Running with the Kenyans Read online

  “It’s okay,” says Japhet. “Today is easy.”

  Henry nods. “Easy,” he says.

  A few runners jog past us out of the blackness, calling out in Kalenjin to Japhet and Henry. Roosters, somehow spotting the imperceptible paling in the eastern sky, call out among the scattering of tin roofs. About sixty people have gathered for the run, stretching their long arms in the air, shaking hands, or standing huddled in silence. Someone starts speaking to the group, explaining the route. Japhet nudges me. “Kipsang,” he says, nodding toward the man talking. A few people ask questions. I’m sticking to Japhet like glue. Despite his small stature and tatty clothes, he’s bubbly and friendly with everyone, even making a joke about the route that gets a few chuckles from the other runners. I remind him that I’m slow, and not to forget about me amid the banter, but he says it’s okay and that he is happy to run as slow as I want.

  It’s still dark as we take off. “Pole, pole,” (Slowly, slowly) says Kipsang, as we begin running up the main road into town. At St. Patrick’s school we turn right, down a side track. The first seepage of light is beginning to pick out the silhouettes of trees. As I run along beside Japhet in the midst of the group, something strange happens. I don’t get left behind. Even as the pace begins to increase, my breath remains steady—strong almost.

  Occasionally a car coming the other way forces everyone to slow down and bunch together, and I get to catch up any lost yards and gather myself. And then we’re off again. For the first forty minutes I’m motoring along amid the scattering of feet and swishing of tracksuits, feeling fine. Eventually, as the charge to the finish begins to gather pace, I start to lose ground. Japhet, good to his word, sticks with me, and we run the rest of the route within sight of the main group. At the end, as we’re stretching by the side of the road, Japhet’s friend Henry comes dawdling up the track. He’s dripping in sweat as he stops next to us.

  “You’re fast,” he says, clearly out of breath. I look around to see who he’s talking to, before I realize it’s me.

  Ten

  Barefoot children after a race at Salaba Academy

  Foolishly buoyed by my run with Japhet and the End of the Road group, two days later I find myself standing on the start line of a local cross-country race. It’s a hot but windy day in Eldoret. We’ve all woken up early so that Lila and Uma can run in the children’s race. Memories of the fun run at the Great West Run back in England have prompted their enthusiasm. That day Uma refused to run, and Granny Bee had to carry her around the two-mile loop. But today’s race is less than a mile, and she’s now five—she was only three and a half then.

  They get dressed in their best racing outfits—shorts, sneakers, and Hello Kitty T-shirts—and we talk tactics in the car on the way to the course. As we enter the gates to the Eldoret Sports Club it’s still only 8:30 A.M., but the place is heaving with excitement, people in race numbers and bare feet darting around everywhere. Heads turn to look at us as we enter, children giggling and passing comments behind cupped hands. A man at a desk sees us and ushers us over. Lila, though, has changed her mind. She doesn’t want to run. Uma, in a blur of bodies and early-morning chaos, lets me register her. The race is about to start, we’re told, so I guide Uma through the crowd—a parting sea of staring eyes—and out onto the course. The sun is getting hotter. Announcements are blaring out over the PA. There are children zipping around everywhere. Skinny, bony children, light on their feet. Uma is one of the youngest. She looks confused.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “Look, that girl is smaller than you.” A little girl watches us from the side with unblinking eyes. She has a race number on her chest, but doesn’t appear to be heading to the start. “If you don’t want to run, you don’t have to,” I say. Uma looks at me and leaps up into my arms, burying her head in my neck. It’s an intimidating atmosphere for two little English girls just turned seven and five. I sympathize completely. In three hours’ time, it will be my turn.

  Instead of racing, we take the girls and Ossian to sit in the small stand by the clubhouse. Inside, we find Godfrey with some friends. He is in his element, chatting with former runners, reminiscing about old times. He introduces me to a man in a smart, brown jacket and sunglasses who won the silver medal in the marathon at the 2001 world championships, finishing just one second behind the winner.

