08.20.07
Posted in Training, Running 101, Kenyans at 11:04 pm by Administrator
Start runs very slowly but accelerate until at the end you are running very, very hard.
Run sessions very, very hard.
Follow runs with a full range of stretching, drills, sit ups and medicine work.
Watch TV at all times between training except when eating or reading.
Take a nap if there is nothing on TV.
Eat ugali as much as possible. Does your sweat carry the feint smell of maize? If not eat more ugali.
When you walk, walk slowly. Very slowly.
Run only on grass or tracks. Walk to the park rather than running there. Remember to walk slowly.
Make your tea using milk instead of water and add sugar in the kind of quantity you would normally add milk.
Do not train in the rain unless absolutely necessary.
Get a Great Night’s Sleep with the Sleep Number® bed, only at Radisson Hotels & Resorts.
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03.27.07
Posted in Back in the Day, Athletes, Kenyans at 6:39 pm by Administrator
Rono tries to distance himself from troubled past
The runner, who broke world records in four events in short period in 1978, says his life is on the upswing after alcoholism and homelessness.
Read the rest of this entry »
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03.11.07
Posted in Invitationals, Results, Kenyans, Politics, Religion at 7:41 am by Administrator
jordan hasay ran 10:04 and the winning relay team ran 10:07 at the wildcat relays.
she won the junior national cross country meet and qualified for the world championships in kenya but is not going because of safety concerns. click here for story
of course there is this to consider.
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01.06.07
Posted in Training, BHS, Kenyans, High School, The Colonel, Lydiard at 5:24 pm by Administrator
today was fun! the plan worked. christopher proved that the Lydiard Program works.
before june 2006, christopher never ran. heck, he never even went outside. he went to BC a couple hours a day and played video games the rest of the time.
i let him do whatever he wanted as long as he did well at BC. but after he graduated with his AA, i decided he needed to go to high school to become a more well rounded person.
in fact, athletics is the main reason he is going to high school and running was his only option. he cant throw or catch anything as the team knows.
besides he had my decades of running knowledge and a perfect body for running. he is five foot and eleven inches and weighs maybe 120 pounds. so in june 2006, he started running.
well lets say jogging. he was slow. the first time he ran a mile he barely broke 10 minutes. his first 5k he ran in 33:56 on 6/6/6. when he finished, the race volunteers thought they needed to call a medic.
because christopher was so slow, i had him do more intervals then long runs because he couldnt run long at all. through the summer he improved and ended up running 24:20 at the last handicap race on 8/15/06. in fact he won the btc 5k handicap series (his 8th grade brother got second btw).
when xc season started he was still slow and barely broke 16 minutes for the 2 mile. but he eventually ran 12:20 for the two mile and 19:57 for the 3 mile.
then the season ended and i could fully implement the Lydiard Program. the police 10 k was right after the season so it was a good race to run. christopher had never run a 10 k and barely broke 51 minutes.
then he started doing the following:
Monday: Aerobic running 3/4 hour.
Tuesday: Aerobic running 1 hour.
Wednesday: Run hilly course 1/2 to 1 hour.
Thursday: Aerobic running 1 hour.
Friday: Jog 1/2 to 1 hour.
Saturday: Run hilly course 1/2 to 1 hour.
Sunday: Aerobic running 1.5 hours.
Monday: Run hilly course 1/2 to 1 hour.
Tuesday: Aerobic running 1 hour.
Wednesday: Time trial 3000 or 5000 meters.
Thursday: Aerobic running 1 hour.
Friday: Jog 1/2 to 1 hour.
Saturday: Relaxed striding of 4 to 8 times 200 meters.
Sunday: Aerobic running 1.5 hours
we followed this schedule except that he took tuesdays off because of academic decathlon. he walked home on those days to get some exercise in.
after almost two months of this training, christopher PRed on a much harder course today. he took almost 8 minutes off his time today with a 43:24.
he ran between 30 and 40 miles a week and most of it was in the 8 or 9 minute per mile range. in fact, i have every mile logged via the Garmin Forerunner 205 Wrist-Mounted GPS Personal Training Device
. now some may say 30 or 40 miles isnt much but he has only been running for 6 months.
during this time, he didnt get hurt or burnt out. he got strong and fast despite not doing any speed work. next up in the program is Hill Resistance Training (4 weeks).
there is nothing like making a plan, following it and then getting the results you wanted. when christopher was in 6th grade, i mapped out a plan to get him an AA from BC and he graduated from BC before his former classmates graduated from 8th grade.
so far my athletic plan for him is going like my academic plan. the goal is to be the best runner he can be by his senoir year. i dont want him to look back at his high school athletic career and say what if i had trained better?
if anyone out there wants to join us in our quest, you are more than welcome. we need company! look at the kenyans, they train together and it works.
if you want to know more, check out da plan.
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11.11.06
Posted in Training, Kenyans at 9:38 pm by Administrator
Why Kenya?
The following essay was written in January, 1997, as a foreword to the book Train Hard, Win Easy: The Kenyan Way, by Toby Tanser. It was intended to provide background for the book’s anecdotes and training information, which were based on Tanser’s experiences during a five-month visit to Kenya a year earlier. The book is available from Track & Field News, phone 650-948-8188.
In the mid-1960s, when Kenya emerged as a world power in track, Tropical Africa seemed an improbable place for distance runners to come from. For decades, athletes from the cool climes of Northern Europe — the British Isles, Scandinavia, the Soviet bloc — had dominated the distance events, now and then giving way to interlopers from North America or Down Under, or to North Africans running for France. But sub-Saharan Africa, as far as track fans were concerned, was still terra incognita — a land of future sprinters, perhaps, in that it was the ancestral home of so many American and Caribbean dash men, but surely not distance runners.
