Running with the Kenyans Read online

  A week later, our house in Iten is finally ready to move into. When we turn up, the only person there is the builder, still working on a few last jobs. The place smells of paint and dust. The rooms are bare, save for unmade beds and an elaborate, handmade sofa set in the sitting room. The new linoleum floors have been badly taped down and are already curling up at the edges.

  In the section of the house where the man with the passion fruit was squatting, a half-made bed without a mattress fills a tiny, bleak room. The main room is completely empty, while a third room is filled with junk—an old television, bits of wood, some frayed electrical wires. Flora, a young woman hired by Marietta’s sister to work for us, is supposed to live in this half of the house. It feels a bit desolate. The toilet is black with grime and the flush doesn’t work.

  About an hour after we arrive, the landlady, an elderly, kindly woman in a big, patterned blouse, turns up carrying lots of sheets and blankets for the beds. She immediately sets to mopping the floors and making the beds. Like almost all women in Kenya, she wants to hug and pick up the children, but they back away shyly. This only makes her persist more, giggling to herself as she chases them around the room.

  While the rest of the house is put in order, we leave Lila and Uma with Flora and head back to the supermarkets of Eldoret to get supplies such as spoons, plates, knives, pots, pans, and all the other household items. It’s quite a job and we don’t get back until after dark. On the way home we start worrying about the girls. They seem too young suddenly to spend the day in an empty house in a small Kenyan town, with a 22-year-old woman that they hardly know looking after them. But as we pull in through the gate, they’re standing smiling at the front door, a warm glow of yellow light behind them. They run out into the night to meet us. Inside, we find a big bowl of soup that they have made, waiting on the table. We all sit down, and family life in Iten begins.

  Seven

  The early-morning run

  “The time is five thirty-five. It’s time to get up. The time is five—” I switch off my alarm before it wakes up Ossian. I look over. He’s sleeping soundly. I creep out of bed and put on my running clothes: tights and a long-sleeved top. The door bangs as I open it, but no one in the house stirs.

  I step out into a moonlit night. Dogs and roosters are already doing their best to wake the valley, but there’s still no sign of the dawn as I walk through Iten toward the meeting point: a junction between one of the many dirt roads and the main paved one. I’ve been told that runners meet here just after six every morning.

  Despite the thousands of athletes in Iten, when you first arrive, there is no program that you can join or center where you can go to put your name down to start training. The many international runners who come here stay at Lornah’s camp and run every day by themselves or with other international athletes they meet at the camp. So far I’ve run a few times with Godfrey, who is just starting to train again after a few years, trying to get himself into shape for Lewa. But if I want to run with the big groups that I see zipping by everywhere, I’m going to have to do what any Kenyan hopeful turning up in Iten has to do: Stand by the side of the road, wait for a group to come by, and join in.

  The town is quiet at this time of the morning, and I slip by unnoticed in the darkness. Even at this hour there are people out running. I don’t know how they can see well enough to negotiate all the bumps and potholes without twisting an ankle. There are also children running to school already, racing past with their pencil cases rattling in their schoolbags.

  I’m the first to arrive at the junction. I do a bit of stretching and jogging up and down to keep warm, as the occasional matatu drives slowly by, beeping for customers. After about ten minutes, runners start appearing from everywhere, materializing out of the darkness. Within minutes there are about sixty Kenyan runners standing around. Some of them are talking quietly and stretching. They are mostly men, their long, skinny legs wrapped in tights, some wearing woolly hats. I suddenly feel out of my depth, panicking as more athletes bound down the slopes or appear out from behind trees. But it’s too late to turn back now.

  Without any announcement, we start running, heading off down the dirt track. Here we go, I tell myself, following them off into the darkness. Buckle up and hang on. The initial pace is quick without being terrifying, so I edge myself into the middle of the group and try to stay calm, focusing on my style, feeling the gentle pat, pat, pat of my feet skipping under me. Up ahead the full moon lights the way, while behind us the dawn is creeping across the sky, making it easier to see. The last few stars go out as we hurtle along out of the town and into the African countryside.

