Running with the Kenyans

by Adharanand Finn

  Seventeen

  Japhet with his father and niece

  There’s a metal pole in the ground outside the post office in Iten that all the athletes use as the starting point for their long runs. We line up beside it, gazing up the road into the dawn sky. Two figures appear over the horizon, running toward us. Marietta and the children, looking sleepy, are sitting in the cab of the truck as we prepare to set off on our second Lewa team run. Our two newest recruits, Philip and Beatrice, are also joining us this time. Godfrey tells us that we need to start faster than before. “But no pushing, Chris,” he says. “Just maintain.” Chris smirks like a naughty schoolboy not taking his lessons seriously. Godfrey and Chris are good friends, although both think they are the senior partner in their relationship, which means that Chris doesn’t like taking advice from Godfrey.

  Chris starts off at the front, as if to make his point, but he’s not pushing too hard. After a steady few miles, we turn off the road, following the same route as before, and drop down into the fields. Beatrice, however, is already dropping off the pace. I look behind. She has a short, heavy stride, her arms held up high across her chest. Japhet drops back to check if she’s okay as the rest of us push on.

  I’m determined to make it to twelve miles this time, so as the pace starts ratcheting up, around the seven-mile mark, I let them go. Marietta watches me from the back of the truck, concerned. “Are you okay?” she asks as I drift farther back.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Tell Godfrey he doesn’t have to wait.” She takes a few more pictures as the truck speeds away, chasing after the others in the main group. I’m actually feeling strong, keeping my form, lifting my legs, relaxing my shoulders. I pass the nine-mile mark three minutes quicker than the last run, in 1 hour 3 minutes, and then push on. The last stretch up to the twelve-mile mark is all uphill. By the time I get there, my legs have gone. All I can manage are short, pathetic steps that edge me slowly along, past groups of watching children, calling one another across the fields to come, quick, to see the mzungu running past. They sprint like excited puppies across the ploughed earth to see the strange sight. “Fine, fine,” I manage to gasp in response to the singing chorus of “How are you?” that follows me the whole way up.

  At the top, Chris is already sitting beside Uma in the back of the truck. This time he doesn’t give an excuse for why he has stopped. I put on my jacket and take a water bottle. About five minutes later, an exhausted-looking Beatrice looms into view, her 76-minute half marathon looking more questionable than ever. “You okay?” we all ask, as she puts on her tracksuit top.

  She breaks into her big smile, happy to have stopped. “Yes,” she says, seemingly unperturbed by how far behind she was. “That was good. Very good.”

  We all hop in the truck and tear off after the others. Godfrey is supposed to give them water and time splits at each five-kilometer point, but we’ve become so spread out that he can’t catch up with them until almost the thirty-kilometer mark. Josphat is the first we catch up to. Then Philip. Finally we catch up with Japhet and Shadrack. They’re sprinting now, flying along the lane. Godfrey hands drinks to them as he drives, which they collect calmly, without breaking stride, drink, and then hand back. “Only one kilometer to go,” says Godfrey, driving along beside them. “Push now, push, the last kilometer.” They race each other up the last hill, Shadrack still wearing his running jacket, drenched in sweat, and little Japhet’s matchstick legs, amazingly, keeping up stride for stride.

  “Welcome to my home,” says Japhet, as I step in from the steady rain that has settled over Iten today, through a wooden door, and into a darkened room. Along the back wall is a bed, with clothes hanging from a string stretched above it. Sheets hung from the ceiling divide the room into sections. “Sometimes my uncle stays here,” Japhet says, pointing to a covered area at the back. A small kitchen section with a camping stove, a few pots, pans, and two thermos flasks for tea, lines another wall. The whole place is about half the size of my bedroom back home.

  Newspaper has been stuck all over the walls. Japhet has pinned athletics reports over the top here and there, and he points them out to me, recalling them fondly as though they were describing his own exploits. He has the customary agricultural calendar, and a few medals hanging from the cardboard ceiling. Behind the door is a huge container of water, which he uses for cooking and washing. When the tap in the yard outside works, he refills it from that. Otherwise he walks down to the river, or collects rainwater. “Sometimes if I hear the rain at night, I get up and put my can under there,” he says, pointing to the roof gutter.

