Until we touched down in Kenya, stories of a lightning fast boy named Philemon and Kenyan runners were the closest we ever got to the country. Our friend Jon Rosen, currently a masters student at Johns Hopkins School of International Studies in Bologna, Italy, was our link to the country, and is closely in tune with the running scene in Kenya through his friend Philemon Terer. The following piece by Rosen gives a glimpse at the scene at the elite runners village of Iten - where the running world is a long and hard ticket out of Kenya. This piece also appeared on RunnersWorld.com. - T.A.
Except for the muffled tones of distant cowbells and the mild rustling of nearby pines, the clearing where our group of runners has assembled is eerily silent. Though just a twenty-minute jog through glades and pastures, the local town where we began our warm-up might as well be days away, the street-vendors and overcapacity mini-busses having yielded somewhere around the ten-minute mark to the pristine forces of nature, including, of immediate concern to our company, a large green hill right out of the literature of Hemingway.
For our group of thirteen athletes, composed of eleven highly-trained Kenyans and a visiting father-son team of wazungus (white men in Kiswahili), this 150-meter mound is a sign that it’s time to get to work. As we line up in single file, shortly after 10:00 am, the most accomplished athlete of our group, Ronald Kipchumba Rutto, hands down the morning’s assignment: 15 times up and down. Knowing that most of the athletes have already run an hour hard early in the morning, I ask if the workout will be competitive. Rutto, the 2004 World Junior Steeplechase champion, turns and stares me down with a slight grin.
“We are Kenyans,” he says.
This is all I need to hear.
We are, in fact, at the very epicenter of Kenyan athletics. Iten, a small town of roughly 2,000 people where this particular group is based, is the training headquarters of hundreds of the country’s decorated and aspiring male and female athletes. Perched atop a large escarpment overlooking the green and expansive Kerio Valley, the town, with its cool, dry climate, 7,500-foot altitude, and extended network of roads composed of soft volcanic soil, is perhaps the quintessential place to train. Though it certainly lacks the glamour (the main attraction of its downtown is arguably the Mobil station), Iten is effectively the Hollywood of Kenya. Here, it’s virtually impossible to walk down the street without running into someone who’s found athletic glory. This is a place where dreams are made and broken.
Hard Work and Hard Rest
My father and I have come to town specifically to check up on our friend Philemon Terer, part of the hill-workout crew and one of Iten’s many dreamers. It’s been almost a year-and-a-half since I coached him as a high school senior 200 miles away in the dry and rural outpost of Sigor, a place still alien to electricity and a reliable source of running water. A four-time district cross-country champion while in school, Terer arrived in Iten last July and has since been chipping away at his goal of making it in the Kenyan athletics’ world by the only means possible: Making running the focus of his everyday life.
Doing so calls for a regimen that, if attempted by most competitive athletes in the western world, would probably result quickly in burnout. In just six days of running each week, Terer and his training mates amass upwards of 110 miles, training two to three times per day, with hard workouts (hills, intervals, fartlek, and wind-sprints) on the schedule Monday through Thursday. With so many competitive runners in one place, Saturday’s long runs, which start out at an old man’s pace, generally escalate into races. On a recent weekend, for example, Terer and his gang averaged roughly 5:40 per mile for 38 kilometers, probably dipping down toward 5:00 in later stages.
The reward for such an effort is ample time to recover and rest, both in-between training sessions and, like professionals in any discipline, on Sundays. In a culture where everyday idleness (among men, at least) is far from taboo and even encouraged, most runners are fully content to lounge around when not hitting the roads, which only helps to aid in their recovery. Sleep is a priority, too, and bedtime often comes at 8:30 to prepare for the next day’s 6:00 a.m. run. To keep up with the demands of training, life is fairly ascetic, save the occasional Saturday night when a more seasoned athlete, like Rutto, returns with money from racing overseas. In this case, an evening on the nearby town of Eldoret may be in store, though the revelry is kept to a minimum. The combination of 110-mile weeks and 110-pound bodies means that one mildly alcoholic Tusker is more than enough for an outing.