As late as 1960, few recognized the portent in the marathon victory of Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila at the Rome Olympics. Eight years after that, though, there was no mistaking the significance of the nine medals East Africans won in the long races at the Mexico City Games. The geographical center of distance running was shifting. It now lies almost exactly on the Equator in a poor African country that for the first half of the century seemed no more likely a source of world class distance runners than, say, Gabon or Cameroon.
Why Kenya should have become the world’s preeminent distance running nation is a complex question, but it’s a little less mystifying if you keep in mind two general points about the country. First, although Kenya straddles the equator, its most populous regions don’t fit anybodys stereotype of tropical. More than three-quarters of the country’s 28 million people live at altitudes of 5,000 feet or more, which means they enjoy a year-round climate that’s something like summer in the former center of distance running, Northern Europe. What’s more, of course, many of these high-altitude dwellers benefit from the thin air they breathe, developing powerful hearts and lungs to compensate for the deficiency of oxygen.
The second general point about Kenya is its state of economic development. By world standards, it’s a poor country; the latest World Almanac gives its per capita Gross Domestic Product as $1,170. The comparable figure for the U.S. is $27,607. Now poor countries, as a rule, are not sports powers; either their citizens are too busy scraping by to indulge in such frivolous pursuits, or the countries don’t have the resources to support the institutions that organized sports require. Yet Kenya suffers neither of these crippling disadvantages. Why not? First, Kenyans aren’t quite so poor as the GDP numbers make them seem. Three-quarters of them are subsistence farmers who raise most of their own food and build their own homes out of materials that cost little or nothing, and since these activities don’t figure into the cash economy, they are difficult to count in the GDP. In fact, compared to their fellow Africans, most Kenyans are quite well supplied with basic necessities. Malnutrition is rare, and while droughts produce occasional food shortages, famine is practically non-existent. The infant mortality rate is among the lowest in Africa, life expectancy and literacy among the highest. More than 85% of all children attend at least a few years of primary school.
What accounts for Kenya’s relative good fortune? In a sense, it comes back to altitude. The southwestern quarter of the country, where most of the population lives, is largely made up of highlands watered by moisture drifting over from massive Lake Victoria on Kenya’s western border. It’s some of the best farmland in Africa. This fact was not lost on the British when they built a railroad from the coast to the lake at the turn of the century. The aim was to secure the lake, the source of the Nile, for geopolitical purposes, but to help pay for the railroad, they encouraged British settlement in what soon became known as the White Highlands. The settlers, who had come to stay, built roads and bridges and towns and covered hillsides with huge plantations of coffee and tea — all, of course, with the help of minimally paid African labor on land forcibly expropriated from its original possessors.
Along with a modern economic infrastructure, the British developed sport — golf, tennis, cricket, horse racing and polo for themselves; soccer, boxing and athletics (track and field) for the Africans. At first, African sport was concentrated in the army, the police and the country’s few mission-run schools, but eventually British district officers were marking out running tracks on pasture land around the country and conducting regional meets that built to a Colony championship and sometimes an inter-territorial meet with neighboring Uganda. By the time of Independence in 1963, Kenya had sent small teams — mainly runners and boxers — to two Olympics and three Commonwealth Games.
After Independence, Kenyans took the base left them by the British and, well, ran with it. The government, as in many poor countries, was autocratic and corrupt, but it was also pro-West and relatively stable, so foreign investment poured in. And with increasing jet travel, tourists came in growing numbers to visit the country’s magnificent game parks and Indian Ocean beaches. A sizable chunk of the government’s proceeds from these enterprises went into education, especially at the secondary level, which had been largely neglected by the colonial administration. And with secondary schools came secondary school sports, a vital new avenue for athletic talent.
Before long, U.S. college coaches discovered this fresh source of educated, English-speaking athletes, and from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, when the NCAA imposed age restrictions that made many Kenyans ineligible, hundreds of young men traveled to America to complete their education and develop their running skills. This exodus was decried at home, but it helped sustain Kenyan athletics through the disastrous Olympic boycotts of 1976 and 1980. Then came the International Amateur Athletic Federation’s liberalization of its oft-flouted amateur rules, and a few Kenyans began to earn serious money in Europe and the U.S. When the cash started filtering back to Kenya, it had a galvanizing effect on thousands of young men and women. They saw an opportunity to earn unimagined riches, and they began to train with the ferocious dedication that Toby Tanser documents so thoroughly in this book.
Now, having taken note of all this — relatively recent developments like scholarships and prize money, as well as Kenyas long-standing advantages, such as high altitude, a temperate climate, a reliable food supply and a solid athletic infrastructure — its important to remember that Kenya is still a poor country. And interestingly, given the other circumstances, that, too, can be a plus when it comes to turning out hardy distance runners.
Consider the following points. First, houses in Kenya tend to be small, dark and smokey, and on average, there’s one TV set for every 106 people. This means that Kenyans, especially kids, spend most of their waking hours running around outdoors. Second, cars in Kenya are a luxury. There’s one passenger car for every 180 people; the U.S. ratio is a hundred times greater — one car for every 1.8 people. An obvious consequence of this disparity is that Kenyans cover a lot more ground on foot. Stories of kids running or walking several miles a day to school and back are by now tired cliches, but they’re nonetheless significant. All those miles from early childhood — most of them, it should be noted, covered barefoot — can’t fail to have helped condition young adult Kenyans to withstand training regimens that would injure legs unsteeled to such punishment. Finally, in a country where the average income is roughly 4.2% of what it is in the U.S., it’s hardly surprising that there’s a great willingness to strive and sacrifice for the rewards available even to second- or third-rank distance runners. A net income of just $10,000 in a year is nearly nine times the average Kenyan’s annual earnings.
