Running with the Kenyans Page 5

  Many of the houses in Iten are owned by former athletes, but, like Kirui’s house, they are all surprisingly small and unglamorous. The late Richard Chelimo, a former 10,000 meters world record holder, was the first athlete to invest in Iten. His legacy is a few rows of concrete one-bedroom units now falling into disrepair.

  Later we go to look at the house that Toby Tanser found for us to rent. “The nicest house in Iten,” he had said. It is actually owned by Erastus’s wife, Sylvia Kibet, a world champion 5,000 meters silver medalist. Tucked behind a gas station, it has three small bedrooms looking out onto a brick wall, some old cardboard cabinets in a dark sitting room, and a tiny shared yard.

  Godfrey’s backward-built house is sumptuous by comparison, with its ample garden and views across the valley. When we see it for the first time, it is being redecorated and is a bit of a mess, but we’re assured that it will all be ready within a few days. In the garden there are four sheep and an angry dog tied to a post. The house is split in two and we’re told that the man who owns the dog lives in the other half of the house, its windows covered by dirty polyester curtains, but that he will be moved out.

  “The landlord is a man who has traveled,” Godfrey reassures me. “He understands privacy.”

  Koila is more succinct: “And mzungus.” The implication being that we’re too finicky and uptight to share our house with a strange man with a wild dog. To be honest, I think we are. But where will he go?

  “He will still be your neighbor,” says Godfrey, pointing vaguely to where he will live, somewhere over the back fence behind a large plantation of passion fruit trees. It turns out that the man has been squatting in the house and growing passion fruit for some time. We agree to let him back in once a week to spray and harvest his crop.

  The day we eventually move into the house, he shows up. He has an unsettling grin and tiptoes around me like an unpredictable pony. He tells me he wants to be a runner, if I sponsor him. I have to admit, I’m a bit worried about letting him in the house even once a week. Godfrey seems to think he’s harmless, though, and jokes with the man while helping himself to some passion fruit.

  “He says you can eat the fruit whenever you want,” Godfrey tells me, as the man grins his approval.

  We agree to rent Godfrey’s house but are told a few days later that it won’t be ready for another week. I get the call while we’re in the larger nearby town of Eldoret. We’ve come here to visit the European-style Nakumatt supermarket. Nakumatt is a big, glossy store that’s open twenty-four hours a day and sells everything that a homesick European could dream of, from strollers to bathrobes, and from Barbie dolls to ice cream.

  After a few days in our little campsite, cooking rice on the camping stove and sleeping on dirty pillows, it’s like stepping back into the comfortable, ordered world we left behind. I realize suddenly how tough life has been for the children over the last few days. Although Alastair, my brother-in-law, has now lent us a car, we’ve been ferrying the children back and forth in it, from house to house, back to the campsite, then off to visit athletes in training camps, all in the heat, meeting lots of people who talk about running. They get stared at wherever they go. Sometimes they embrace it, waving at everyone, laughing, and shaking hands with all the other children, who shriek with excitement and run along beside us. But sometimes it’s too much. Our daughters keep telling us they like England better.

  “It will be different when we have our own home,” Marietta says. “They’re just unsettled.”

  When the children are unhappy, the whole venture seems like a folly. I feel I’ve dragged them away from their friends and their home, all for some whimsical goal of running a fast time in a running race. It seems so trivial. I begin to think I should take them home to England.

  As we drive back from Nakumatt through the outskirts of Eldoret, the road is lined with collapsing houses and tiny shops built from scraps of metal, cardboard boxes, and anything that people can find. Children play in puddles that are black with grime, or sit among stray dogs on piles of trash, as men whip threadbare and overladen donkeys into a slow, painful walk.

  As we reach Iten, we pass a group of European runners. With their fair skin and pristine clothes, they look like creatures from another world. It seems ridiculous that they—and I—have come all this way to preen themselves for some competition. Amid the chaos and poverty, where people struggle to make enough money to buy even the simplest things such as bread and water, here are some of the world’s best athletes doing drills, back and forth, along the side of the road.