A Welcomed Sacrifice
Such an existence may be definitively Spartan by western standards, yet however grueling life may seem, most of the athletes in Iten would consider themselves quite lucky.
If he weren’t here chasing his dream, Terer, like most of his classmates at Sigor High School, would have returned home to his family farm upon graduation, perhaps to oversee a small plot of maize, build himself a new hut of mud and thatch, and seek out a woman to marry. Yet, as Kenya’s arable land is engulfed by a rapidly growing population and environmental problems become more common (Terer’s home village required food-aid from the government after a severe drought caused its harvest to fail earlier this year), such a life is becoming increasingly difficult.
The prospect of making it in the running world is a much more attractive option. In a country where 58% of the population lives on less than $2 per day, even modest race winnings — let alone the six figure purses of major international marathons — can go quite a way for athletes and their families. Thus, hundreds of talented youngsters like Terer — the vast majority of them members of the Kalenjin tribe, who are historically (and physiologically) Kenya’s athletes — flock to Iten with the dream of earning a ticket to race overseas, a ticket they believe will somehow put them on a path to wealth.
Simply getting to Iten, though, or to a training center elsewhere in Kenya, can be quite a challenge. With little government support of athletics, particularly for a country with the deepest pool of talent in the world, many Kenyans are only able to train here — on the requisite full time basis — because of connections. It’s not uncommon to find an up-and-coming athlete like Terer sponsored by a friend or relative that has already made it in the running world.
Some, like Terer’s pals Fred Kiplangat and Wilfred Maiyo, are beneficiaries of the small support the public sector does provide. Kiplangat, 28, a prison social worker by profession, has been granted two years with pay to devote to full time training, a period that may be extended based upon his athletic performance. Maiyo, a notably articulate man of 26, has a similar arrangement with the Kenya police. On these small salaries, the two men can afford to rent small rooms in close proximity to other athletes and keep themselves fed. Yet staying clothed — at least as one would expect from a world-class athlete — can be a different story.
Perhaps the most glaring irony of running in Kenya is the fact that it is virtually impossible — even in Iten or Nairobi — to come across proper training gear in the country. Though one could imagine a tree in the Kalenjin-populated Rift Valley Province that buds each year with sub-2:10 marathoners, there are no noted saplings that produce the red and blue hued banknotes of the Kenyan shilling. With the basic economic model of supply and demand lacking an asterisk for foot-speed, there’s just no market for a proper pair of running shoes. Training in the $10 sneakers available at many market shops, though affordable for someone like Kiplangat on a prison’s salary, would be akin to Lance Armstrong riding the tour-de-France on one of the rickety bicycles one normally sees navigating the pot-holed roads of Kenya.
Managers Wanted
For the sake of their feet — and their racing careers — the main objective of most young athletes in Iten is either to qualify for a national team (spots on which are few and far between) or, as is more likely, attract the attention of the coach or manager of a professional club. The later will generally provide the athlete a constant supply of gear as well as access to an international racing schedule, typically in Europe, Japan, or the U.S.
Team Kimbia, launched last year by Boston-based manager Tom Ratcliffe and the German coach Dieter Hogen, is one such enterprise with a philanthropic twist, as it seeks to develop talented and civic-minded athletes who will eventually strive to give something back to Kenya. Operating jointly from Iten and Boulder, Colorado, Kimbia fields a roster of roughly 25 accomplished international runners. Additionally, the squad has room for ten or so of the up-and-coming variety.
“We really look for athletes that are good people,” says Godfrey Kiprotich, a former sub-28 10,000-meter runner who now works as a Kimbia coach/manager. “We have young guys coming to us all the time, looking to join, but we just don’t have room for everyone. One of the hardest things to do is to say no to someone.”
Unfortunately, when a quality club like Kimbia says no, athletes are sometimes compelled to take their chances with less-reputable management teams, which often have the potential for trouble.