So it seems that Kenya’s altitude and its particular stage of economic development are a fortuitous combination that has helped to turn out legions of world class distance runners. The odd thing is that while the vast majority of Kenyans share these circumstances, the runners, with very few exceptions, have come from just four of the country’s 40 tribes: the Kikuyu, the Kamba, the Kisii (or Gusii) and the Kalenjin. In fact, about three-fourths of Kenya’s best runners come from just one of these tribes, the Kalenjin, who make up a little more than 10% of the population. To explore the reasons for this astonishing concentration of talent would take another book, but ethnic affiliation — and, sadly, friction — is such a central fact of Kenyan life (not unlike race in the U.S.) that it cant be ignored even in a book about training.
Tribal consciousness is pervasive, but acknowledging it is avoided in polite conversation. Kenyans rarely need to make explicit references to tribe in any case, since a person’s name, accent or physiognomy will usually reveal his or her origins. If they want to make a point of ethnicity, Kenyans will often use a geographical euphemism in place of a tribal name, much as Americans use terms like “inner city.” This sort of conversational delicacy is easy for Kenyans because the country’s administrative regions have generally been drawn along tribal lines. Several of Kenya’s 57 districts are actually named for their principal tribe or sub-tribe — the relevant examples here being Nandi District, Keiyo District, Marakwet District and Kisii District — and a few of the eight provinces (each of which encompasses several districts) are also closely identified with a particular tribe, so that referring to, say, Central Province, can be tantamount to speaking of the Kikuyu.
The trickiest of these multipurpose geographical terms is Rift Valley, and it requires some explanation here because it comes up frequently in the chapters that follow. Depending on the context, Rift Valley can mean any of several things: 1) The Rift Valley is a geological formation, a massive gash in the earth’s crust that runs from the Dead Sea down through eastern Africa to Mozambique. It cuts right through Kenya, north-to-south, geologically splitting off the western third of the country. In its most populous part, it’s about 30 miles wide, bordered on either side by steep escarpments that rise 2,000 feet or more. 2) Rift Valley Province is the largest of Kenya’s administrative regions in both area and population. The province includes practically all of the actual valley, but it also takes in a great deal of territory on either side. 3) Rift Valley is increasingly used as a euphemism for the Kalenjin. Few Kalenjin live in the actual valley — most are spread out along its western rim and as much as 70 miles west of that — but the provincial boundary was drawn and redrawn, first by the British and later at the time of Independence, to include almost all of the tribe’s territory. The Kalenjin now constitute close to half the province’s population, and partly because the current president of Kenya, Daniel arap Moi, happens to be a member of the tribe, the Kalenjin are the politically dominant group in the province.
Finally, when a runner speaks of the Rift Valley as a place, he’s generally referring neither to the actual valley nor to the province, but rather to the Kalenjin homeland, a region of rolling green hills and red dirt cow paths lying at altitudes of between 6,000 and 8,000 feet. And in these respects, the Rift Valley is quite similar to the homelands of two of Kenya’s other running tribes, the Kisii and the Kikuyu. As you will see, all of these areas, Kenya’s western highlands, constitute an ideal environment for the sort of training that has developed the corps of distance runners who now dominate the sport.
Kenya’s Running Tribe
This article originated as a talk given to the annual conference of the British Society of Sports History at Keele University on April 13, 1997. It was later published in the Society’s journal, The Sports Historian (No. 17/2, November 1997).
This talk is about a tribe in Kenya that has a remarkable faculty for turning out world class distance runners. The people are called the Kalenjin. They occupy an area about the size of Wales and they number something under 3 million. That’s about 10% of Kenya’s population. But this group has earned about 75% of Kenya’s distance running honors. That’s impressive enough, in view of the degree to which Kenya now dominates the sport, but looked at another way, the figures are even more remarkable: Over the past 10 years, athletes from this small tribe have won close to 40% of all the biggest international honors available in men’s distance running.
Most of this talk will be a discussion of various notions that have been advanced to account for this phenomenon, but before that I want to throw out a few more numbers to show what I mean by that 40% figure. First, I want to make it clear that I’m talking about men’s distance running. Kalenjin women — African women in general — have lagged behind their male counterparts for reasons I’m afraid I won’t have time to get into.
Now, the Kalenjin excel in varying degrees in all three of distance running’s disciplines: cross country, road racing and track. I’ll take them one at a time, starting with cross country.
Three weeks ago, the annual World Cross Country Championships were held in Turin. I don’t know how much coverage the press here gave the event, but from an international perspective, the World Cross Country Championships are a big deal. In fact, it’s often said that the men’s championship is the toughest of all foot races to win because it attracts the world’s best at distances from the mile to the marathon, and each country can enter not just three runners, but nine. In this year’s men’s race there were 280 competitors from 60 different countries, most of them hoping somehow to upset the Kenyan juggernaut, but in the end, out of those 280 runners, five of the first seven to finish were Kenyans and four of those five were Kalenjin.
Remarkable as it may seem, this result is fairly typical. Since 1986, when Kenya began taking these championships seriously, the country has yet to lose the men’s team race. And Kalenjin runners have made up fully three-quarters of the scoring runners on those 12 winning Kenyan teams. In fact, in eight of the 12 winning years, if only the Kalenjin runners had competed, they’d still have taken the team title. What’s more, of the 36 individual medals awarded in the men’s competition in those 12 years, Kalenjin runners have won 18, precisely half the total.