  I love running like this, in a group. You often hear commentators on television saying that an athlete is getting an easy ride running in the pack. In one way it doesn’t make sense. You’re still running under your own power, using the same energy to propel yourself forward. Wind resistance isn’t usually a big factor in running. But somehow, in a group it is easier. It can feel as though the group is running, not you; as if the movement around you has picked you up and is carrying you along, the switching back and forth of legs focusing the mind, synchronizing it, setting a rhythm for your body to follow. As soon as you become detached from the group, its power evaporates and it feels harder to run.

  When I run on my own, particularly in a town or city, I feel like I’m constantly negotiating obstacles, such as curbs, pedestrians, parked cars, and lampposts. Here it is potholes, cows, and bicycles. In a group, though, they all whiz by almost without registering. In the group, everything is swept up and spat out as you pass.

  A few of the runners around me are chatting quietly, but mostly we run in silence, passing small settlements of round mud huts, following the red dusty trail as it winds its way farther and farther away from anywhere I recognize. The children who usually call out and get excited when I go by just stand and watch as we run past. I’m lost in the blur of the charge.

  It doesn’t last long, however. After just a few miles, the pace begins to pick up. I feel it most up the hills, and soon find myself drifting to the back of the group. I ask someone how far we are running. “One hour ten,” he says. We must be moving now at a pace of about six minutes per mile, and getting faster with each stride. I will need to have the run of my life not to get lost.

  Luckily for me, two women also begin struggling with the ever-increasing pace and I end up sticking with them for the rest of the run. They kindly encourage me whenever I start to fall behind. Up one particularly steep hill near the end, as my legs finally start to rebel, refusing to match the patter-patter rhythm of the two women, one of them turns to me and says simply: “Try.”

  I can’t help but respond, and I manage to stay with them until the end. We finish at the top of the hill outside Lornah’s camp back in Iten. The other runners are all standing around in the bright sunshine, joking and stretching. Some are walking home. I’m exhausted, but still standing. It’s as much as I could have hoped for.

  After thanking my two companions, I make my way slowly through Iten back to our house. The rest of the town is waking up now. Men walk around selling newspapers by the side of the road, while boys on bicycles deliver bread to the various wooden kiosks dotting the town. Outside the big black gates to our house is a tiny kiosk with a grill-covered window across the front. It sells tea and rice and other things that last a long time, in case nobody buys them. There are always a few men sitting on the counter outside, as though at a bar, passing time, watching us as we come and go. I walk over and shake their hands. I can just about make out the face of a man inside the kiosk. “Fine, fine,” he says, coming out through a side door to greet me.

  His name is Geoffrey, he tells me, smiling. He thought we were German. One of the men, sitting languidly on the shop counter is his brother, Henry, an athlete. “Half marathon,” he says.

  A third, shorter man is wearing a ripped yellow tracksuit. He gives me a big, bucktooth grin. His name is Japhet.

  “A
re you an athlete, too?” I ask him.

  “Yes,” he says. His torn running shoes and old clothes suggest he isn’t the most successful athlete in Iten, but I imagine he’s still probably pretty fast.

  “Two hours twenty-eight,” he says. He’s talking about the marathon. It’s a surprisingly slow time for a Kenyan. Most marathon runners in Iten have a best time of under 2 hours 15 minutes. Even 2 hours 10 minutes is fairly average. But Japhet says it was his first marathon, and he ran it in Kisumu, here in Kenya. He says it was very hot when he ran. “But I ran all the way,” he says, smiling. “Position twenty-seven.”

  I ask him if he trains full time, or whether he has a job, too. He shakes his head.

  “If you have a job, you can’t run,” he says. “You get tired. Too tired.”

  I tell him that I’m running a marathon in Kenya, too. Perhaps we could train together.

  “The Lewa Marathon,” I tell him. “Do you know it?”