  Yet, ironically, they have come here to be inspired. To live among people who don’t think that running is ridiculous, no matter how hard their lives are, but who value running and the opportunity it brings, who revere it, almost. Even if you never become an Olympic champion, or even manage to race abroad, just being an athlete here seems to lift you above the chaos of daily life. It marks you out as one of the special people, who have chosen a path of dedication and commitment. You can see it in the runners’ eyes when they talk to you. Even the slowest of the runners talk about their training with an almost religious devotion. They may live in makeshift houses, without running water, and sit by candlelight each night, but their best times for the half marathon are recalled with reverence. Running matters.

  Six

  Cross-country racing in Iten

  Toby Tanser tells me to meet him at the gates to Lornah’s training camp, where I first bumped into him, at 6:30 A.M.

  I wake up at dawn, feeling a thrill of excitement as I pull on my running clothes, which I left ready and laid out on the floor. Lila and Uma are sleeping soundly, curled up on their beds, their heads fallen off the hard pillows. I slip out of the room. The awakening Rift Valley drops away outside the door, the sound of roosters echoing over its majesty. This is it, the first run in Iten. Let the show begin.

  The car starts with a purr, and I drive carefully out through the campsite’s elaborate entrance gates and up the bumpy road to Iten. Toby is there waiting for me when I arrive, bouncing around on his toes. We head out on a very gentle thirty-minute jog, down through the town, past the famous St. Patrick’s school, and out along a dusty, red track into the countryside. The trail we follow is actually a road, snaking its way through farmland and green fields dotted with cedar trees. The only vehicle we pass, though, is a motorbike with two men and two children on it, beeping at us as it bumps along.

  We see fewer runners than I was anticipating. Toby says we’re a bit late, that most of them start earlier. The few we do pass are running alone or in small groups of two or three. I don’t see any large groups blocking the way of taxi drivers.

  Every couple of minutes Toby points to a house and tells me the name of an athlete who lives there and the incredible times they have run or the championship medals they have won. He also has a personal story about some wild escapade he once had with each one.

  I ask him why the people here are so good at running. Could it be because they run barefoot?

  “They don’t,” he says. “The children run barefoot, but it’s not what makes them fast.”

  I don’t press him, I wasn’t expecting the barefoot theory to be widely held, even here. I ask him what he thinks it is, then, that makes them so fast.

  “It’s not one thing,” he says. “You’ll meet lots of people. You’ll get lots of answers. And they will all be right.”

  As we run, schoolchildren run along beside us. A few call out: “How are you?” but most seem to be running regardless of us. One of the theories often put forward as to why Kenyans are so good at running, often by the athletes themselves, is the fact that they run to school every day.

  “Are they already hoping to become athletes?” I ask Toby, assuming he will know the answer. “Is that why they’re running?”

  “No,” he says. “They’re running because if they’re late they get caned.”

  Despite the fact that corporal punishment was officially banned in schools in Kenya
in 2001, lots of Kenyans later verify that Toby is right. A few weeks later the national newspaper carries a story about one of the country’s brightest junior runners, Faith Kipyegon, who has been so badly beaten by her teacher at school that she is unable to train because of her injuries. With the world cross-country championships coming up, it’s bad timing, the newspaper reports. There is a distinct lack of outrage in the article.

  But surely school beatings can’t be the secret behind Kenya’s running success. It’s not as romantic a secret as barefoot running. One day Godfrey tells me that when he was young, he ran the four miles to school every day because he felt better when he ran.

  “I noticed I felt better in my body during the day,” he says. “I was able to concentrate much better. When I didn’t run, I felt tired and lethargic all day.” Perhaps he felt more awake only because by running to school he could sleep in longer, but it’s interesting to hear him talk about how running made him feel good. It’s this sense of well-being that gets people out running in the West, rather than necessity, but I wonder how many runners here even think about how it makes them feel.