In road racing, Kalenjin participation has been comparatively limited until recent years, but they’ve had a perceptible impact at the top — the unofficial world best times for the standard road race distances. Kalenjin men own the world bests at five of the eight commonly run distances shorter than the marathon, and in two of the remaining three, Kalenjin runners have bettered the listed world best while running in longer races. As for the marathon itself, a Kalenjin claims history’s second fastest time — 2 hours, 7 minutes, 2 seconds — and Kalenjin runners have won the Boston Marathon, the world’s oldest and most remunerative road race, four times since 1988. In fact, at last year’s Centennial Boston Marathon, the richest road race in history, Kalenjin runners took the first two places, three of the top five, five of the top eight and nine of the top 18.
But nowhere in road racing do Kalenjin achievements compare with the record they’ve built up in the more exacting discipline of track. Here we’re talking about distances from 800 meters to 10,000 meters, and success in these events is measured mainly in two ways: medals and times. I’ll start with medals. First, Olympic medals. Kalenjin distance runners have won 26, eight of them gold. The only meaningful numbers to compare this to are medals won in men’s distance events by whole countries during approximately the same period. If we begin in 1964, the first Olympics to which Kenya sent more than a token contingent, and if we exclude the two Olympics that Kenya boycotted — 1976 and 1980 — the nearest national total is the U.S. with 10. Next, I’m happy to tell you, is Britain, with eight. Fourth place, seven medals, is a tie between Morocco and . . . non-Kalenjin Kenya. Here are the leading national totals, medals and gold medals. As you can see, in the Olympics in which they have fully participated, Kalenjin distance men have won nearly three times as many medals and three times as many golds as rivals from any whole country.
MEDALS, MEN’S TRACK EVENTS 800m to 10,000m
Olympic Games, 1964-96 (excluding boycotted Games of 1976 & 1980)
All Medals GoldKalenjin 26 8USA 10 3Great Britain 8 1Non-Kalenjin Kenya 7 4Morocco 7 3Germany (East & West) 6 1Ethiopia 5 1Finland 4 3New Zealand 4 2Tunisia 4 1
Until 1983, the Olympics were the only worldwide open competition in track and field. But in that year the sport’s governing body introduced the Athletics World Championships, which provide Olympic-level competition without the Olympics’ political baggage. Kenya has participated in each of the five World Championships so far, and Kalenjin distance men have built a record much like the one they’ve established in the Olympics: 17 medals and nine golds. The countries that come closest are Germany (East plus West), with eight medals and two golds, Morocco with seven medals and one gold, and non-Kalenjin Kenya, with five and three.
If we concentrate on more recent worldwide competition — say, in the last 10 years — the medal totals become altogether lopsided. In three Olympics and three World Championships, Kalenjin distance runners have won 31 medals and 12 golds in men’s track events — 34% and 40%, respectively, of the available totals. The nearest whole countries are Morocco with 11 medals and Algeria with four golds (all won by Noureddine Morceli), each total equal to about one-third that of the single Kenyan tribe.
So much for medals. The other gauges of success on the track involve recorded times. The most comprehensive of these are what are called all-time lists, which set out in order the top performers in the whole history of an event, strictly on the basis of their best recorded times. As you might expect, Kalenjin runners are well represented. Here are the number of Kalenjin appearing in the all-time lists for the five Olympic distance events at three different levels — top 10, top 20 and top 50:
NUMBER OF KALENJIN IN MEN’S ALL-TIME LISTS
Event Number of Kalenjin Top 10 Top 20 Top 50800 2 7 131500 0 4 135,000 3 6 1310,000 5 7 133,000 St. 9 13 20 19/50 37/100 72/250 38% 37% 29%
If we tally up these figures for all five events, we find that members of tribe make up 38% of the all-time top 10, 37% of the top 20 and 29% of the top 50. But even these numbers don’t quite convey Kalenjin runners enormous recent impact. That shows up more clearly in annual rankings from the last several years. These are also based solely on recorded times. Here are the numbers of Kalenjin in the top 10 in the five years from 1992 to 96:
NUMBER OF KALENJIN IN ANNUAL TOP TEN LISTS
Event 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996800 4 5 4 5 5 1500 4 2 2 2 65,000 3 3 3 5 310,000 2 4 3 4 53,000 St. 7 4 6 9 9 20 18 18 25 28 40% 36% 36% 50% 56%
Another quick tally reveals that in the last five years Kalenjin runners occupied 43.6% of the top ten spots in the five men’s endurance events. Take this together with their 38% of the top-ten spots on the all-time lists for those events, and the 34% of all Olympic and World Championship medals they’ve won in those events since 1988. Then throw in their collection of world bests in road racing and the incredible 50% of all men’s medals that they’ve won at the World Cross Country Championships since 1986, and you can boil this down to the generalization I made at the beginning: In recent years, of the biggest worldwide honors available in men’s distance running, Kalenjin runners have won something like 40%.
I contend that this record marks the greatest geographical concentration of achievement in the annals of sport, and if we had time I’d welcome arguments to the contrary, but for now, let’s look at what makes these people so good. There’s been a fair amount of published speculation on this subject. I’m going to look at a few of these ideas, and then I’m going to offer a couple of suggestions of my own.