  “I was that close,” he says, holding up his thumb and forefinger.

  Also sitting in the stands is the Chinese national team. They’re here to watch and learn, their coach tells me. This is no ordinary local cross-country race. The whole thing is sponsored by Nike and is used as a way to unearth emerging talent. As the event organizer, the legendary manager Doctor Rosa gets to pick a few of the most promising young athletes to invite to train at his camp.

  As stewards hand out water to everyone in the stands, two announcers tag-team on the PA. They say everything twice, in Swahili and English, and take turns talking, so there’s no letup in the noise booming from the speakers that have been set up just in front of the stand. Meanwhile, the races are trundling by. Every now and then a crowd of barefoot children flies past. Interestingly, in each race there are a few children wearing running shoes, but they all invariably finish near the back of the field, particularly in the younger age groups.

  A week later I find myself watching a race at Chris Cheboiboch’s school, Salaba Academy. Again the same pattern is evident: The children wearing shoes are all at the back of the field. I seem to be the only one noticing it. Whenever I point it out to people, they smile and say, “Oh, yes, how funny,” as though it’s a quirky coincidence. They don’t seem to make the connection, that running barefoot could actually be a key part of the Kenyan secret. But the evidence is mounting. At one training camp in Iten, a top marathon runner tells me that when he was at school, his parents had a bit of money so they bought him some running shoes. But the children without shoes kept beating him, so he took his off and started winning races.

  Ironically, the prize for the winners at Chris’s school race is a pair of running shoes. It’s as if the organizers not only don’t appreciate the benefits of barefoot running, but see it as some kind of disadvantage. It seems ridiculous to be giving the fastest runner in each race something to help him run which, on the face of the evidence in front of us, will only slow him down. In one race, the farther back in the field the girls finish, the better their shoes, to the absurd extent that the girl with the newest, sleekest running shoes of all comes in last, while the girl whose shoes are only slightly worse finishes second to last. Each time, the runners without shoes seem light and graceful, while those wearing sneakers seem to be plodding, burdened by heavy weights tied to their feet.

  At the cross-country race in Iten a few weeks before, the junior girls winner, Faith Kipyegon, tried on a pair of running spikes for the first time.

  “They felt uncomfortable,” she said. “Even though they were very elegant, they felt very heavy to run in.” So she stuck to what she knew best, her bare feet, and she won. A few months later she would go on to win the world cross-country championships, also barefoot. To Faith, used to running barefoot, even running spikes, the lightest shoes imaginable, seemed heavy.

  Despite the recent boom in barefoot running in the West, it is not a new idea. In 1962, a young Briton named Bruce Tulloh won the European 5,000 meters title running without shoes. (Tulloh would later train the Kenyan national team in the run-up to the 1972 Olympics.) I met him just before leaving for Kenya and asked him why he chose to run barefoot. “I ran a lot on grass tracks in those days and it was just much easier in bare feet. I could adapt more quickly to changes in the uneven surface. Also, when I ran barefoot, I had a shorter stride and a faster leg turnover.” Tulloh agreed to be a guinea pig for Dr. Griffiths Pugh, a leading exercise physiologist of the time. “He managed to plot a straight-line relationship between the weight of the shoe and the energy cost of running,” said Tulloh.

  Few men have looked as closely at the phenomenon of Ken
yan running as sports scientist Dr. Yannis Pitsiladis, from the University of Glasgow in Scotland, who has spent the last ten years trying to work out what it is that makes East African runners so good. Across many trips to Kenya and Ethiopia he has become close friends with many of the athletes, and is now a visiting professor at both Moi University in Eldoret and Addis Ababa University. He was recently asked by the great Ethiopian runner and marathon world record holder Haile Gebrselassie* to give a seminar on how to get a human to run under two hours for the marathon.

