Running with the Kenyans Read online

  After we’d eaten, his mother turned up. She was a tough woman who grunted an unimpressed hello at me. After Chris’s father disappeared when he was very young, she started farming the land, bringing up her six children on her own. But Chris was clearly a little embarrassed by her, with her tired scowl and woolen Manchester United hat. They hardly spoke to each other. A few muttered words and then we were gone, heading back to Iten.

  Chris is now forty-two, although, like virtually all male Kenyan runners, his official age is much lower, in this case thirty-four. I never get to the bottom of why they all say they are younger than they actually are. Each person has a different story, although it usually involves someone else, such as a manager, getting the date wrong at some point. Bizarrely, around half of Kenya’s runners were born on January first, according to their official records. When I fill in Japhet’s Lewa entry form with him, I ask him what his date of birth is.

  “Nineteen eighty-seven,” he says.

  “What day and month?” I ask him. He looks at me and starts shuffling around on his seat.

  “Let me go and find out,” he says.

  In 2002, when Chris was thirty-three (officially twenty-five), he came second in both the Boston and the New York City marathons. He was flying, one of the top athletes at the illustrious stable of the Italian agent Doctor Rosa. Almost immediately, though, he became distracted. He used his money to build a school named after his home village, Salaba.

  Like all Kenyan runners, when Chris was young he had to run to school, three miles, back and forth twice a day every day.

  “Unknowingly, we were already training,” he says. “But it was hard.” He says he built Salaba Academy so that his own children didn’t have to suffer as he did.

  “It’s also an investment. It’s his retirement,” says Godfrey.

  A fee-paying boarding school just outside of Iten, Salaba Academy takes up a lot of Chris’s time. He seems to do everything himself, from buying the flour for the ugali to attending meetings with education officials in Nairobi. One morning we arrange to leave for an early run at 5:00 A.M. and he asks if we can pick him up at the school.

  “Why will you be at the school at that time?” I ask.

  “I’m always at school early,” he says.

  “But is anyone even awake?”

  “They are in class already,” he says, affronted, as though I’m suggesting that his children are lazy.

  “At five in the morning?”

  “They have exams coming up. They must work hard.”

  Once his school was up and running, Chris never reached the same level of performance in his running again.

  Chris’s story of short-lived glory is common among the athletes here and shows just how vital focus and dedication are to Kenya’s running success.

  The most famous example of a great athlete becoming distracted by success is Sammy Wanjiru, who blazed away to win the 2008 Olympic marathon at the tender age of twenty-one. A few months after setting up my Lewa team, Wanjiru, one of the most precocious and successful of all of Kenya’s runners, is killed in a fall from a balcony at his home in Nyahururu. Wanjiru was known among the other athletes as a heavy drinker. I was told that if I wanted to meet him, I should go to a bar in Eldoret and ask around. According to the stories, he would regularly go into a nightclub and buy everyone a drink. On the night he died, his wife came home to find him in bed with another woman. What happened next no one knows, but Wanjiru ended up dead.

  One warm, still afternoon, as a paraglider circles in the sky above, I find the legendary Italian coach Renato Canova sitting in his seat by the vast windows that span one side of the Kerio View hotel, a glass of milk on the table in front of him. He’s the only person there, apart from a team of waiters hovering by the kitchen door and talking quietly to one another. I ask him if I can sit down.

  “Please do,” he says, moving the chair out for me. Renato has a permanent room at the hotel and spends much of his time sitting here, perched above the sky, reading a newspaper or gazing out the window. Since he first came to Iten in 1998 he has been training Kenyan athletes, and virtually all of his runners have gone on to win world titles.

  One of the waitresses comes over and asks me what I want to drink. I order a passion fruit juice. She doesn’t ask Renato. He has his milk. He’ll be back later for supper, at the same time as always.

  “So, what did you want to know?” he says.