Altitude is most people’s first thought, and with reason. 2,000 meter elevations are common in Kalenjin country, and leading a vigorous outdoor life in the thin air at such altitudes has been shown to help create the high aerobic capacity that’s vital to distance running success. Every athletics fan has heard stories of runners’ childhoods in these highlands spent covering mile upon mile chasing cattle or — to cite the contemporary chestnut — jogging back and forth to school. The question is, why have these circumstances been so much more helpful to the Kalenjin than to other high-altitude dwellers? Where are the world-class athletes from Nepal, Peru and Lesotho? And what about elsewhere in Kenya? A dozen tribes around the country lead similar lives at comparable altitudes and have produced no notable runners.
How about diet? When I first wrote about Kalenjin runners 20 years ago, nutritional theories of the time ascribed benefits to the relatively high proportion of protein in their diet (from cows milk and blood) compared with the diets of other African peoples. Actually, by Western standards, Kalenjin protein intake was pretty low — lower still among mess-fed soldiers and school boys, from whose ranks most of the athletes come. These days, however, conventional dietary wisdom touts complex carbohydrates, and Kenyans starchy fare has been cited as a possible source of runners’ strength in several recent TV programs and articles in the consumer press. There’s no question that the Kalenjin do live on a starchy diet. But then so do most Third World peoples. Starch, after all, is what subsistence farmers produce.
Material incentives are the time-honored explanation for ethnic disproportion in professional sports — the classic examples in my country being the succession of Irish, Italian, Black and Latino boxers from the wrong side of the tracks. By this line of thinking, the downtrodden groups’ inordinate success results from hordes of boys taking up boxing because they see it as an escape route from their desperate poverty. The same reasoning is often applied to running in Kenya today. The availability, first of U.S. college scholarships and now prize money and appearance fees has had a demonstrable effect in boosting interest and participation throughout the country. But the Kalenjin were turning out world-class runners long before such rewards became available, and they continue to turn out three times as many as the rest of Kenya’s tribes combined, incentives or no incentives.
Clearly, none of these factors is a sufficient explanation for Kalenjin success, but neither can they be dismissed out of hand. Altitude by itself, for example, doesn’t account for much. But when you combine 2,000 meter elevations with equatorial latitudes, you get an ideal climate for sustained outdoor activity — comfortably warm days, cool nights, low humidity. That, together with altitude’s aerobic benefits, begins to show why Kenya’s highlands as a whole are an ideal home for distance running. And it’s worth pointing out that while about a quarter of Kenya’s population lives in comparatively sultry conditions at altitudes below 1200 meters, every one of the country’s world class runners is a highlander.
Diet, too, has some significance, though I doubt if it has much to do with complex carbohydrates. Rather, it’s that, like most Kenyans, and unlike many of the world’s poor, the Kalenjin have enough to eat. The simple fact that Western Kenya has a lot of excellent farm land and a reliable food supply sets the country apart from many places that might otherwise be breeding grounds for runners.
That brings me back to poverty, which is also an important factor, but not quite in the cliched sense of an oppressively grim environment that drives young men to train maniacally as they dream of escape. Rural western Kenya, where almost all the runners come from, is a far cry from a teeming slum or a grimy coal field. It’s a land of beautiful green hills, not unlike Somerset or Wiltshire. And compared with other African countries, Kenya is fairly well supplied with basic necessities. Malnutrition is rare, infant mortality is among the lowest in Africa, life expectancy and literacy among the highest. More than 85% of all children attend at least a few years of primary school. And the country has been able to support the institutions — schools, uniformed services — that provide a fairly solid athletic infrastructure. So Kenya is at least prosperous enough to provide athletic opportunities.
Yet the people are poor, and unemployment is high. Kenya’s per capita Gross Domestic Product is about $1200 a year, less than 1/20th the figure of a prosperous Western country. This means that to the average Kenyan, even the meager winnings brought in by most professional or semi-professional runners look pretty lavish. The prospect of earning, say, $10,000 a year as a second- or third-rank road racer is a powerful incentive, and in view of the hundreds of Kenyans now making that kind of money, not an unrealistic ambition. Someone who thinks he has potential as a runner might quite reasonably devote a year or two to intensive training in the hope of attracting the attention of an agent and landing an invitation to a foreign road race or track meet.
Still, while there’s something in each of these factors — altitude, diet, poverty — that helps explain the phenomenon of Kenyan running as a whole, none of them begins to account for the hugely disproportionate success of the Kalenjin. For that, we have to look more closely at circumstances unique to the tribe.
An obvious thought is that the Kalenjin might be endowed with some sort of collective genetic gift. This is touchy stuff, of course, and there’s nothing like replicable scientific data to support the idea. But the prima facie case for a genetic explanation makes some sense: the Kalenjin marry mainly among themselves; they’ve lived for centuries at altitudes of 2,000 meters or more; and, at least by tradition, they spend their days chasing up and down hills after livestock. So it’s not unreasonable to suggest that over time some sort of genetic adaptation has taken place that has turned out to be helpful in competitive distance running.
This notion gets some flimsy support from the fact that ethnographic and linguistic data link the Kalenjin to tribes elsewhere in East Africa that have turned out a majority of their country’s world class runners: the Oromo in Ethiopia, the Iraqw and Barabaig in Tanzania and the Tutsi in Burundi. There’s a temptation to imagine a race of lean, cattle-herding uebermenschen wandering up and down the Rift Valley.