  I sit on the only chair and he sits on the bed. From a folder he carefully slides out his application form for college. He never sent it off because he couldn’t afford the fees. The form is kept, though, as testament to his ambition. It’s even on his résumé, which he pulls out and shows me. Under “Talents And Achievements” it says, handwritten in blue pen, “Form filled in for Moi University.”

  He pours me a cup of millet porridge from one of the flasks. It’s sweet and warm, bringing comfort from the rain outside. Japhet gets the little money he has for food and rent from his uncle, who works at the gas station in Iten. I ask him about his father. Does he help, too?

  “My father is very old,” Japhet says, smiling, perhaps surprised that I want to know, or perhaps because he hasn’t thought about his father for a while. The memory makes him chuckle. “He married six times,” he tells me. “He wanted to have children, but his first five wives didn’t produce.” Japhet’s mother, though, wife number six, started to go mad when Japhet was very young. “She killed my brother,” he says.

  He refills my cup. The afternoon is quiet. People are in their houses waiting for the rain to stop.

  “How did she kill him?”

  “She lay on him. She used to burn houses, and attack my father. One morning we found my father bloodied on the floor. He was once a powerful man in the community, with many cattle, but he had to sell many things to pay for my mother’s treatment.”

  Once, when Japhet was just a baby, the neighbors caught his mother trying to drown him in the river. So they put her in a psychiatric hospital in Nairobi. She was there for seven years, receiving treatment. Eventually she was allowed to go home. The doctors gave the family handcuffs to restrain her with when she turned violent.

  “One day she tied a bull up in the house and killed it with a machete.”

  Driving or walking through the picturesque valley slope where Japhet was brought up, it’s hard to imagine such madness lying underneath the peaceful surface; lush, green hillocks, fluffy white clouds drifting through a blue sky, the air soft and warm. Chris took us there one time to meet Japhet’s family. He sat in his car while we ran down the track to a small, peaceful compound with a round thatched hut in the middle.

  An old man was laying asleep on the grass. When he heard us, he leaped up as though he had seen a ghost. “Who are these people you’ve brought?” he asked Japhet in Kalenjin, panicked, looking around as if he was trying to remember where he was. The only other people living there, in another small mud hut along one edge of the compound, were Japhet’s sister-in-law and her baby. She came over to greet us, shy, but strikingly beautiful. A radio fuzzed away, hanging from a nail in the outside wall of her hut. Josphat, who was also with us, told us we had to go. Chris was waiting, he said. So we left them there, standing in the green fields, wondering what had just happened.

  In 1999, either from her madness or from the drugs she had to take, Japhet’s mother died. Japhet was twelve years old. It was then that he started running. “I still have the school record for the five thousand and three thousand meters,” he tells me, pouring the last of the millet porridge into my cup. One summer, Chris convinced Brother Colm to take Japhet in one of his training camps. “I still do the exercises I learned,” he says.

  Even though he couldn’t afford to pay the school fees, the head teacher at his school let him stay because he was running well. “Som
etimes he sent me home, but then he called me back when the races were on.” At race meetings, he tried to find a coach, but he says they didn’t help him. He had no phone and lived in a remote area, so communication was a problem.

  When he was twenty-one, he decided to move to Iten to become an athlete. “First I ran by myself to get into good shape,” he says. “I was seeing the athletes, how they behave. I tried joining a few groups, but the End of the Road group was the best. They were talking, explaining the routes, bringing a vehicle for long runs. Kipsang was there.”

  The rain has stopped. A small boy in a fleecy snowsuit comes in, sees me, screams, and runs off. Japhet seems keen to tell me something else before we’re interrupted. “Cheboiboch said he would help me. But he left me,” he says. The boy pokes his head back around the door, a woolly hat under his hood, snot running from his nose. When I turn to look at him, he yelps and runs off again.