  I ask him why the Kenyans often have short careers. Unlike the great Ethiopian runners such as Haile Gebrselassie and Kenenisa Bekele, most Kenyans run well for a few years and then disappear.

  He looks at me over the top of his fingers, held in a prayer position on the table.

  “The runners all come from poor backgrounds, with less education,” he says. “When they win, the whole village celebrates their victory, and everyone asks for support. The successful athlete becomes like the chief of the village, so then everyone goes to him with their personal problems.” Renato says he once had an athlete who, while at the world championships in 2005, was being phoned every two hours by people back in Kenya asking him where they should put the windows in a building they were constructing. “The athletes need to concentrate on their training,” he says. “They need to educate their villagers about their life.”

  This is why the training camps were started, to remove the athletes from the distraction of their families and relations, and the rest of the outside world. But once athletes become successful, they often decide they don’t want to live in the camps anymore, where daily life is stripped down to the bare essentials of run, eat, and sleep, so they move out. “They start dealing with building projects, borrowing money,” says Renato. “This is normal behavior for a Kenyan.” It is normal behavior in most other countries, too, even for athletes. Those who live in the camps are the unusual ones. But the difference it makes is huge. Without the same intense levels of dedication and focus, when an athlete leaves a camp it often signals the beginning of the end. Wanjiru isn’t the only great athlete who ended up propping up the bars of Eldoret.

  Chris at least kept running. He tells me that for the month before the Lewa Marathon, he will move away from home, to a hotel, to concentrate on his training. “Of course,” he says. “You have to be focused.”

  I can’t imagine this level of intensity, living away from home in basic-training camps for months at a time, being considered normal among athletes in other parts of the world. Yet there are hundreds of these camps in Kenya, all filled with dedicated athletes. Under the heading “Secrets” in my notebook, I jot down the words focus, dedication, training camps.

  Godfrey calls a Lewa team meeting at a hotel in Iten. Japhet turns up wearing a sleeveless safari jacket that hangs way too big from his shoulders. He sits shyly on the edge of his seat, listening intently as Godfrey talks about what an honor it is to be on the team, that the race will be live on television, that the whole world will be watching. As he’s talking, Chris arrives with another runner.

  “This is Josphat,” he says. “He wants to run, too.”

  Josphat shakes my hand and gives me an amused smile. Like Chris, it’s hard to put an age on him, but it turns out that he’s Chris’s childhood friend and he’s also from the same village.

  “Okay,” I say. “So together we’re five, if Godfrey runs.” He has been telling me his knees are too sore. “Otherwise, Godfrey has agreed to be our coach.”

  Godfrey and Chris take turns to make the most grandiose speech about what the team means, and they keep thanking me profusely for setting it up.

  “We are representing Iten,” says Godfrey. “When you are interviewed afterward,” he says, looking at Japhet, “you must speak well. You mustn’t be shy.”

  “Josphat, what have you got to say for yourself?” says Chris, turning on his friend. “What will you say after the race?”

  Josphat, who still hasn’t spoken since he arrived, looks unwilling to join in the game. The hotel waitress brings over five cups
of tea, buying him some time. She places them down on the table in slow motion, without speaking or looking at anyone.

  “So, Josphat,” says Chris, sounding like a teacher.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  “Ah, that’s no good,” says Chris, annoyed.

  Later, after the others have gone, Godfrey seems concerned. “I don’t know why Chris brought Josphat along. He doesn’t add anything to the team. He’s way too old. We need a winner.”

  A week later I get a call from Godfrey. “Finn,” he says. “I think I’ve found our winner.” I’m not sure we need a winner. I’ve agreed to pay the race entry fees and arrange some accommodation for the night before the race. Suddenly everyone wants to be on the team.

  “How good is he?” I ask.

  “Are you kidding me? He’s good. Come and meet him tomorrow. There’s a homecoming for some athletes who ran in the African championships. Komen will be there.” He means the great Daniel Komen, the 3,000 meters world record holder.