  Godfrey admits to me that I’m the first person he has ever told this to. In fact, he says he has only just realized it now, as he was saying it. We’re sitting in the cheap Hill Side Hotel café in Iten, and Godfrey has a look of excitement on his face, as if he has just realized something profound. I don’t know if it is coincidence or not, but later that day he tells me he wants to run the Lewa Marathon with me. He hasn’t run for years, but suddenly he’s full of the joys of running. He wants to be my training partner, and keeps saying thank you to me as though I’ve done something other than just listen to him and nod.

  A few days after we arrive in Iten, the national cross-country league comes to town. It’s the last leg of a seven-race series and it’s all brilliantly organized, with runners doing laps in and around the playing fields in the center of the town. It’s a warm day and a big crowd has turned out, lining the hills on two sides of the playing fields. There is even a sound system booming out from the back of a truck, with two women on the stage grinding to the jumped-up music. A few gazebos have been put up by the corporate sponsor, KCB, a Kenyan bank, at the start and finish areas. We make our way over. Marietta initially sits down with the children in the front row, where someone is handing out free bottles of water. But after a few stern looks and poorly disguised coughs, she realizes she is taking up the prime viewing seats in the VIP tent—seats reserved for dignitaries such as the head of the army and the head of the Kenyan Olympic Committee.

  Milling around by the start, I bump into both Toby and Godfrey. They introduce me to a seemingly endless number of runners and coaches. Rather than telling me their names, each person is introduced by a time or an achievement—often a world record or an Olympic title. One man in particular seems to be getting handshakes from everyone. He’s a short, white man with a ruddy face shaded by a baseball cap. He has his arms folded tightly across his round body as the leading junior girls come by. Quietly, with a strong Irish accent, he tells the girl in second to “Stay there, stay there.” I know who he is without being introduced.

  In the late 1970s, an Irish priest with no background in athletics came on a two-year placement to teach at Iten’s Catholic boarding school, St. Patrick’s. At that time there were no runners training in Iten. Even though the school had already produced an Olympic medalist, Mike Boit, who won the bronze medal in the 800 meters in 1972, it was the influence of the new recruit from Ireland, Brother Colm O’Connell, that was to turn St. Patrick’s into one of the most successful athletics schools in the world, and turn Iten into the running center it is today.

  Soon after Brother Colm started teaching, the school’s track coach returned to Britain and the Irish priest stepped into the vacant role. His teams began to do well in national competitions, and in 1986 he was asked to select the Kenyan team for the first ever world junior championships in Athens. He picked nine runners, seven from St. Patrick’s. Having never competed internationally, he didn’t know what to expect from his team, but to his surprise they won nine medals, including four golds.

  “It was then I realized we had something special going on here,” he tells me later. Three years after that, in 1989, he started the first running camp in Kenya. It was open during school holidays, and initially it was just for girls.

  “I just wanted to give athletics a bit more focus,” he says. But the idea caught on. St. Patrick’s went on to produce numerous world and Olympic champions, and today there are more than 120 training camps in and around Iten. Brother Colm has since retired from teaching at the school, but he still lives within the school grounds. Tucked behind his modest house is his training camp—a small house where the runners share rooms. Currently he has only four athletes in the camp, but they’re all people he has coached since they were very young. One of them, 22-year-old David Rudisha, has just been crowned the IAAF World Athlete of the Year after he twice broke the thirteen-year-old 800 meters world record. The person who held the record before him was Wilson Kipketer, another St. Patrick’s old boy and former charge of Brother Colm.

  At the race in Iten, Godfrey, yet another of Brother Colm’s former prodigies, introduces him to me as a legend in Kenyan running. Brother Colm, though, is quick to tamp down the hyperbole. “The legend is bigger than the man,” he says, looking away as though he’s in a hurry to be somewhere else. Godfrey tells him I’m writing a book on Iten and the runners, and that I’d like to talk to him at some point. “What do you want to talk to me for?” he says. “There are lots of other more interesting people.”