  “Now I am learning how to run,” Japhet says. “Before, I used to go home too much to help my father on the shamba, with the cows. But I was wasting time. I keep correcting my mistakes. I saw Kipsang going to Paris and thought I could do that. Now I don’t go home so much, I just focus. I see others going home, not serious.”

  I imagine what it would mean for Japhet to win something at Lewa. It would justify all these years of perseverance. All those thousands of miles run in the belief that one day they will pay off. His dedication in the face of such odds is humbling. Perhaps Lewa will be his crowning moment. He has been outrunning some good athletes on our training runs. Godfrey has given him some new shoes. “Hopefully you will do well at Lewa,” I say. “There are prizes for the top five, remember.”

  “I will do it,” he says, that big grin of his lighting up his face. “I will do it.”

  Eighteen

  Emmanuel Mutai cleaning his running shoes

  The One 4 One camp is just a single grass courtyard surrounded by rows of small dormitories. A water tower stands high in the middle, offering some shade. In one corner are some sheds with the words TOILET and SHOWER painted over the doors. It is one of the top training camps in the country, housing some of the very best Kenyan athletes.

  Godfrey and I arrive around midday, when the runners are all resting. We walk in and sit down on the grass. Godfrey knows the coach, and a few of the athletes come over to sit and chat with us. I ask one of the more talkative runners what his specialty race is.

  “Marathon,” he says.

  “This is Emmanuel Mutai,” says Godfrey. “Second in New York last year, and second in London.” He also came second in the world championships.

  Chewing on a piece of grass and watching me closely, his long legs folded up under him like a praying mantis, is a young man called Nixon Chepseba. Although he is only twenty-one and hasn’t raced much outside Kenya, the coach is full of praise for him, telling me that he has recently broken the 1,500 meters record at the local track by three seconds. In most places in the world, breaking a local track record is a relatively minor achievement, but considering the roll call of athletes who have raced in the Kipchoge Keino stadium in Eldoret, it is worth noting. “He was reading a book on the last lap, he was so easy,” eulogizes the coach.

  The athletes invite me to spend a few days training with them, and so a few weeks later, here I am, driving my car back down the bumpy track to the camp, just off the main road between Eldoret and the town of Kaptagat. I drive past a tiny makeshift house built from sticks and plastic, stopping in front of two innocuous metal gates. Who would guess that behind this badly bricked wall live some of the greatest runners on Earth? I’m a little nervous as I get out and push open the gate.

  At first no one moves to help me. They all stop in mid-conversation, sitting and watching. Then a few of them, realizing who I am, or what I’m doing, come over to hold the gate open for me while I drive my little Corolla through and park it up beside a glistening Land Cruiser.

  Some of the athletes are laying on old mattresses and chatting on the grass. I spot Emmanuel Mutai sitting on a stool washing his running shoes in a bucket of water. I go over and sit next to him, hoping he’ll remember me. He nods a hello and carries on scrubbing away at his racing shoes. He has three pairs of them.

  “Do you remember me?” I ask. “I came here a few weeks ago. With Godfrey Kiprotich.” He nods, not looking up. One of the other athletes brings me a cup of tea and a full flask, which he places on the ground by my chair.

  “Thank you.” We shake hands.

  “Thomas,” he says, and goes off to sit in a chair.

  I turn my seat around slightly so I’m facing the courtyard. One athlete is hunched over the newspaper, peering into it like a man who needs glasses. Nixon Chepseba is playing cards at a small table with another athlete. Running clothes are drying from lines around the edge of the courtyard. A dumbbell made from two old paint pots filled with concrete lies on the floor.

  “You feeling ready for London?” I ask Mutai. In a few weeks he’s running the London Marathon again.

  He looks up. “Yes,” he says, then goes back to his scrubbing. He’s not as gregarious as I remember. “Are you running with us in the morning?” he asks suddenly.

  I ask him what they’re doing.

  “Thirty-eight kilometers. We leave at five in the morning.”

  “Yeah, sure. Sounds good.” Sounds terrifying, is what I mean. That’s almost twenty-four miles. I’ve never run more than thirteen miles before. But hopefully they will start slowly, like on the Lewa team runs, and I can bail out when I run out of steam. “Will there be a truck?”