What I find more intriguing, however, is the possibility that some of these peoples’ customs might have functioned indirectly as genetic selection mechanisms favoring strong runners. I’m thinking specifically of the practice of cattle theft — euphemistically known as cattle raiding. It was common to all these pastoral peoples, but in Kenya, at least, the Kalenjin were its foremost practitioners. Of course they didn’t regard it as theft; they were merely repossessing cattle that were theirs by divine right and happened to have fallen into other hands. Never mind that those into whose hands the cattle had fallen often felt the same way. Anyway, Kalenjin raids often called for treks of more than 100 miles to capture livestock and drive them home before their former owners could catch up. The better a young man was at raiding — in large part, a function of his speed and endurance — the more cattle he accumulated. And since cattle were what a prospective husband needed to pay for a bride, the more a young man had, the more wives he could buy, and the more children he was likely to father. It’s not hard to imagine that such a reproductive advantage might cause a significant shift in a group’s genetic makeup over the course of a few centuries.
Much as I enjoy this sort of speculation, however, a different kind of data is needed to substantiate anything approaching a scientific genetic theory, and so far none exists. The most rigorous work to date has been done by the Swedish exercise physiologist Bengt Saltin, who took a team of researchers to western Kenya in 1990 and conducted elaborate treadmill tests and muscle biopsies on several dozen Kenyan men, all of whom happened to be Kalenjin. He discovered unusual features in his subjects’ muscle tissue and response to physical exertion, but he concluded that these were probably the result of the Kenyans’ lifetime of vigorous activity at altitude.
One of his findings does suggest the possibility that the Kalenjin evince uncommon “trainability” — the capacity to increase aerobic efficiency with training — and research by the Canadian geneticist Claude Bouchard has shown this trait to be largely hereditary. Before drawing any firm conclusions about Kalenjin gifts, however, further studies would have to determine that trainability — or any other heritable trait — was truly instrumental in distance running success and that ordinary Kalenjin exhibit the trait to an unusual degree.
Without such evidence, notions of Kalenjin genetic superiority rest on anecdotal data — and as you might imagine, there’s an abundance of that, some of it surprisingly persuasive. My favorite data of this sort are a dozen brief case studies I’ve collected of Kalenjin young men in their 20s who had never thought of themselves as runners at all until they wound up in circumstances that more or less obliged them to take up the sport. Most often this was because friends who were runners helped them to secure American track scholarships under false pretenses, and once on campus, the non-runners had to run in order to stay. In each case, what happened when they started training is quite remarkable. I’ll give one example.
Paul Rotich is the son of a prosperous Kalenjin farmer. The father wanted his son to go to college in the U.S., and in 1988, when Paul was 22, he was packed off to South Plains Junior College in Texas, where there were several other Kalenjin already enrolled, all of them on track scholarships. Rotich, however, went with no scholarship but with $10,000 his father had managed to collect, a sum that should have been plenty to pay his tuition, room and board for two years. By the end of the first year, though, Paul found that he had spent $8,000, and he realized he had to do something to get himself through the next year. Under the circumstances, the first thing that came to mind was a track scholarship. Trouble was, he had never run a race in his life, and he was fat — 85 kilos (13 and 1/2 stone) at a height of 1.73 meters (5 ft. 8 in.). He began training, running at night because he was embarrassed to be seen lumbering around the track. In the autumn he managed to make the cross-country team, and by the end of the season he finished in the top 50 in the national junior college championships. But that was just the beginning. He landed a track scholarship to nearby Lubbock Christian University and over the next two years he earned All-American honors 10 times in cross country and various track events. When he went back to Kenya and told his cousin what he had done, the cousin replied, “So, it is true. If you can run, any Kalenjin can run.”
It may be true, and if it is, it may be because of some as yet unspecified genetic endowment. But even if the Kalenjin are blessed with an innate physical gift, that doesn’t account for their astonishing record in major championships. To succeed in those circumstances, an athlete must not only be able to run fast, but to run fastest when it matters most. And in this, the ability to rise to the occasion, to perform under pressure, the Kalenjin are supreme. I’ve tried to quantify this ability by evaluating performances in the most pressure-laden of all athletic events, the Olympic Games, and to compare Kalenjin performances with those of their rivals in the distance events. The aim was to rate performances not just in terms of medals or finishing places but in comparison to each athlete’s pre-Olympic personal best. The base line, 0, was what I judged to be a respectable but undistinguished Olympic performance: not getting a medal, not reaching the final, but coming close — within half a percent — of the pre-Olympic PB. In a 1500 meters, that means within about a second. I gave positive points for reaching the final, finishing in the top eight and for winning medals, and also for improving a personal best by various percentages. Negative points for failing to finish and for falling short of a personal best by various percentages. Here’s a summary of the scoring system:
PERFORMANCE UNDER PRESSURE Point System
Base line: 0 = < 0.5% slower than pre-Olympic PB, not finalist, not medalist
Positive points:
+1 for reaching final
+2 for reaching top eight
+3 for bronze
+4 for silver
+6 for gold
+1 for PB by <1 %
+2 for PB by >1 % but <2%…etc.
+1 additional for PB in final
+1 additional for Olympic record (no world records in sample)
Negative points for times slower than pre-Olympic PB by > 0.5% (e.g. -2 for time >1% but <2% below PB)
I evaluated every performance of every Kenyan in men’s track events from 800 m to 10,000 m, for every Olympics from 1964 to 1996, and I did the same for the two countries with the next best records in terms of medals, the U.S. and Britain. Here’s a brief rundown of the aggregate scores:
PERFORMANCE UNDER PRESSURE
National Aggregate Scores
USA
-107 points by 82 men in 104 appearances in 7 OG; 9 PBs; 7 PBs in finals.
Avg. per man: -1.30
Avg. per appearance: -1.03
Great Britain
-95 points by 76 men in 92 appearances in 7 OG; 6 PBs; 5 PBs in finals.
Avg. per man: -1.25
Avg. per appearance: -1.03
Non-Kalenjin Kenya
+49 points by 18 men in 24 appearances in 7 OG; 9 PBs; 7 PBs in finals.
