Running with the Kenyans

by Adharanand Finn

  “When will they come to our school?” the three girls ask, as they sit with Lila and Uma making passion fruit juice on the back step of our house. Between them they have virtually stripped the passion fruit plantation of its bounty, leaving the poor man who cultivated the plants with nothing left to sell at the market. He hasn’t complained, but he has stopped coming so frequently.

  “Would you like to go to school?” I ask my two daughters. They both nod at me, only half sure. Marietta is nervous about them going. We’ve seen classrooms in other schools, with up to one hundred children crammed in, sitting in long rows, learning by rote, repeating their lessons lifelessly. We’ve heard stories of children being beaten for getting low marks on a test, or for being two minutes late for class. We’re not great advocates of school at the best of times. In England our children go to a Waldorf school, where formal learning doesn’t even begin until age seven. “And they’ll be the center of attention all the time,” Marietta says. She’s right, it won’t be easy for them. But it is part of community life here, and they seem to want to go. We decide they can try it for a day.

  So a few days later, at 6:00 A.M., I wake the girls up for school. They packed their bags the night before and even laid out their clothes in anticipation, but as I pull back the curtains, Lila hoists the covers up over her head and says she doesn’t want to go. Uma is already up and bustling around, getting dressed, saying “Come on, Lila, I’m not scared.”

  I promise Lila that I’ll stay with her if she wants me to, and so at 7:30 A.M. we arrive at the gates of Sunrise Academy. Most of the children are already in school. A few latecomers, who can’t be more than three or four years old, scuffle in behind us, staring as they go, their heads corkscrewing around as they pass us.

  The head teacher comes out of his office to greet us. Hilda and Maureen emerge to take Lila and Uma off to their classroom to prepare for assembly. Another student brings over a couple of white plastic chairs for me and Marietta to sit on. Corrugated metal classrooms surround a small, grassy square. From behind the closed doors comes the busy sound of chattering and laughter. Then the doors open and children parade out into the square from every direction. I spot my children, two little blond heads among the melee.

  After the assembly, the children return to their classrooms; windowless sheds, the light streaming in from gaps between the walls and the roof, with pairs of wooden desks arranged in rows. Lila and Uma squeeze into small spaces on the benches between their friends. They seem fine, so we leave them unpacking their pencils and notebooks from their bags.

  I return at lunchtime to see how they’re doing. As I walk into the school, a group of older children is lined up along one side of the small playing field. They all have their arms in the air and are kneeling down in front of their teacher, who has a big, red stick under one arm. In unison, they chant out a chilling refrain: “We will not fail again. We will not fail again.” Over and over again.

  I walk past them and into the courtyard, where the head teacher, the deputy, and another teacher are sitting on plastic chairs in the sun. They have the slow, unhurried aspect of people who have been there a long time.

  “How are they?” I ask.

  “They’re doing fine,” says the head teacher. “They’ll be out in a moment.”

  Lila is the first one out. She walks over to me looking a little dazed and buries her head in my sweater. Uma, however, is in the swirl of a big gang, trying to ignore me. She’s the youngest in the class by about five years and all the other children are swooning around to look after her. “Dad, I want to stay for lunch,” she says.

  “Okay,” I say, but she’s already gone, carried in the flow of children toward the lunch barn.

  The head teacher smiles happily. “And you, Lila?” he asks.

  But Lila is burrowing deeper. “You want to come home for lunch?” I ask her. I can feel the nod in my side.

  On the way out, we peek into the barn that houses the dining hall. Among the sea of black hair and gray uniforms bustling around sits a little blond girl in a pale blue dress, her face flushed, a fork in one hand, laughing and joking with the other children. We leave her there and head home.

  When we return after lunch, the other children bring Uma out of the classroom. She’s crying and she looks lost. She gives me a big hug as Lila slips back into the dark classroom, finds her desk, and takes out her books. Uma wants to come home. On the way out of the school, she holds my hand like a captive being led to freedom. I can feel the relief in her step, her voice, which gets almost giddy as we head out through the gates.