  “Yes,” he says, laying his shoes out on the grass to dry. And then he walks off and disappears into his room.

  For the next few hours I sit listening to the runners chatting away in Kalenjin, the words drifting and bumping around in the still afternoon air, my face slowly burning in the sun. Only one of the athletes in the camp is not a Kalenjin. Daniel Salel is a Masai 10,000 meters runner. When the other athletes talk to him, they speak in Swahili, Kenya’s national language, but once they get chatting among themselves, he’s left sitting, like me, unable to understand anything.

  The afternoon sun is just beginning to weaken when I spot Chepseba and another athlete striding around in their running clothes. “You going for a run?” I ask. “Can I come?”

  “Sure.”

  We walk out through the gate, two of Kenya’s finest athletes and me. We make an odd threesome as we set off slowly toward the forest. They’re both long and sinewy, gliding along through the trees. I feel like a clown stuttering along beside them.

  They have just come back from racing indoors in Europe for the first time. Chepseba ended the season with the fastest 1,500 meters time in the world. Luckily, however, this is just a recovery run and the pace never rises above a slow jog. The forest is quiet. Unlike on the trails around Iten, there are no children calling after me, or running along beside me. Just endless forest, the late-afternoon sunlight dappling the trees, the trails soft under our feet as we run in single file unison.

  At one point we come up behind a man herding his cows. At the sound of our feet, the cows start to run on ahead of us along the narrow pathway, and so we keep going, chasing them as if in a backward version of a Spanish bull run. Eventually we come to a clearing and the cows skip and twirl out of our way, their big horns spinning around dangerously. We’ve run a long way with them, and I wonder how the owner is going to track them down again.

  When we get back to the camp, the day is starting to cool. Chepseba, stripped down to his waist, hands me a bucket. He starts to fill his up from the outside tap. “Is this the shower?” I ask, unsure. He grins at me, nodding, amused at my confusion. We take the buckets into the shower sheds and then use the cold water to splash ourselves, scooping it up with our hands.

  Later I ask the runners why the camp has such basic facilities. The toilets are just holes in a concrete floor. This is typical in Kenya, but these are wealthy men, most of them. The collection of bran
d-new cars parked just inside the gate is proof of that. But the athletes even clean the toilets themselves, a handwritten schedule on the wall in the common room listing when each athlete is expected to carry out his chores.

  “It’s what we’re used to,” says Emmanuel Mutai. It is this way of life that has gotten him to where he is now. To change it would be to risk everything. The athletes know that those who choose to leave the camps to live a more comfortable life often lose their edge. And with so much competition in this one tiny corner of the world, edge is something that is hard to get back once it is lost.

  Soon after darkness falls, the supper is dished out. We all sit in the common room, the fluorescent light glaring along the ceiling, building rubble piled in one corner. The walls are bare except for an article cut out from a newspaper about why carbonated drinks are bad for children. Some twenty athletes are cramped into the room, sitting on white plastic chairs, talking excitedly. Almost everyone is wearing the same puffy, black Adidas overcoat.

  The cook passes a tray with a mound of ugali on it through the window from the adjoining kitchen, then a pot of sukuma wiki, which is basically stewed kale. Pages of an old calendar are used as place mats for the pots. While Chepseba acts as head distributor, slicing the ugali with a bread knife, adding a side helping of stew, and handing out the food, Mutai sets up a laptop computer on a chair beside the television. We’re going to watch a film. Someone turns out the light and quiet descends as we all sit eating with our fingers, watching as Mutai tries to get his DVD showing on the television. Finally it appears to a halfhearted cheer and the film starts.

  It’s about an American teenager and martial arts fan who somehow ends up in China learning Kung Fu from Jackie Chan. At first he is hopeless, way out of his depth and racked with doubts. “Just don’t forget to breathe,” Jackie Chan tells him. It’s good advice. Gradually, with months of dedicated practice out in the woods, waking up at dawn every day to train, he becomes brilliant. Then he returns back to his small town in the Midwest to duff up the bullies who had been giving him a hard time before he left.