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Runner's World, July 2005
Wazungu in the Valley of Champions
What's it like to eat, drink, and race with the fastest men and women on earth? A group of (Western) runners travel to Kenya's famous Rift Valley to find out. Kip Keino bought the drinks, and Lornah Kiplagat even baked a cake.
by: Benjamin Cheever
Ernest Hemingway--having got wind of my literary ambitions--invites me on safari. In a tent high on the Serengeti Plain the great man sits me at a folding table and suggests I rap out a paragraph on his Underwood. "As fast as you can type, and then read it aloud." Pouring us each a glass of whiskey from a flask, Papa begins to move his arms and sway to the music of my prose. "Guts," he says, "Grace under pressure. You've got the cojones."
If this sounds wildly implausible, then you understand how difficult it is to explain the warmth and enthusiasm with which the Runner's World tour was welcomed to Kenya in February. With the help of Micato Safaris, RW's Kenya expert, John Manners, brought 13 dazzled Wazungu (Westerners) into the presence of the fastest men and women on Earth. In 11 days, Manners introduced the group to almost 40 international athletes. They ran with us, discussed their understanding of the sport, invited us into their homes. Stuffing their guests with goat stew and ugali (cornmeal boiled and stirred until it's solid), the superstars treated their fans like...well, they treated us like superstars.
Our tour started out of Nairobi. Back home, I navigate the rutless asphalt of Pleasantville, New York, in an all-wheel-drive Lexus. We hit Kenya's fearsome roads in Micato's two-wheel-drive Nissan vans. Government-mandated rules restricted the vans to 80 kilometers per hour, but even at this speed, our teeth rattled, our vision blurred. "In Kenya, if you drive straight, it means you're drunk," said Bill Orr, a fellow traveler from Bartow, Florida, "since any sober person would swerve to avoid the potholes." Hours out of the city and beginning to labor uphill, we overtook a girl of about 12 and a much younger child whose age and sex were unclear. Barefoot, but dressed in bright clothes, they were running, not walking, on the side of the road. Probably going home from school for lunch, said our Micato guide Philip Rono. "You see how we get our runners."
The highlands, when we reached them, were a revelation. I'd seen movies. I expected Africa to be beautiful and strange. I didn't expect that it would also be so real. The roads were clogged with bicycles and livestock, and out behind the thin band of humanity sweeping hills and mountains, with nothing to jar the eye.
The weather was out of Camelot. "In the daytime you felt that you had got high up, near the sun," writes Isak Dinesen in Out of Africa, "but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold." Director Sydney Pollack, who filmed Out of Africa in the Kenyan highlands, has said, "If there was a Garden of Eden, this is where it would be."
We were in the hills that hang above the Rift Valley in Western Kenya, higher than Dinesen's farm. She was at 6,000 feet. We went up to 8,000. The air was fresh, but flavored with the smoke of wood or charcoal fires. If you heard crying it was not a child, but a goat.
As soon as we'd unpacked, John Manners took a vanfull out for our first run on the red clay roads. We were all clamoring--as runners will--for a chance to put in an hour, but John insisted that we were expected that evening for cocktails and begged us to go out for just twenty minutes, and then come back. "Fifteen minutes would be better," he said.
Daniel Komen, who holds the world record for 3,000 meters (indoors and out), joined us with two other international competitors that first afternoon. The Kenyans jogged easily with us, chatting politely. Since we were heading out of town, we passed a tide of Africans on foot and bicycle going the other way. Most waved and called out greetings. Couples often traveled together on a bicycle, the man pedaling, the woman in a dress sitting sidesaddle on the luggage rack. The sun was setting as we pulled up at the van, outlining a giant cloud in gold. If this is the high point of the trip, I thought, it will have been enough.
We were staying in guest cabins at the Eldoret Club, a country club with a nine-hole golf course, which has thrown off its colonial past. Kip Keino bought us drinks at the bar and gently chided those who ordered water. Yes, that's Kipchoge Keino, the uncoached policeman who smoked Jim Ryun over 1,500 meters in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico. Once the best-known athlete in the world, after Muhammad Ali, Keino has now retired into the status of living legend. He operates a training camp. His wife runs an orphanage. Three stadiums bear his name.
In America, an athlete of equivalent status would throw up an invisible shield. Sports fans want autographs, pictures, tickets. Crowds at baseball games seem to want blood as well. Nor are American athletes always models of deportment. Keino seemed entirely comfortable with us and with himself. He wore an altimeter watch. Asked the elevation, he'd operate the gadget gleefully and call out the results, although he must already have known the answer. "If you are having trouble going to sleep," I asked, "do you relive your victories?" "No," he said. "I have the video."
At the bar in Eldoret, Yobes Ondieki recalled how it felt to be the first man to run 10,000 meters in under 27 minutes. He told me he had no idea how fast he was going in that 1993 race in Oslo, but said the memory was still precious today. "God is good."
Kenya is to distance runners what the Vatican is to devout Catholics. In 2003, in a world of 6.5 billion souls, only 100 were chosen to run a marathon in less than two hours, 10 minutes, and 40 seconds. Forty-eight came from Kenya. Forty-two belonged to a single tribe, the Kalenjin.