  I don’t go back to collect Lila until five o’clock. Rather than rush to me, though, she walks straight past with Maureen, Brenda, and Hilda. I end up following her home at a distance, trying not to cramp her style as she walks along holding hands with the others, her bag on her back. The people in Iten stand and watch as she walks by in the midst of the other children, just part of the gang, coming home after a day at school.

  When she gets home, though, she collapses on the sofa, exhausted. Uma hovers around her, intrigued to find out what the rest of the day was like. But Lila looks shell-shocked and just stares straight ahead, not speaking. I get the feeling she will remember this day for many years to come.

  Later that night as they sit in bed, I ask them if they’d like to go back to school.

  “Yes,” they both say, but they don’t sound sure.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Maybe not tomorrow,” they say.

  A few days later, Chris’s car is rolling back through my gates, this time with a woman athlete. She is in her early twenties and has just run a local half marathon in seventy-six minutes, which is pretty fast for a race at altitude. She looks familiar as she gets out of the car. Her name is Beatrice. I ran with her on the track one day with the Run Fast camp. I seem to remember being able to keep up with her, which suggests she’s not as fast as she says. Chris has her half-marathon time written down on a scrap of paper, as though that’s proof that she did it. But Beatrice has a winning smile, and is soon playing with the children on the grass and chatting to Marietta, already part of the team.

  She tells us she has been running for only two years, and has never done a marathon before. She says she knows that the Lewa race is tough, but she’s confident she can do well.

  “Are you a runner, too?” she asks Marietta as we all sit down at the table.

  “No,” says Marietta, holding up her hands, making it clear she won’t be joining the running craze anytime soon. “I just like to watch.”

  “You look like a runner. You should try,” Beatrice insists. “You are slim. I think you would be good.”

  Unlike most athletes, Beatrice didn’t run at school. She says she didn’t like running. After she finished primary school, at fifteen, she lived at home for the next five years, helping her mother. “I was big,” she tells me one day, as we sit facing the gas stove in her tiny house. “This big,” she says, holding her hands out wide. Bored of sitting at home with her mother, she decided to follow her brothers who had moved to Iten to become an athlete. She found a small room behind a noisy café. To get there you have to walk in through the café and out into the backyard. As well as a few wooden huts, there is also a shed with a screen where the café shows English football matches and big running races.

  One evening I sit there in the dark, squashed on one of the long wooden benches between Japhet and Beatrice, watching the Boston Marathon. Less than a month before he is found dead, Sammy Wanjiru is sitting on one of the benches in front of us, going wild along with everyone else as the Kenyan Geoffrey Mutai wins in 2:03:02, the fastest marathon time ever run.

  When she moved to Iten, Beatrice started running at 5:00 A.M., when it was still dark, so that people wouldn’t see her. Slowly the weight started to drop off. Now, two years later, she’s a 76-minute half-marathon runner (at least, that’s what she says). She’s still quite big compared to the typical Kenyan runner, but extremely slight by the u
sual parameters.

  Despite Beatrice’s initial lack of promise, her mother agreed to fund her running, giving her what little money she could to cover the cost of her rent (about six dollars a month), fuel, and food. There aren’t many countries in the world where you can tell your poverty-stricken family that you want to leave to become an athlete, spending most of your days resting and sleeping, and they will reply, Great, let us give you the tiny amount we have to help you. But like their children, the parents in Kenya are aware of the bounty that running can bring.

  Many people in Kenya, however, mistakenly assume that all athletes are wealthy. One moderately successful runner told me that when he runs, children shout out to him, “Buy me a car!”

