. Once I get used to my new style, I decide, I’ll switch to running flats, just like the Kenyans. These have a little more support than barefoot shoes, but none of the bulk and weight of the conventional sneakers usually worn by Western runners.

  So for the next six weeks I start learning how to run again. Running short distances has its advantages. The runs take a fraction of the time they used to, which means I can fit them in more easily. “Don’t worry,” I tell Marietta as I head out the door, “I’ll be back in ten minutes.” Lunchtime runs at work are also less of a mad panic to get back to my desk within the regimented hour.

  As Lee predicted, my legs feel sore after the first few runs, but the more I do it, the farther I can run, and the more natural it begins to feel. I even find myself spontaneously running around the street in my new style. Whereas before I used to feel wary about breaking into a trot without my running shoes on, I’m now happy to run in any footwear. In fact, running shoes seem to be the singularly worst possible shoes to run in. My normal office shoes have very little heel, and I find I can run barefoot style in them quite easily. And the more I do it, the zippier it feels.