Jackie Lebo
10 August 2008
column
Nairobi — IT IS NOVEMBER; THE SHORT RAINS HAVE been particularly heavy this year, making Iten even colder than usual.
There is an incessant drizzle, the kind that is bearable for a short while even without an umbrella, but over a length of time soaks through to the skin, chilling you to the bone; at the end of the day, it feels worse than a heavy downpour.
Elias Kiptum and a group of athletes meet us at the Kamariny' turning off the Iten-Eldoret road.
The ground is muddy and slippery and the athletes plan to run for an hour, if the weather allows. There was supposed to be a huge group going for Fartlek training, but the route they usually use is impassable today.
Among the group of runners is Elias's twin brother, Sylvester Cheruiyot, who has been training for nine months but has not competed professionally yet. Though he is not as muscular as Elias, he is starting to develop the bulky leg muscles needed for those last-stretch sprints.
Elias is young, confident and believes he will be running a 2:06 marathon within a year. The world-class time is repeated often, with a mixture of seriousness and jest.
He has been competing professionally for three years, has paced champions including Felix Limo and Martin Lel in the London, Rotterdam and Bonn marathons, and this year clocked good times in various road races.
We drive behind the runners for an hour, passing houses, trees and mysterious shapes cloaked in mist. It is chilly and the drizzle increases in intensity.
The athletes nevertheless begin to shed their clothes and throw them in the car. After 20 minutes, jackets and long-sleeved shirts are off. We set the odometer to zero and go for eight kilometres then turn back at a village centre.
Training in such slippery conditions, athletes risk falling and injuring themselves, but we get back to the tarmac without incident.
Iten is a town with no centre. It has formed around a T-junction, the shops on the main street of the town lining the tarmac road that comes from Eldoret and goes to Kabarnet; the other shops line the road to Kapsowar.
From Eldoret, 30 kilometres west, the town is hemmed in by farms, from 1,000-acre tracts to small subsistence plots. The land is flat, with fertile red soil suitable for grain, mainly maize and wheat.
THE EVEN EXPANSE OF THE UASIN Gishu plateau drops spectacularly into the Kerio valley at the edge of the town. Sitet Complex, a hotel built near the cliff, offers tea with great panoramas, but its curtains are often drawn against the view.
It is testament to the fact that, until now, land value was predicated far more on productivity than vistas. Cliff land, which used to be given to unmarried women in Keiyo society, has gone up tremendously in value as hotels that cater to elite runners and foreign managers are built.
The valley is dry, with thorny acacias and people eking out a living from the thin soils, in contrast to their better-off neighbours on the plateaus above. A deep narrow gorge at the bottom of the valley holds the Kerio River.
While crocodiles sun themselves on a sandbank, the small boys with fishing rods a little way down the river seem quite unconcerned, clambering up the rocks to the roadside to sell their catch -- delicious whiskered catfish.
It is said the crocodiles, familiar with the taste of vanquished warriors from old feuds, have come to taste the blood of modern feuds too.
Through most of the day, the Tugen hills on the far side of the Kerio appear blue, but the late afternoon light shows them to be green and as the sun changes position they seem to move closer; Kabarnet, on the spine of the hills, can be seen beginning at twilight as a cluster of lights.
On a clear day you can see beyond the Tugen hills, which separate the Kerio Valley from the Rift Valley, to the Laikipia plateau. The formation of the valleys pushed up the adjoining areas into high tables of land with altitude conditions ideal for training, thus the profusion of athletes' training camps on both sides, in Nyahururu and Iten. At peak training season, there are between 400 and 700 runners in Iten.
FOR EVERY BOSTON, NEW York, London, and Vienna marathon there are many smaller races - the Würzburg 10km, the Sevenaer Run, the Great Scottish Run, the Zwitserlootdakrun -- 10km, 15km and half-marathon events modelled after their more prestigious counterparts. The events are part of the host towns' social calendars, with media coverage that attracts sponsors. The races also raise money by charging entry fees to the general public, who in turn enter for the challenge, to raise money for charity, or for just plain fun.
Race organisers work with agents and managers to secure places for the Kenyan runners, who set credible race times, and whose formidable reputation brings a certain prestige. This has led to the creation of a whole class of middle-tier athletes who run, not to represent the country in the Olympics or world championships, but to make a living. They are journeymen with no illusions -- in other words, true professionals.
These middle tier runners live and train in Kenya, spending up to three months a year in Europe. They stay in small apartments with other runners under the same management, driving from town to town to races every week.
The popular perception of running, of course, still centres on elite runners who dominate the news. In reality, a talented, but not necessarily outstanding athlete with training and the right connections to get into the right races, can make enough money to live on, or in some cases to supplement their incomes. This in itself is not an amazing discovery.
But there exists a whole system to support this industry, from the athletics governing body that oversees the relations between agents and runners, to athletic visa guidelines in the Nairobi embassies of host countries. This is a widely known practice among officials and other sports professionals, but not in the general public consciousness, where running is still a thoroughly nationalistic sport.
WE TRAVEL TO MOI University's Chepkoilel campus to see what separates a journeyman from a champion. Felix Limo has won the Chicago Marathon twice, in 2005 and 2006, and the London Marathon in 2006. In 2007, he was third in a spectacular sprint finish in London (at the last mile with the finish line in sight, it was still a four-way race) that has gone down in history as the biggest talent pool ever assembled at a marathon start line -- including then and current record holders Paul Tergat and Haile Gebrselassie.
When we arrive, Limo and his group they are already on the track. Other athletes' groups, including Elias Kiptum from Iten, are also on the field. Speedwork does exactly what the name suggests, building speed. The athletes run at full speed for a kilometre --two and a half laps -- then rest for two minutes, walking back to the starting point. Coach Chelimo and assistant coach Patrick Sang (Barcelona silver medallist, 3,000-metre steeplechase) watch closely as the athletes repeat this sequence 12 times; by the end of it they are breathing hard, soaking in sweat with their clothes plastered to their bodies.
They put on warm-up suits at the end and sit down to talk with their coach, who provides critical feedback and plans corrective measures for their weak points. Coach Chelimo prefers to wait for the end to provide feedback, unlike the Italian coach in the centre of the track alternately shouting at his team to slow down or speed up. The athletes finish with the coach and enter the van waiting to take them to camp.
The camp is in Kaptagat, a lushly forested area about 30 kilometres south of Iten. There are two long buildings forming an L-shape around a square grassy lawn, with a kitchen in the back. Inside, a corridor runs around the L, with small rooms opening off it on either side, each with two narrow beds. There is a huge pile of expensive running shoes airing in the courtyard and all manner of training clothes hung on the fence.
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