  “Who has told them that just because I’m a runner, I’m rich?” he asks. “Where do they get that idea from?” Yet it’s an assumption that drives many poor men and women toward running. Training is regarded not as some frivolous way to spend your time but as serious work, even by those struggling to put food on the table. All around the Rift Valley there are role models proving that running can bring you your fortune. Virtually every village has its running star, someone who has packed a bag and gone off to win world titles or big road races abroad, returning rich (at least by Kenyan standards), driving a big 4×4 Land Cruiser, building a brick house, and buying a cow, and some land to plant maize.

  As Bruce Tulloh pointed out to me, the great growth in Kenyan running coincided with the rise in financial rewards. While running was still an amateur sport, Kenya produced a few great athletes who had come through the military system, or via track scholarships with American universities. But once professionalism took off in the mid-1980s, with prize money and appearance money being offered to the fastest athletes, Kenyan runners really started to dominate.

  Recently, Kenya’s success on the world’s road-racing circuit, where most of the money now is, has far outstripped its performances on the track. At virtually every big city marathon or half marathon, from Brussels to Bogotá to Boston, the winner is almost always a Kenyan. However, over the last two world athletics championships, Kenyan men have won only one bronze medal in the 5,000 meters and 10,000 meters events.

  Of course, a desire to escape poverty is not unique to Kenya or East Africa. And all over the world people are running barefoot to school. The difference is that here in Kenya there is an established running culture ready to take advantage of it. The origins of this culture are hazy, built on the folklore of Kipchoge Keino, who won gold medals in the 1968 and 1972 Olympics, and developed through the running camps set up by Brother Colm and others. As Yannis Pitsiladis puts it: “How many athletes training camps are there in India or Bolivia?”

  Now that running is firmly established as the way out, as football is in Brazil or cricket is in India, all over the Rift Valley people like Beatrice and Japhet are taking it up in the thousands, and the result is that Kenya is now dominating long-distance running even more than ever.

  Fifteen

  Mary Keitany and her husband, Charles

  Iten wasn’t always the home of Kenya’s conveyor belt of running talent. When Kenyans first started to raise eyebrows with their running exploits, it was mainly the runners from the Nandi Hills, farther south, who dominated.

  “When I came here in 1976,” says Brother Colm, “there were no runners in Iten.” I’m sitting in his dimly lit living room, sunk back into an old armchair. In one corner is a small TV with piles of videos stacked up in the sideboard underneath. Godfrey tells me that Brother Colm records every race that gets shown on television. The room is sparsely furnished, with a clock and a picture of a saint on the wall, alongside a free tractor calendar. He doesn’t offer me any tea. A packet of ginger nut cookies on the table remains unopened.

  It was the influence of Brother Colm and his St. Patrick’s boys’ school, and to a lesser extent Signore girls’ school just outside of Iten, that were to turn the town into the running center it is today. With the repeated success of their teams in national and international competitions, Iten began to build a reputation as the place to train. “St. Patrick’s and Signore were the beacons that made Iten the running center,” says Brother Colm, as he walks me back out to the school gate. He has his cap pulled down low over his eyes and walks, where he can, in the shade. “We put Kericho [the Iten region] at the center of the map. Now everything emanates from Kericho.”

  As we stand at the gate, a car pulls up and a man gets out and starts shaking Brother Colm’s hand. “Henry, how are you?” says Brother Colm. He looks at me. “Henry was one of my students. He’s now a university lecturer.”

  Henry turns to shake my hand. “We are all his products,” he says, pointing at Brother Colm, clearly delighted to have bumped into him again.

  Iten’s influence is celebrated each year at its annual sports and tourism day. “Iten is the factory of Kenyan running,” the day’s organizer tells me as we stand in the sports field at the center of town. “So we thought we should have a factory day.” The festivities begin, aptly, with a race. Starting down in the hot, cactus-pimpled belly of the valley, the route winds its way thirteen miles up to the cool freshness of Iten. A half marathon, uphill all the way. I’m hurrying the children to get dressed. The race is supposed to start at 8:30 A.M., and I’ve just received word that not only is it starting on time, but it is starting only half a mile down the road, so the runners will be passing through the town in about five minutes. Uma says she doesn’t want to come; I’m sensing her passion for running is wearing thin. Lila seems happy to tag along, though, so we leave Uma with Flora and hurry down into town, Marietta strapping Ossian on her back as we go.