"I love superlatives," John Manners said, explaining how he's been fascinated with the Kalenjin since he came to Africa as a 12-year-old, when his anthropologist father brought the family. John liked the children he played soccer with and in whose mud-and-thatch homes he was given tea. (In Kenya tea is traditionally mixed with fresh, hot milk and sugar.) Then he went to a race with his father and saw his adopted tribe compete. "They kicked ass," he told me. "I wanted some justification for my, you know, utterly groundless, root-for-the-home-team prejudice. And I got it."
Returning to the highlands above the Rift Valley with the Peace Corps in 1969, Manners taught English and coached track for two years. He lives now in New Jersey, manages the IAAF's Focus on Africans project and the Kenyarunners.com Web site, and is at work on a book about the Kalenjin tentatively titled The Running Tribe. During our trip he was scrambling to resolve last-minute glitches in an effort to win scholarships to top American colleges for a few Kenyans. In this, he has been helped by 800-meter Olympic medalist Mike Boit. Manners was also helped in the scholarship drive by marathon world record holder (2:04.55) Paul Tergat. I have a picture of myself with an arm around each of these men. I actually heard Mike Boit say, "Human potential is immense." I was so moved, I rushed off to the privacy of the bathroom to write this down. (Okay, maybe you had to be there.)
Which is the problem with writing about this trip for Americans. There was no invisible shield. Our hosts spoke freely, unselfconsciously about the sport we share. Keino said winning is not about training so much as it is about mind and spirit. L.A. Marathon champion Lornah Kiplagat sat with a bunch of us for an hour fielding questions, and returned again and again to attitude and mental preparation. She paused during the interview to get us a jug of water and glasses to drink it from. Try to imagine a similar confab with the most pleasant of American athletes, say Tiger Woods. "Lunch in your home for me and 13 of my friends. We'll bring clubs, and you can look at our backswings. We are all golf enthusiasts. You might bake a cake." Lornah Kiplagat did bake us a cake, with blue icing that read "Welcome Runner's World."
Our second morning in Africa brought us to Saint Patrick's High School, an unprepossessing collection of brick buildings. "Under Brother Colm O'Connell," Manners told us, "this high school has produced more world-class runners than any other single educational institution in the world--at least in the last 30 years." In one night in Zurich in August of 1997, three world records were broken by students from Saint Patrick's.
Brother Colm led us into the school's courtyard and to a stand of trees, each planted to commemorate an outstanding athlete. There were a lot of trees. Ibrahim Hussein's tree--just for instance--had a sign in front of it that read: Boston 3. New York 1. Honolulu 3. Those were his victories in major U.S. marathons.
What's the trick? For a long time students and faculty went without running water or electricity, if that helps. An athlete gets one pair of shoes a year.
Our lunch had been scheduled at a local restaurant, but Lornah Kiplagat ("Kiplagat" means "born at sunset") insisted that we come instead to her High Altitude Training Center in Iten, not far from Eldoret. Hanging on a cliff, the campus looks and feels like Shangri-la. The sign on the gate reads: "Welcome to High Altitude Trainings Centre Iten (Kenya)," and then there's a line-drawing of a runner in hills. Below this: "University of Champions."
Kiplagat, a small woman with the grace and poise of a natural athlete, ladled out pumpkin soup and pressed seconds of fresh bread, sliced cheese and meat, and salad on her guests. (No ugali this time.) I sat across from John Manners, who was explaining that the Kalenjin live at a high altitude, have done so for generations. "As horseless cowboys, they have always run, often great distances to steal the stock of other tribes," he said. "The fastest, bravest men collected the most cattle, and since cattle were the currency used for bride wealth, the fastest, bravest men were able to marry the most wives and father the most children."
"I wish it was all genetics," said Brother Colm, who has been coaching for 20 years. "Then I could rest. You have no idea the amount of work that goes into this."
Having paused in her efforts to make her fat guests fatter, Kiplagat listened quietly. When she spoke, it was almost a whisper. She seemed not to mean to challenge either of the other two theories. "We are tougher than anybody else," she said. "And smarter."
Which reminds me of a line Manners had dropped when talking of Kip Keino's Olympic victory over Jim Ryun. "He said he was ready to die rather than lose--and he meant it."
After lunch we took another too-brief run on the now-familiar blood-red trails above the Rift Valley. Lornah Kiplagat wanted to show us the new house she is building, and came along, moving freely in the group so that we could each marvel at the economy of her stride and the ease with which she engaged us all in conversation. Children in uniform--skirts or shorts, and sweaters of brilliant blue or green--called out to the Wazungu in their musical voices. "How are you? How are you?" And if we didn't answer promptly enough, they'd answer for us. "I am fine. I am fine."
The next day, Manners brought us to the North Rift Provincial Cross Country Championships, one of many feeders for the nationals. Those of us who had no shame could also run in the 4-K or the 12-K. Nine signed up for one race or another. Many of us signed up for both.