  “Okay,” I say, not realizing what is in store.

  After driving for about two hours along the edge of the escarpment, we swing in through the drive of a school in the village of Kamwosor. “Can we stop?” Godfrey asks. I pull the car to a halt. “I think this is it,” he says, “but let me check first.” He gets out of the car and disappears through the gate behind us.

  “Where’s Godfrey going?” Lila asks me, as though I ever know what is going on when Godfrey is around.

  “I don’t know,” I say. We all sit staring out of the front window. A long, corrugated metal building sits at the end of the dirt driveway. I presume it’s the school. A few heads appear around the edge of one wall and then disappear. Suddenly the whole school is running up the drive toward us, a huge swarm of red sweaters. We sit trapped in our car as the children clamber around us, laughing and chattering to one another, peering in at us. They reach in through the half-open windows, looking for handshakes, money, candy, anything. Lila and Uma are not sure whether it’s funny or terrifying. Uma is standing up on the backseat, while Lila climbs over the seat to the front and curls up on my lap. The car is rocking in the frenzy.

  “Finn, Finn.” I can hear Godfrey outside, but I can’t see him. He manages to push his way through the crowd. Where are the teachers? “Finn, start to come back,” he says. I turn the engine on to a big cheer, and start edging the car backward. Godfrey is pulling children out of the way. Finally we make it back out onto the street. The children stand in the open gateway, held back by some invisible force, waving and laughing as we turn the car.

  Godfrey gets in. “Sorry about that,” he says. “Let’s go this way.”

  We drive up into the village, a single strip of road with painted wooden shops on either side, a few flimsy vegetable stalls, women with big skirts holding long knives, standing staring at us. We park the car and Godfrey takes us into a tiny, blue building with the word HOTEL painted across it. It’s actually a café. Inside, a few men sit at wooden tables. They look at us in silence as we sit down. Rickety chairs, benches along the walls, a dusty red floor. There’s a wooden counter in one corner, with a pile of rocklike buns on a shelf behind the glass front. In the other corner is a butcher’s shop, the skinned and headless body of a cow hanging from a hook.

  Godfrey asks us what we want to drink and then disappears out through the front door when we tell him, leaving us sitting there.

  “Where’s he gone now?” Lila asks me quietly, leaning across the table.

  “I don’t know,” I say, looking at Marietta. She shrugs, amused at his constant comings and goings. Ossian climbs onto her lap and starts banging the table and singing, happy to be out of the car. The other men in the room give up watching us and turn back to their conversations. Eventually Godfrey comes back with a bag full of sodas. He has two men with him. One of them is Shadrack, the runner he has been telling me about.

  “Hi,” I say, after Godfrey introduces us. “I hear you want to run Lewa?”

  “Huh?” he looks at me as though I’m mad.

  “Lewa. You know the marathon?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “You want to run?”

  He nods, staring at me now with unblinking eyes. “Yes,” he says.

  About three hours later than planned we make our way back down the road to the village school where the homecoming ceremony is finally about to begin. Four of the children from the village have just come back from the African cross-country championships in Cape Town, where Kenya won every single medal on offer despite sending only a second-string team. The first team was being saved for the world championships two weeks later.

  The appearance of the teachers means that we don’t get such a raucous reception this time, so we’re free to park the car and walk over to where the festivities are taking place. As guests of honor, we are each given tinsel wreaths to wear around our necks and are directed to sit under the shade of a small marquee. The schoolchildren sit on the ground around the tent in the hot sun.

  One of the speakers is Daniel Komen. The chairman of the local athletics board, he sits sullenly through the speeches by the other dignitaries, not laughing when everyone else does. Occasionally he calls Godfrey close and whispers something in his ear, his eyes looking around to make sure nobody else is listening.