  There are very few spectators around, but we spy a couple of the men from the Run Fast camp standing by the side of the road. Before we’ve had time to shake everyone’s hand, the runners are in sight and pushing up the hill. Somewhere among the heaving bodies is Japhet, gamely throwing his hat into the ring. The prize money on offer, organized by the local council, is fairly small, which keeps most of the top runners from competing. For someone like Japhet, this is ideal, as it gives him a better chance of winning something. Even if he comes in sixth he will win 8,000 Kenyan shillings, which for most people here would be a decent month’s salary. We clap as the runners surge by. And then they’re gone.

  “They’ll be back in an hour,” I say, wondering what we should do until then. We decide to amble up the street to see if anything is happening by the finish. As we set off, a 1970s school bus, with ST. PATRICK’S HIGH SCHOOL printed on the side, pulls up beside us. I get out my camera to take a photo. As I do, a man comes over and asks if we’d like to ride in the bus. A large group of women in tracksuits is starting to board it.

  “Okay,” I say. “Where is it going?”

  “To the start of the women’s race,” he says. It turns out the courses have been altered at the last minute because the council couldn’t find enough buses to take all the athletes down to the bottom of the valley. So this St. Patrick’s bus is taking the women six miles down the flatter road toward Eldoret. From there they’ll run straight back to Iten.

  I’m not sure how the athletes are supposed to prepare for these races when things like start times, courses, and race distances are decided at the last minute and news is spread purely by word of mouth. Somehow, though, they always seem to know what is happening.

  Lila’s thrilled to be on a bus. “Is this a school bus?” she asks me as we sit down. “It’s like an airplane.”

  A runner named Rose sits down next to Marietta and Ossian, who is peeking blearily out of his sling. She tells Marietta she has four children but her husband has left her. She can’t afford to send her two daughters to school, she says.

  “Where are they now?” asks Marietta.

  “At home,” she says.

  “But who’s looking after them?”

  “They’re alone,” Rose says, looking out of the window. They’re six and four.

  Rose has come to Iten in th
e hope of becoming an athlete, but she has been injured for seven months, so she has been working as a housemaid for Nicholas, the cycling coach from Singapore.

  After about ten minutes, the bus pulls off the road. An army officer with a stick under his arm is standing by the roadside, peering out from under the brim of his hat. The women rush to get changed into their running clothes and then hop off the bus and run over to the start line. A skinny man in a tracksuit is yelling instructions and waving his arms around. It’s Chris Cheboiboch. He spots me.

  “Hey, man. Want a ride?” he asks, walking over to his car and opening the door.

  “Okay,” I say. I don’t know how else we’re going to get back to Iten. I look at Marietta, who nods and climbs into the rear seat with Ossian. Lila looks slightly confused as I bundle her straight from the bus into a car, but the race has already started and we’re speeding off ahead of the runners. Chris’s job, it seems, is to warn oncoming traffic about the race. He does this by driving headlong at top speed toward anything coming in the opposite direction. Once the oncoming vehicle is forced off the road, he stops briefly beside it and fires off a ream of instructions about being careful of the runners. It’s a hellfire ride back into town.

  The race finishes in the field in the center of Iten. Chris arrives just in time to leap out of the car and get someone to hold up a finishing tape before the leading man comes sprinting across the field. Chris seems to have organized the race single-handedly. He leaps back into his car and skids off, leaving the following runners with no obvious finish line. They have to keep running, charging past the people trying to record their times and hand them bottles of water. Someone eventually realizes what’s going on and puts a bit of tape down on the ground as a makeshift finish.