How to Run with the Kenyans Pt. 1
This post details my introduction to running with Kenyan pros and the legendary town of Iten. It probably caters most to the running buffs, but anyone interested in the daily routines of pro athletes.
Run to Children’s Hospital Fundraiser (click me to DONATE)
It’s exciting to see donations are still coming. I’ve decided to leave the fundraiser open as long as I’m running in Africa, especially considering the construction on the Women’s House is still a few months from breaking ground. (So close to $10k!!)
Speed work in Kip Keino stadium in Eldoret.
My host and Kenyan marathon runner Peter with his son Ryan.
Summary
This post details my introduction to running with Kenyan pros and the legendary town of Iten. It caters to the running buffs and anyone interested in the daily routines of professional athletes. Disclaimer: This is a long post. If you’re pressed for time, I suggest skimming the whole thing rather than reading partway.
Full Story
My last morning in Eldoret, I crawled under the fence to Kip Keino stadium. Toby Tanser tipped me off to go Tuesday morning, but I had no idea what to expect. I couldn’t find the entrance, hence the slip under the fence.
When I got inside, what I saw blew me away. Over 100 perfectly sculpted Kenyans in top-shelf running gear plus a handful of white folks sweating hard doing intervals around the track. I just stood and watched for a couple minutes until working up the courage to ask someone on the sidelines if I could run? He laughed and said, “Yes everyone can run!” How wild I thought that the world’s greatest runners let anyone train with them (I assumed these were the pros but didn’t actually know).
I started jogging slowly around the track, and as a group passed me, I sped up to try to match their pace. “Ooof!! This is uncomfortable. My body feels weird. Omg why would anyone want to run this fast?!” A storm of feelings surged through my body and thoughts raced through my mind. After months of running long distances with a backpack, sprinting felt foreign to me…. Yet it was exhilarating!
After a lap, I slowed to my slowest jog. Another group passed, and I sped up to catch them. Again, thoughts and feelings raced through me. “I don’t know if I can do a whole lap! Ooh my stomach! My legs burn! I think I should stop!” I lost the group in a matter of seconds but finished my version of a speed lap. I repeated the process one or two more times until deciding I felt sufficiently challenged for the day. The athletes kept going, lap after lap after lap.
As I stretched, I heard a man speaking English with an athlete. We made eye contact, and he walked over to me. He pointed out some of the top runners confirming that they held Olympic medals. The man was a coach originally from the Bahamas who ran for University of Kansas and moved to Kenya permanently many years ago. I lobbed him a softball asking if he liked it here, and he knocked it out of the park, “Look man I been all ovah, I lived in the US for many years… and this is where I ended up! So what do you think?!”
On my way back to town, I noticed I felt energized. I was wide awake perhaps for the first time since leaving Kilimanjaro! I looked forward to my meeting with Kiprop, a communications officer at the Shoe 4 Africa hospital that Toby connected me with. I ran straight to the hospital. Kiprop took me on a tour of the Moi Teaching Hospital, Kenya’s second largest hospital and the source of funding for the Shoe 4 Africa Hospital. As we walked around, he mentioned he came from a village near Iten and was going back to visit later in the day. I asked if I could go with him, as I also wanted to visit the town. He said sure, and I was thrilled.
What’s Iten you ask? If Eldoret is the big city where famous runners buy houses, then Iten is the little town where they actually do their training. I learned about Iten from, you guessed it, Toby Tanser who wrote his first (bestselling) book, Train Hard Win Easy there. The name Iten comes from the local (mis)pronunciation of the British name “Hill Ten”, as Iten is the tenth hill from Eldoret.
When Kiprop and I arrived in the afternoon, he described the town as an island protected from the heat. At 2400m it stays significantly cooler than the surrounding area. It felt like an island in more ways than one to me. A banner read, “Welcome to the Home of Champions.” Men waved and greeted us confidently. They walked with pride, like the cool kids in school. The town felt safe. I didn’t worry about being harassed by drunkards or aggressive hustlers.
Aside: You may have picked up on this in previous posts, but I’ve been generally disappointed with the typical sampling of men in a given African village. While women put their heads down and work hard (on average), men seem to look for the shortcut time after time. Iten appeared to have a healthy population of proud humble men. This surprised me. I expected a few champions to have the confidence of rich men but not the average runner in town struggling to make it.
Aside Extension: As a wall fly in Africa, I’ve developed some theories on societal expectations of men. My sense is that men are expected to provide the resources for their family to survive. Straight forward enough, but there’s a little more to it. Men are expected to fulfill their responsibilities out in the world. For reference, my observation is that the traditional expectation for women is to bear/raise children inside the home. Consequently, if men don’t find a purpose out in the world, the logic follows that they have no value to bring to a family inside the home. I think men, who haven’t found a purpose either internalize this, feeling they don’t deserve a family or home, or they literally are rejected by their families. In a place where money is scarce, I wondered if the men of Iten derived purpose from the act of running itself, knowing that financial success comes only to a few runners at the top.
Kiprop walked me down to edge of a huge escarpment, “Whoa that’s the Great Rift!” Apparently, Iten sits right on the edge of the Gregory Rift (the same section of the rift valley we traversed in Tanzania). From there Kiprop took me to meet a local athlete he knew named Peter. We stopped at a guesthouse along the way to get the price of a room— 2500Kes ($19.50). “Ghali sana!” (so expensive). Seeing my reaction, Kiprop asked if I was comfortable staying with a family. “Yes! That’s my preference!” I told him I loved staying with families and had done so many times over the course of my run so far.