  Every article I’ve read about Iten talks about the influence of Brother Colm. The athletes themselves talk about him as the godfather of Kenyan running. As Godfrey says, to them he is a legend. But I guess he doesn’t like the limelight, because before I have a chance to say a word, he’s gone.

  I bump into him again the next evening at a bar in the Kerio View hotel, sitting with a young Kenyan woman. “I’m stalking you,” I say, only half jokingly. He warms to me a bit more when I tell him that my parents are Irish and that my dad is from Galway. “I went to university in Galway,” he says, and starts telling his companion about the beautiful wildness of Connemara. He talks with the wistful tone of a man who has spent a long time away from his homeland and remembers only the most cherished of moments, like little treasures in a box, taken out occasionally, held delicately, turned over, and then placed carefully back again.

  Back at the race in Iten, a long line of men stretches out across the dusty field. A few officials are rushing along the front of the line, trying to keep order. I’ve gone to stand at the first corner, to take pictures of the start, so it’s hard to see what sets everyone off, but suddenly half the runners are charging across the field toward me. A shout goes up from the crowd as marshals rush onto the course to halt the runners. Some of them don’t want to stop and have to be virtually pulled to the ground. Eventually they all return to the start line to try again.

  With all the incredible runners here, competition is stiff, so getting a good start is vital. The second time they get it right and the line quickly becomes a swarm of athletes fighting to get ahead. I hold my camera up as the field arrows toward me and darts around the corner. It is like they are sprinting for their lives. But they still have over seven miles to run, in 85-degree heat.

  This is one of the fiercest races you could hope to witness anywhere in the world. At the world cross-country championships, for instance, there are only six Kenyans in each race, most of whom usually finish in the top ten. Here there are three hundred Kenyans in each race. It is quite a sight.

  Unlike open cross-country races in Britain, where you will always see a fair sprinkling of gray hair and bandy legs, and many runners who are clearly doing it purely for fun, in Kenya everyone is under forty and fast. I briefly contemplated running, but after watching, I’m glad I didn’t. Next time I’ll run, I tell myself, not realizing the next r
ace is only a few weeks away.

  There is one foreigner in the race. A fair-haired man wearing a Winchester AC running vest. He trails just a few places from the back, and I’m thinking that he is a brave man even to be out there. Later I find out that his name is Tom Payn and that he is the fourth fastest marathon runner in Britain.

  The large crowd watches mostly in silence, except at the end when the spectators occasionally rise to an excited cheer at the prospect of a sprint finish. In the women’s race, they scream and yell as the world champion 5,000 meters silver medalist, Sylvia Kibet (who almost became our landlady), produces a barnstorming sprint at the end—to finish third. The race is won by one of Godfrey’s friends, Lineth Chepkurui. The junior women’s race is won by Faith Kipyegon, just days before the reports of her school beating, and a couple of months before she becomes world champion.

  The men’s race is won by Geoffrey Mutai, who a few months later will go on to win both the Boston and New York City marathons, setting course records in each, while the winner in the junior men’s race is Isaiah Koech, who just weeks later will smash the world champion junior 5,000 meters indoor record by an incredible forty seconds. And this is just a national league race.

  The quality of the running is slightly lost on my children, who initially enjoy watching, but soon find the sun too hot and the races too long. “Daddy, is it nearly finished yet?” Uma keeps asking me. Eventually Marietta has to take them back to the car.

  Ossian may not have been paying close attention to who was winning the races, but later that day he starts playing a new game. Standing at one end of the long veranda that runs across the front of our three rooms at the Lelin campsite, he says, “Ready, steady, go!” Then he starts running, his arms up in the air and a big grin on his face. The Kenyan magic, it seems, is already starting to have an effect.