Avg. per man: +2.72
Avg. per appearance: +2.04
Kalenjin
+175 points by 41 men in 59 appearances in 7 OG; 25 PBs; 15 PBs in finals.
Avg. per man: +4.27
Avg. per appearance: +2.97
What accounts for this extraordinary difference? What is it that gives seemingly every Kalenjin runner the ability to summon a supreme effort when it matters most? We tend to think of such emotional strengths as acquired rather than inherited, though of course there’s the possibility that cattle raiding or some other custom might have conferred a reproductive advantage upon, say, individuals who stood firm in crises, and that that faculty was somehow passed on. But I’m inclined to believe this ability is the result of conditioning — that the tribe’s austere warrior culture prepares young Kalenjin almost from birth not to quail under pressure.
The most obvious and probably the most significant set of customs in this regard is the series of escalating physical ordeals each child undergoes while growing up, culminating in circumcision, which marks initiation into adulthood. Circumcision is the central event in the life of every Kalenjin youth, anticipated for years with dread, and suffered with unblinking stoicism under the eyes of watchful elders, who are ready to brand a boy a coward for life if he so much as winces. It’s not hard to see how this rite might help develop a capacity to put up with pain, which, of course, is vital in running long races.
But circumcision is far from unique to the Kalenjin. Dozens of societies in Kenya and hundreds elsewhere in Africa use more or less the same operation for more or less the same purpose; in many, the rite has much the same significance and is accompanied by comparable community-wide commotion. For this reason, I was at first inclined to look beyond circumcision for whatever it was in Kalenjin culture that gave the runners their special strength. I changed my mind after going to a couple of circumcision ceremonies. I don’t have time now to give a detailed account of what I saw, but when I compared it to what I was able to glean about other initiation rites from standard ethnographies and cross-cultural studies, I found what I think are significant differences.
They’re not in kind, but in degree. In general, the Kalenjin rite and the long recovery period that follows are invested with greater secrecy and solemnity, and with greater importance as a means of inculcating standards of behavior. The operation itself is more physically arduous and the sanctions for failure more severe (flinching in fear or pain can result in what amounts to a kind of permanent internal banishment). Perhaps most important is the pervasive sense among adults, children and initiates that the traits of character tested in the ritual — courage, endurance, determination, restraint — are the ones the tribe values above all, and that to pass the test is to affirm those values, to fail it is to betray them. Thus as the initiates approach the predawn ceremony, they’re quite conscious of bearing the weight not only of their own fears and hopes and those of their family and friends, but also those of the whole community, the tribe and centuries of Kalenjin tradition. A boy who stands up under that kind of pressure at 14 or 15 is unlikely at 25 to be anything but invigorated by the comparatively benign tensions accompanying an Olympic final. And if he was able as a boy to muster the strength to endure the excruciating pain of circumcision, what must he be able to do as a man when faced with nothing more than the aches and fatigue of the closing laps of a tough race.
Now, as a final note, since this is a gathering of British sports historians, I’d like to bring up another possible reason for Kalenjin success that has to do with a British colonial law enforcement policy. I once had high hopes for this idea, but up to now I haven’t had much luck finding evidence to support it. I’ve talked about cattle raiding. In the early part of the century, it was endemic in Western Kenya, and the colonial administration went to some lengths to stamp it out. Because the Kalenjin were the most frequent offenders, they got more than their share of attention from the British in this regard. Raiders who were caught were jailed, and prisoners were sent out as laborers on public works projects; among these were the leveling and marking out of running tracks. Thus rustling and running seemed to be connected in an odd kind of symbiosis. This connection was confirmed in a letter I have from a former colonial officer — now dead — who recalled a campaign he conducted in one part of Kalenjin territory in the 1930s, promoting athletics as a surrogate for cattle raiding with a slogan that translates roughly as, “Show your valor in sports and games, not in war.”
So it seemed that the Kalenjin fondness for raiding earned them an extra push from the colonial administration to take up track instead. But try as I may, I haven’t been able to find any evidence in colonial records that my correspondent’s approach was ever applied throughout Kalenjin country. There are lots of references to Kalenjin cattle raiding, some with a detectable note of admiration, but none that mention the promotion of sport as a surrogate. I’ve looked through some of the literature on sport as a mechanism of social control, and there’s certainly evidence that sport was used this way among another Kenyan tribe, the Kikuyu, after the Mau Mau rebellion in the ’50s. But I’ve found nothing about the Kalenjin. I’ve even looked at the encouragement of cricket as a surrogate for ritual warfare among Trobriand Islanders to see if I could in some way argue that this sort of thing was a common policy throughout the Empire. But that argument seemed a little thin. And in any event, if athletics was encouraged disproportionately among the Kalenjin in the ’30s, the effects of the policy were long delayed: Kalenjin names don’t start turning up with any frequency on the rolls of national champions until after World War II, when the tribe began to join the mainstream of rapidly Westernizing Kenya. Still, I’m eager to pursue this idea further if anyone here can suggest sources that I may have overlooked on colonial law enforcement or the use of sport as a means of social control.
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11.08.06
Posted in Training, Kenyans at 7:15 pm by Administrator
Kenya Diary: Kenyan World XC Championships History
To say that Kenya has had extraordinarily colossal success at the IAAF World Cross Country Championships would still be understating it. The East African nation has thoroughly dominated the entire world for nearly two decades.
The International Cross Country Championships were given official IAAF World Championship status in 1973. As a team, Kenya’s men’s squad first made a mark with its third place in 1981, finishing behind Ethiopia and the U.S (with Craig Virgin winning his second straight individual title). Finishes of 4th, 3rd, 4th, and 2nd the next four years paved the way to the Kenya’s first world title in 1986.