Nike.Running.Com appeared in black letters on the orange plastic start and finish banners, and there were recognizable shorts and singlets among the competitors, but every other sight was strange and new. There were men in uniforms with rifles, but also men in tribal gowns with spears. We were engulfed in oceans of children. I was shocked to find myself looking into the face--faces--of a boy of five, or six. He seemed to have two heads, until I realized that a much younger sister was strapped to his back. There were few shoes, and I saw one little girl running in a pink dress. Boy, but she was fast. The course was a 2-K oblong with one mud patch and one hurdle.
When the whistle blew for our first event, we began to run. Or rather that was our intention. If we were running, though, then what were the Kenyans doing? I, personally, was pumping my arms and legs, gasping like a beached fish, and yet--compared to the Kenyans--it seemed just as if I were standing still.
A ripple of laughter ran through the spectators. No malice. They cheered us on, "How are you? How are you?" although I also heard, "Pole, Pole" which is Swahili for "slowly, slowly."
Amby Burfoot, winner of the 1968 Boston Marathon and executive editor of Runner's World, ran the 4-K barefoot, and afterward we all gaped at the wounds he had sustained. The two doctors on the tour tisked at him and produced gauze and salves.
Between events, fellow traveler Bill Orr introduced me to Susan Chepkemei, a small, shy woman whom I had seen take second in the 2004 New York City Marathon in a close duel with Paula Radcliffe. I also shook hands with Ibrahim Hussein, whose tree made such an impression when we visited Saint Patrick's High School.
"We were looked at as superstars," said Steve Chorma, a software engineer and one of our fastest. "We just stood and after five minutes we had a crowd of kids around us like six people deep."
since kenya is famous for its game parks, we took time to visit the Mara Simba Lodge, in the Maasai Mara Game Reserve, high on the Serengeti Plain. We photographed zebra, antelope, and giraffe on the way. You can look down from a deck outside the bar and watch crocodiles vie with monkeys and vultures for a plastic tub of chicken parts put out by staff at dusk. If I'd gone right from New York to the lodge, I would have been thrilled, but after you've been waited on by world-class runners, then hotel staff--however prompt and courteous--is a bitter disappointment.
On our last, precious day, we went to another postcard-picture setting, the Ngong Race Course in Nairobi, to see the Kenya National Cross Country Championships. Because of the depth of talent, the event has been called the greatest distance race in the world. (And no T-shirt!) Catherine Ndereba ran. In April, she would win the Boston Marathon a record fourth time. Here she finished 13th.
I've never seen so much excellence and so little pretension in the same spot. Many of the runners were children. Many ran without shoes. The course looped around the grassy colonial horse track. Golfers waited for gaps in the flood of elite runners, and then pulled their bags across the track in order to get at a driving range, which was in the center of the field.
Tape strung between stakes was all that separated us from the athletes. I was shocked again by the grace of these competitors. Take four of my buddies up a hill on a Saturday morning and we puff and clatter like a locomotive working a grade. Thirty elite Kenyans going twice as fast sound like the wind in an alley of trees.
But I was proud of them. I'm a runner, too, right? What makes runners different? We run, of course, but I like to think it's more than that. I find it easy to trust people when I know that at one time or another, they've run their guts out and lost.
If not as gifted as the people we had come to see, then those on the tour were remarkably unpretentious. Amby Burfoot, our alpha, tried to explain away the decent 4-K he'd run at the North Rift by saying, "I got into a groove." If I hadn't questioned Kiyonari Yoshida, of Yokohama, closely, I wouldn't have learned that he runs faster now at 41 than he did in high school. He must have come on the trip partly to polish his English, and I'm sure my quick-talk and muttering didn't help. But when Kiyo and I ran together, I felt that we understood each other perfectly. Candor can be mute.
Taking the two rear, and therefore bumpiest, seats in my van were Bill Orr, who runs an insurance firm, and Susan, his pharmacist wife. He coaches track in Bartow and handles the elite runners for the Gasparilla Distance Classic in Tampa; Washington, D.C.'s Cherry Blossom 10-miler; and the L.A. Marathon. Throughout the highlands, men came forward to welcome the Orrs, offering up pictures of wives and children. The Orr's house in Bartow has been a hostelry for visiting Kenyans.
Two doctors, a nurse, three software engineers, a wine merchant, a novelist, an environmentalist, and a game-park operator. All of the dough-faced Wazungu had, it seemed, fantastic back stories.
One of the miracles of our aerobic brotherhood is that while speed matters a great deal, it can be settled quickly, and then it ceases to matter at all. It's about the race you run against yourself, the guts, cojones.
We journeyed from the first world to the third, wondering how we would see ourselves among the fastest men and women on earth. Running with fabled athletes was a lot like typing a s d f g h j k l ; on Papa's Underwood. The thrill was there, even if the talent wasn't. The gods of track and distance invited us into their homes, served us goat stew and ugali. They even ran with us. What is more, they welcomed us, not as the athletes we wished to be, but as the people we already were. They celebrated us as ourselves.
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