When we got to Peter’s home, he was gone on a run— a good sign 👍. We met his wife, Miriam, and one year old son, Ryan, and she warmly invited us inside their single room apartment. When Peter arrived, he was full of energy— his flawless skin radiated, and he smiled with pearly white teeth. He took a lightning fast shower and lifted Ryan high in the air making him erupt in laughter. Watching Peter, there was no doubt that I came to the right place to get my mojo back. Kiprop explained my situation, and Peter told me I was welcome. Just like that, I had a home in Iten, the last thing I’d expected when I woke up in the morning. Happy that his work was done and seeing my gratitude, Kiprop said goodbye.
Peter spoke no English. He took me to meet his friend Mike who spoke excellent English. We drank chai in Mike’s apartment as they exchanged words in their local language, Kalenjin. I noticed Mike’s marathon medals hanging from the walls and started going through them. There were local marathons— Nairobi and Eldoret— and then international— Egypt, Tanzania, China. I asked his times at each one. They tended to hover around 2:15. I asked how many athletes in Kenya ran that fast? Mike told me there are 500 Kenyans who ran sub 2:10 marathons and then another 1000 who ran sub 2:15 last year. I imagined committing to a career, where the entirety of its success could be judged by one number… I wasn’t sure my ego could handle it. But, Mike gave off an aura of perfect relaxed confidence; if he’d been introduced to me as a billionaire, I would’ve believed it.
Mike told me that he and Peter had decided I would sleep in his house because Peter’s apartment was very small. That was no problem for me. I was excited to get to know him. This kind of hospitality was the last thing I’d come to expect in Kenya. In Tanzania, most villages had been overly generous with hospitality. But I had come to believe unconditional hospitality didn’t exist in Kenya after paying directly in food or money for every single accommodation/host up to now.
Eager to rest for the week of running ahead, I settled into bed at Mike’s house.
The Next Day
Mike and I met Peter at 6 am sharp at the fruit stand between their homes. Unlike the rest of Africa, it turns out the runners actually operate on time. They all have watches. When they say 6, they mean 6. As I would learn later, they also run precise distances. One day, Peter joked to me, “Kama tunasema 10, ni 10!” (“If we say 10km, it’s 10km!”).
We jogged over to the meeting point, where around 100 runners gathered chatting. They stood tall and showed no trace of anxiety. Today was “easy day”— 18-20km at a 7 or 8-minute mile pace. Everyone looked like they could have played the role of “Kenyan Runner” in a Hollywood blockbuster. Not an ounce of waste on their bodies— skinny as twigs, strong as tree trunks. Looking at their calves, I worried the muscle would burst out of the skin. We started, and immediately, I found myself running for my life.
I had to get creative to keep up with the group. I started kicking my legs back as hard as I could. One thing I noticed was the loud footsteps of the runners. My bible “Chi Running”— given to me by my Alaskan family Amanda and Matt Montavon— evangelizes soft footsteps. One exercise from the book involves running without making a sound, so for years I’ve practiced running like a house cat. Here though, the runners sounded like a stampede of stallions.
Throwing my legs backward harder gave me a little speed, but I still needed more. I usually try to stabilize my upper body as much as possible to keep my energy centered around my core (especially to reduce swing when I run with my backpack). I decided to let go of that idea and swivel my arms and spine more. It worked. That extra mobility gave me the rest of the speed I needed to keep up. Now I just had to pray that my body would sustain the speed for another 14km.
It felt like we ran downhill forever, and with each step, I worried about the climb back up. I was already falling behind the group. Thankfully Peter stayed with me. I felt bad for slowing him down, but I didn’t object, as I had no idea how to get back. Finally we turned, and I assumed, started the way back. The uphill slowed me down and swallowed the last of my pride. At each slope crest, I hoped the run would end. Visions of my legs collapsing under me replayed in my head.
Over a thousand kilometers with a backpack and nothing pushed me to my physical limits like this. But at long last, somehow we arrived back at the starting point, my legs still under me, only a little behind the slowest local runners of the group. I was proud of myself. We chatted and stretched. Unlike my running club in Seattle, no one was in a rush to hop in their car and drive to work. By contrast, we had all the time in the world to finish stretching.
Now what? I wondered. It wasn’t even 8 am. I was soon to get some of the best news of my life: we had the rest of the day to relax and recover. Even the evening run would just be easy jogging to reset the muscles. I thought of amending Toby Tanser’s “Train Hard, Win Easy” to “Train Hard, Recover Harder.” What a beautiful antidote to the high-productivity nonstop culture of tech bros and Wall Street... and even American sports.
What followed was a dream. I took a shower, moisturized my skin, drank tea and ate bread, and then chilled. I wrote a little, played with Ryan. Miriam cooked us lunch — rice and beans— and she washed my clothes. I took a nap and woke up just in time for evening run at 5pm. Peter took me on a nice 10km loop through farm fields. I was surprised to feel good on the run. Relaxing all day actually made me feel recovered enough to run with a little more pace in the evening. After the run, we did some more stretching. Then, shower number two! (Now that’s really luxury for a guy who went up to two weeks between showers last winter.) Rest a bit more, and then dinner of ugali (ground corn), greens, and milk.
I was in bed by 9pm with a huge heap of gratitude, ready for the next day of training: fartlek. I fell asleep feeling like the universe gifted me with the world’s best place to recover after my run to the hospital.
To be continued! Part two will go over my full experience training in Iten with all the nuts and bolts for the running buffs.