  Dr. Pitsiladis went through a whole predictive lecture on what would be required, and one thing he thought would help would be if someone such as Haile, who had not run with shoes until he was in his late teens, didn’t move to shoes but remained barefoot. But even Haile, the doctor says, couldn’t run a marathon barefoot if he wanted to now because his feet had become used to running in shoes. Yet Dr. Pitsiladis is confident that if he put Haile on a treadmill without his shoes on and measured his oxygen uptake, based on his previous studies, Haile would be at least 5 percent more economical than with his shoes on.

  But surely someone running a marathon barefoot on concrete roads would be risking injury? “These kids we study in Kenya,” Dr. Pitsiladis retorts, “the soles of their feet are as strong as any shoes. They can walk on glass and it doesn’t hurt.” As well as landing more lightly, Dr. Pitsiladis says that running barefoot gives you stronger feet, which allows you to train harder with less chance of getting injured.

  But if running barefoot is such a clear advantage, why do all the adult athletes in Kenya run in sneakers? It’s an interesting conundrum. Abebe Bikila, from Ethiopia, broke the world record on his way to winning the 1960 Olympic marathon, running barefoot through the streets of Rome. But in Tokyo four years later, he won the gold medal and broke the world record again, this time wearing shoes. So was he better off with shoes or without them?

  The biggest advantage of running barefoot is that it forces you to adopt a better running style. Without shoes on, all the senses in your feet are suddenly activated, and your inbuilt running software, developed over millions of years, is switched on. You instinctively start to control your impact on the ground, landing lightly on your feet. You quickly learn that the energy you put into the ground, as your foot lands, will return and propel you on. I’ve seen it happen, to me. It really works. The problem for those of us not used to it, is that our feet are soft, our arches are flat, and the muscles we need to run like this, both in our feet and in our calves, are out of shape. If we try it, we’re likely to end up with sore feet and calves after even a short run.

  So we have to start slowly. Barefoot shoes can help protect the soles of our feet from abrasions, but we still need to start with short, gentle runs. It takes time, and we get out of shape. But if we stick to it, our muscles will strengthen, and our style will start to change. And as our foot muscles strengthen, our arches will rise. Arches are like springs, and the higher they are, the more spring we have in our step.

  It’s interesting to note, in trying to determine how much of a factor all this can be, that Kenya’s dominance is greater in one particular event than any other: the steeplechase. This is a 3,000 meters track race where the runners have to hurdle five 91-centimeter (35.8-inch) barriers on each lap, including one with a pool of water on the other side. To be good at this event you clearly need to have good springs in your feet, probably more so than in any other event. Yet despite the fact that there are virtually no facilities to practice steeplechase in Kenya and very little steeplechase-specific coaching, Kenyans have won every single men’s steeplechase Olympic gold medal since 1968 (except for the two that Kenya boycotted, in 1976 and 1980).

  Once you have bounce and good running form, you do not lose them the minute you put on conventional running shoes. So the Kenyans may wear shoes, but they’re still running in what would be called a “barefoot style.” Essentially, the key advantages of barefoot running are retained.

  Lee Saxby said that the Kenyans wore shoes so they didn’t hurt themselves landing on sharp stones. The roads in Kenya are made of dirt, but every now and then you land on a stone half-buried in the ground and it can really hurt—my two sprained toe injuries testify to that (and I was wearing shoes). But that’s not a reason to ditch the shoes completely. You could still do what people like Bruce Tulloh did and run barefoot in races and when the conditions underfoot were conducive to it, such as in track races and on grassy cross-country courses. But it is rare to see a top Kenyan runner racing anywhere without shoes. Tulloh tells me that during his time in Kenya he sometimes ran races in bare feet. “I was the only one,” he says. “They all just thought I was a crazy mzungu.”

  One reason the adult runners give for wearing big shoes is to make their training harder. One runner tells me they always look for the biggest, heaviest shoes they can find. “Then, when you put on your racing flats, you feel so light,” he says, as though it’s a magic trick.