  “Lewa?” he asks. “Yes. Very hard. Very hot.”

  “Perhaps we could go for a run together, all three of us?”

  “Yes,” says Japhet, looking at Henry, who nods his approval. “That would be good.”

  A small herd of cows ambles past along the rutted road, followed by a young girl in a gold, silk evening dress, torn across one shoulder. Her bare feet are caked in mud, and her hair is cropped short. In her hand she carries a stick for prodding the cows. She stares at us as she passes.

  “I see you have a soldier,” says Geoffrey.

  He means our night watchman. Everyone has told me that Iten is a safe town. But they also said that we should get a security guard. Just in case. I’d heard enough terrible stories of foreigners being robbed in other parts of Kenya to make the first few nights of sleeping in the house an hourly ordeal, as I’d hear a noise, wait quietly to see if it would happen again, and then, if it did, jump up to look out of the window. At about four o’clock in the morning on the first night, Lila woke up shouting. I went in to see her.

  “What’s that banging noise?” she asked, almost hysterical.

  “Shhh, it’s nothing,” I said, listening hard to see if there was any banging. There was. “Quiet,” I said, in an urgent enough tone to make her quiet. She looked at me. I looked at her. “Wait here,” I said. The banging seemed to be coming from the kitchen. I opened the door quickly, but there was no one there. It was coming from above.

  Marietta called from the bedroom. I went in to see her. “It’s just the birds on the roof,” she said. “They’ve been making noises all night.”

  The problem with not having a watchman is that you can’t reliably call the police if something happens.

  “What do we do if someone tries to break in?” I asked Godfrey. “Call the police?”

  “Yes,” he said. Then, thinking about it, he smiled. “No, first call Koila.” Koila lives near our house. “Or call me.” Godfrey lives thirty miles away, near Eldoret.

  In the end we hired a watchman. He arrived in an armored car with about eight other uniformed men, who jumped down and saluted me like members of the A-Team. Deliberately last out of the van was a smooth-talking manager in a shirt and tie. He was all reassuring smiles as he pointed at the armored car. “If anything happens, we send the car from Eldoret,” he said.

  “How long will that take?”

  He smiled at me. “This is your guard,” he said, turning to the smallest of the men, who gave me a worried salute. The others looked strong and sturdy, like soldiers. Our man, Alex, looked more like a runner.

  That evening he turned up punctually at seven o’clock and started snooping around the garden like a comic book guard with his uniform and watchman’s hat, his big, white truncheon held out in front of him. He checked the fence and noted things down on a big clipboard. Later that evening I looked out of the window and saw his torchlight skirting the ground by the fence.

  He may not be particularly effective, with his truncheon and his back-up team all the way in Eldoret, but that night I had the best sleep since we moved in. I left the worrying about noises to our man in the garden.

  “Yes,” I say to Geoffrey, the kiosk owner. “You saw him?”

  “Yes,” says Geoffrey. He smiles, friendly. “It’s best to be safe.”

  For the next few weeks I find myself running mostly with Godfrey, or with other foreigners in the town, in an attempt to get in better shape before I’m brave enough to join in with another group run. But everyone here is fast. One guy I meet is a young American student called Anders. Godfrey seems to have taken him under his wing.

  “His mum,” Godfrey tells me, “ran the first ever marathon. In the Olympics. She just jumped in with the men and beat them all.”

  He repeats this jumbled story to people countless times and each time the result is a puzzled expression, rather than the look of impressed surprise Godfrey is hoping for. Eventually I work out that Anders’s mother is Joan Benoit. The story that Godfrey was trying to retell was her victory in the marathon at the 1984 Olympics. It was the first women’s Olympic marathon and she didn’t jump in with the men, there was a separate race. As well as being an Olympic champion, Joan is also a former world record holder and a two-time winner of the Boston Marathon. She’s basically America’s greatest ever woman’s marathon runner.