  Tall and smartly dressed, Komen is one of the greatest runners that has ever lived. In 1996, at the age of twenty, he burst onto the international scene like a fireball. The great Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie was the dominant force in distance running at the time and was breaking world records for fun.* Suddenly he had a challenger. At the end of the 1996 season Komen, upset at not making the Kenyan team for the Olympics, went out and ran one of the most staggering performances ever seen on a track. On a cool September evening in Rieti, Italy, he flew around seven and a half laps like a man possessed, breaking the 3,000 meters world record by over four seconds. Despite all the great names that have tried, nobody has since been able to get even close to the time he ran that night.

  However, less than two years later, Komen’s career was virtually over. Those who knew him blame the money he won, and people often hold him up as a prime example when they talk about athletes winning money and then becoming distracted. Komen himself, however, blames the shortness of his career not on money but on injuries. I corner him one day at the exclusive Eldoret Golf Club, where he often sits on Sundays, brooding under the shade of an umbrella while his children dive-bomb each other in the pool.

  “I had many injuries,” he says, looking away. He seems annoyed.

  “What injuries did you have?”

  “From high school. The teachers wanted the points for the team, so they made me run all the races. Sometimes I had to run two races on the same day. The Ethiopians don’t have so much pressure on them in high school, but it’s a big problem in Kenya.”

  Despite Komen’s ill feeling, he is heavily involved in junior athletics in Kenya. As chairman of the local athletics board, he seems to show up at every school event, although he says he is stepping down next year to focus on the school that he has set up. He also sponsors talented athletes to go and study in the United States.

  “But we have many problems,” he says, scowling. “People don’t run. They take the money.” Just a few months before, one of his sponsored athletes in Alaska hung himself. There’s not a lot of light in Komen’s world right now.

  Back at the homecoming ceremony, he sits glowering as the speeches rumble on, the gold tinsel wreath hanging uncomfortably around his neck. After about three hours, Godfrey is called up to speak. He talks in English, telling the schoolchildren that education is important. That they should work hard at their studies.

  Marietta has taken our three children off behind the marquee to play, but a line has formed of people who want to be photographed with them. It’s getting late, so we decide to make a break for it. We bundle out as the town’s mayor takes up the microphone. Heads follow us as we make our way back to the
car. Godfrey, shaking hands with everyone, is dragged on by Lila. A man from a local radio station comes over, wanting to interview me, asking me to talk into his tape recorder as I climb into the car, reversing as someone leans in through the window, alcohol on his breath, telling me he is a great runner.

  And then we’re off, following the road back along the edge of the escarpment, past round mud huts, flickering wooden fences, bicycles, people walking, the sloping green fields full of the late afternoon, children laughing and chasing each other. And all the while, to one side, the great open space of the Rift Valley falling away below us.

  * From 1993 until 2000, Gebrselassie won every major 10,000 meters gold medal, including two Olympic games, while during his career he broke an astounding twenty-four world records.

  Nine

  Kenyan runners at rest

  When I can’t find anyone to run with, I put on my racing flats and head out on my own. Although I prefer running in a group, here in Kenya sometimes it is a relief to run alone. At my own pace, I can simply enjoy the trails, the countryside, the sense of motion, the earth trundling by under my feet, without having to feel slow and hopeless at the back of the pack, always bursting my lungs to keep up, just waiting to see how long I can survive until I’m cast aside.

  On one of these solo runs I strain a toe landing on a stone. I get it massaged by one of Iten’s many massage therapists and it’s fine a few days later. But the injury makes me question the wisdom of doing all my running in “barefoot” shoes. Lee Saxby, the barefoot expert in London, had told me that Kenyans ran in this kind of shoe, but it clearly isn’t the case. Kenyan runners race in low-support shoes, but they mostly train in big, chunky, cushioned sneakers, just like your average, plodding Western jogger. Oddly, though, and contrary to Lee’s theories, these big shoes don’t force the Kenyans to run heel first. They virtually all run in a lovely, smooth forefoot-first style—what Lee would term “barefoot style.” The shoes, it seems, make no difference.