Maiyo, in a case that made headlines last October throughout Kenya, was the victim of a particularly devious manager on his first and only trip to Europe. After confining 15 male and female athletes to a rundown, one-bathroom Paris flat, the individual in question then virtually abandoned his team, turning off the heat and ceasing to deliver food, until Maiyo took the initiative and eventually had him arrested. To make things worse, Maiyo, a 1,500-meter specialist, never got to run his preferred event. “The only race I was entered in was a half-marathon,” he says. “I was happy with my third place finish, but the whole situation was a real problem. I was so upset.”
Despite such tales of misfortune, running is sill for many a ticket out of poverty, and in some cases a ticket to rewards that are by no means merely financial. As one might imagine, there’s a great amount of pride in Kenya attached to personal success, and, naturally, different athletes deal with it in different ways. Rutto, the world junior champion, while remarkably self-assured at first glance, remains quite modest about his high-powered resume. With travel experience spanning much of the globe — amid a group of athletes that have, for the most part, never left Kenya — he is almost blase about his upcoming running engagements. “I think my manager is sending me to Italy in a couple of weeks,” he tells me when I ask about his upcoming schedule. “But I don’t really know.”
Michael Kite (Pronounced KEE-TAY), one of Iten’s more seasoned and notorious residents is of a decidedly different breed. We first meet Kite when he drops by Terer’s crowded room during dinner on our first night in town, and after five minutes I get the impression that his marathon PR of 2:09:46 — achieved en-route to a victory in Munich six years ago — means we should have brought with us a portable red carpet. “I’m going to run 2:06,” he assures us, a slight edginess already showing through. He reminds us of this again the following afternoon when he sits down next to us to take his tea at a local cafe. When we pass him a third time in our taxi, I consider rolling down my window to shout out “2:06,” in case he needed to be reminded of his goal. But the vehicle zooms past before I have a chance. “That guy is omnipresent,” says Maiyo, who is next to me in the back seat. Surely, I imagine, no one passes through Iten without encountering Kite.
Onward
Kite, however, is anomalous in the sense that here, personal bests are generally assigned minimal importance. Competition, not time, is what really counts, particularly when it comes to the selection of a national team. And though this process, supposedly based upon placement at the national trials for both cross country and track, is not immune to crooked politics, the greatest honor an athlete can achieve is to wear the red, green, and black colors of Kenya.
Our trip to Iten happens to coincide with the 2006 World Cross Country Championships in Fukuoka, Japan. My father and I gather with Terer and his pals to catch the live broadcast of the second day at the Kerio View hotel, a tourist-class establishment perched right atop the escarpment, uncharacteristically vacant because its usual clientele, members of the Qatari national team and their coach Renato Canova, are on the other side of the television. No one in the room (save one token Ethiopian, who manages to change the channel before it is announced that Kenya has taken the team title) seems particularly pleased with Kenenisa Bekele’s victory in the senior men’s 12k. Yet, everyone has high hopes for next year. “You’ll have to come to Mombassa,” (the Kenyan coastal town hosting the 2007 championships), Kiplangat tells us. “We will be racing for Kenya.”
Kiplangat’s dream, of course, may be a long shot, but if it happens it will only come by way of day after day of hard work — our morning at the hill being no exception. Three hills into the workout, the athletes, running single file, are relaxed, efficient, and strong. Having been pressured by Maiyo to lead the first three, I am now in a state of serious lactate-overload, sprawled out in the grass behind the starting line, trying to ignore my own fatigue and take in the awesome display of athleticism unfolding before my eyes.
Immune to the fact that oxygen here is in short supply and high demand, the athletes continue with impeccable grace until the fifteen hills are complete, angular limbs serving as finely tuned pistons propelling their gaunt frames to new heights: not only in the sense of the immediate hill in question; but in the greater context of their lives.
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Jon Rosen is a master’s student at Johns Hopkins School of International Studies in Bologna, Italy, he can be reached at jon@jonrosen.net
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