  Anders is no slouch himself and has a 10K time of thirty-three minutes—five minutes quicker than my best. One morning I head out with him and Godfrey on a steady run through the forest. After a few minutes, Godfrey, the one training partner that I can keep up with, stops, complaining of sore knees. Godfrey was once a great athlete, but at forty-five he is struggling to get back into shape.

  “Sorry, guys,” he says, as we leave him to hobble back to town. As we run, Anders tells me that he’s not sure Godfrey will really run the Lewa Marathon. Godfrey must be the world’s most friendly, helpful man, but sometimes that can be a problem. He says yes to everything.

  “There’s been a change of plan,” is his famous refrain, just when you’re expecting to do something with him. He’s usually on the other end of a long-distance call from Nairobi or western Kenya, where his wife works as a police officer. So I’m not surprised when Anders says Godfrey might not run Lewa, but it leaves me without a training partner. It suddenly feels lonely to go there on my own. I should form a team, I think. It would give me a ready-made group to run with. It would be a great way to get closer to some of the athletes, and to find out what makes them tick. And even if Godfrey doesn’t run, perhaps he could be the coach.

  When we get back, I mention the team idea to Godfrey. He thinks it’s a great plan. “Chris will run, too,” he says. He means Christopher Cheboiboch, the runner who picked us up from the Lelin campsite on our first day in Iten. The man with the fifth fastest time ever in the New York marathon.

  “Really? You think so?”

  “Sure,” he says. “We want only the best.”

  Eight

  Christopher Cheboiboch at his childhood home

  For years I’ve been saying that one day I would run a marathon, and now, in a few months, I will. I’m slowly getting in shape. Every time Godfrey sees me he mentions that I’ve lost weight. I must have had a lot to lose. Whenever I mention the Lewa race to any of the other runners, however, they grimace. “That is tough,” they say. It’s hot, hilly, and run on dirt tracks. Kenyans generally prefer courses where they can run fast times. A fast time can mean an invite to a big city marathon. A slow course is, in many ways, simply a waste of effort.

  My neighbor Japhet, though, says he would like to run it with me. He keeps telling me how he is always at the front on the early-morning group runs.

  “I’m forming a team,” I say. “Would you like to join?”

  He grins. “Yes,” he says.

  Japhet, it turns out, is from the same village as Christopher Cheboiboch, who has also agreed to be part of the team. The village sits on a ridge just below the top of the escarpment, caught between a chiseled rock face rising up be
hind rolling fields and the vast Rift Valley falling away to the front. It’s a beautiful place. Chris says he remembers when Japhet was born. Their family homes are practically next to each other.

  Every Kenyan runner has a story. To go from a small shamba on the side of a mountain in rural Kenya to winning big city marathons in Europe and America is inevitably a tale filled with drama and adventure. Chris told me that the first time he ever visited Iten he was fourteen years old. It was the first time he had ever seen even a small town. He walked through the streets agog at all the people and buildings. Ten years later he was almost winning the New York City Marathon, racing past huge skyscrapers, being cheered on by hundreds of thousands of people.

  Chris took me home to his village one time to meet his family. He looked completely out of place among the raggedy farmers, with his neatly ironed shirt and easy smile. Everywhere we went people waved or stopped to talk to him. The one who had made it. The prodigal son, returning to see his people. But a distance had grown between them. He spoke to most people through the window of his gently purring car, keeping his distance. After we’d spoken to one worker, reaching in to shake my hand, his clothes covered in dust and mud after a hard day’s toil, Chris turned to me.

  “He was a classmate of mine,” he said, aware of the contrast in their fortunes, letting it linger as he drove on.

  Chris’s family home was a simple mud hut like all the others, but he had bought lots of the surrounding fields. It was hard to keep track of how much he owned. “Those cattle are mine,” he said, pointing into the distance. “I bought those two fields for my brother.” At his homestead, his sister had prepared a feast for us. Inside, it was like a shrine to Chris, with newspaper clippings about his successes and photographs of him on the walls, all framed and surrounded in tinsel.