  But why even wear racing flats? According to Nicholas Leong, a cycling coach based in Iten, the real reason is cultural. “Kenyans have too much respect for Europeans,” he says. “They don’t have enough confidence in their culture to say, ‘You know, I’ve grown up running barefoot, I’ve been winning races, I’ll keep running barefoot.’ ”

  Nicholas is from Singapore. As a sports fan, he remembers watching as gradually more and more black athletes began to flourish in sport after sport. “I remember the first black footballers in England,” he says. “Then you had the dominance of the African runners. Then the Williams sisters in tennis, and even Tiger Woods in golf.” But Nicholas was a cycling nut. “It never happened in cycling,” he says. “To this day, there has never been a single black rider in the Tour de France.† I thought to myself, if no one is doing anything about this, then I will.” He decided the best place to start would be Kenya. If they were so good at running, he thought, then perhaps they would be good at cycling, too.

  Nicholas hatched a mad plan to find the Kenyan runners. He booked himself a flight to Nairobi on the same night as the Singapore Marathon, figuring that some top Kenyan runners would be on the plane. Sure enough, as he waited to board, he saw a group of Africans in running clothes milling around. He went over and asked them if they’d just run the marathon. They had. “Who won?” he asked. One of the men grinned as the others pointed him out.

  “Where do you live?” Nicholas asked the man, who said he lived in Eldoret. “Do you mind if I come home with you?”

  He eventually ended up in Iten, where he started a cycling team. To recruit his cyclists he tried some unusual tactics. One was to place a sign at the bottom of the Kerio Valley offering a prize of 200,000 Kenyan shillings (about three times the average annual income) to anyone who could cycle more than fifteen miles up the road to Iten, a 4,000-foot ascent, in under 1 hour 8 minutes. Only one man ever achieved it, riding a heavy, fixed gear bicycle, but Nicholas signed up anyone who came close, giving them a good monthly salary, board, and lodging while they followed his training program.

  “In the past, people have looked at African cycling and said, The big problem is that they don’t have the right bikes.” Nicholas has the harassed look of a prospector, as though he’s in a race to find the golden formula that will produce Kenyan cyclists on a par with Kenyan runners. “There are so few things from Africa that generate such genuine awe, fear, unreserved respect, like a Kenyan runner on the start line of a marathon,” he says. “It is such an achievement. We need to tap into that.”

  But instead of tapping into it, of empowering them, giving them brand-new bikes makes them helpless, he says. “Here we have guys straight from the shamba who can hit 5.8 watts per kilo. That’s cycling talk, but trust me, that’s good. That’s the same power as a top cyclist. Yet you give them a new bike, and they don’t know what to do with it. They don’t know how to use it, so they feel helpless. You’re imposing a European system on them. You’re saying, right, now you should do what we say. And it simply doesn’
t work.” It’s just like giving them shoes to run in, he says.

  In the short time I’ve been in Kenya, I’ve been frequently taken aback by the levels of respect we’ve been afforded simply because of the color of our skin. At every event we’ve been to we’ve been immediately afforded VIP status and given the best seats. Sitting in the sun in the Run Fast camp that afternoon, one of the athletes told me that Kenyans needed European coaches and managers “because you have more brains than us. We need to learn from you.” At one school I visited, the head teacher started telling the children about all the great things the British had done, and about how the British had brought civilization to Kenya. It’s a view I hear frequently, when I was expecting the opposite, that the British had stolen their lands and destroyed their cultures.

  So when Westerners turn up and see their bare feet and think, Oh, look at the poor kids running around without shoes on, we must do something to help them, the Kenyans, too, begin to believe that running barefoot must be wrong, or inferior. Something to frown upon. Ironically, they see the Western runners wearing shoes and want to emulate them.

  “Have you spoken to Brother Colm yet?” Nicholas asks me.

  “Briefly,” I say, nodding.

  “Has he done his Yoda thing on you?” I’m not sure what his Yoda thing is, but I don’t think so. “When he talks about feeling the earth through your feet?” Nicholas says Brother Colm is the only coach who gets his athletes to train and do drills barefoot. This is a man with no European coaching experience, a man who works principally with youngsters, a man who says he learned all he knows “from watching the athletes.” He is also one of Kenya’s most successful coaches. I make a note to ask him about it the next time I see him.