Since then, no other country has won the men’s 12k team title. None. Kenya has won a remarkable 18 straight men’s world crowns—often in dominating fashion. The lead pack of the race often looks like a blanket of Kenyan jerseys gliding in unison over hill and dale.
Individually, three Kenyans have won 12 individual crowns since 1973. John Ngugi won five titles between 1986 and 1992, William Sigei won twice in 1993 and 1994, and marathon WR-holder Paul Tergat won five straight between 1995 and 1999.
In 1998, the IAAF decided to split the fields and offer a short (4k) course along with the traditional long (12k) course races, with the idea that more world-renowned middle distance runners would enter and bring prestige and media coverage to the event. Splitting the field hasn’t dampened the triumphs of the Kenyan men—it has, in fact, only allowed the nation more opportunity to dominate. Kenya has won all six short course team titles since the race’s inception—twice with a perfect team score. Kenyan runners have won four of six individual short course crowns.
In addition, in the men’s junior races since 1988, Kenya has won every team title except one (Ethiopia triumphed in 1998, with Kenya a scant 4 points behind).
If the Kenyan men, inarguably, have had the most success at the World XC meet, then the Kenyan women, arguably, have also had more success than all other nations.
Kenya’s women’s team first appears in the world results at fifth place in 1987, and Kenya’s first long course (8k) women’s title came in 1991. Since then, Kenya has won seven of 13 world team titles, plus four additional runner-up finishes. Ethiopia has five titles and seven runner-ups, but has had more recent success. Hellen Chepngeno’s 1994 crown is Kenya’s sole individual title in the long race.
In the women’s short course (4k) history, Kenya earned three straight team 3rds starting in 1998, then took second in both 2001 and 2002, and won the nation’s first short course team title last year. Individually, Jackline Maranga won in 1999 and Edith Masai has won the last two years.
In the women’s junior team races, Kenya has won 10 of 15 titles since the race’s inception in 1989, plus four runner-ups and a single third.
In 1994, Kenyans won all four senior individual titles. In 1995, Kenya won all four team titles in the men’s and women’s senior and junior races. In an overall accounting of team and individual titles since 1990, an amazing success story emerges: 68 team titles and 68 individual titles have been up for grabs, and—astonishingly—Kenya has won 49 team and 27 individual crowns.
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Posted in Training, Kenyans at 7:13 pm by Administrator
Kenya Diary: Iten Training Camp Part 3
(T&FN correspondent Kirk Reynolds is visiting Kenya this winter and will be submitting observations from time to time. The second major stop on Reynolds’ trip was Iten, a hotbed for distance runners.
Iten observations 3
The other night a handful of us from the camp went to a nearby place for dinner called Kerio View. It overlooks the edge of the Rift Valley in a stunning manner. It sits on the edge of a steep rim, and you look down on an incredible view thousands of feet to the Rift floor. One striking fact about the view was the obvious lack of electrical power. In a whipping, breezy dusk, as the sun was heading down, you could see a multitude of farms and mud-hut houses with cattle enclosures on the valley floor all the way across to the other side where the valley heads back up to Kabernet, Paul Tergat’s hometown. The sun quickly dropped behind us, and everything quickly got darker and darker, and then it was night and there were no lights. None. Way off in the distance, surrounded by a pitch black sky and earth, you could see barely see a tiny patch of lights in Kabernet on the far rim, but everywhere else you knew that thousands of people were living without power and the accompanying lights, tv, fridges, stereos, etc.
The Kamariny Stadium track about two kilometers outside Iten, like Kerio View, is also right on the edge of the Rift Valley. The track is one of only three in the greater Eldoret area, and rumor has it that it’s longer than 400m. A Dutch marathoner with a GPS watch clocks it today at 403m, leading to a reasonable guess that it’s an old British-built 440y oval.
The stadium is wooden and ancient, a steeple pit sits in the grass at the north end, and three warped wooden SC barriers sit on the homestretch. On the infield, two worn trails in the grass criss-cross each other from runners working the diagonals. At 10am, a crowd of Kenyan men and women train on the oval, not caring if it’s 400m or 440y. I count over 40 bodies on the track or infield, not including some sheep that wander onto the grass to graze. A trio of men rips off 1000m repeats at about 66 seconds a lap. With the cross country season over, more and more will be visiting the track for their workouts.
As I watch at the track, a couple of Kenyan lads come up to me after their workout and ask if I am a manager. After explaining no, I’m visiting here for other reasons, they insist on giving me their names and email addresses so that when I return to the U.S. I can get them in touch with either a manager/agent, or a coach who will give them a scholarship. That seems to be a common wish for many, and I’m wondering how many runners in the area are training with the hope of ‘making it,’ versus those who are training because they’ve already won races, or run fast times, and are on a sponsored shoe squad.
There is in Kenya a culture of everyone giving running a try of some sort. It seems that everyone has at least attempted to run, whether as a youth or as an adult. Down at the Kamariny Stadium track, school children will fall in behind some runner doing a workout. It might be a six-year old who does 30m repeats before falling off the pace and waiting for the adult to come around the track to join in again for 30m more, and repeating this ten times. Or it’s the youth who watches a group of obviously talented, sponsored runners go through their track workout and leave, before cautiously stepping barefoot on the track to try out some 200m strides.
In the U.S., I often hear stories that good male or female distance runners have been lost to soccer, or that male sprinters, throwers or jumpers are lost to football. Not so with Kenyan distance running. Everyone has given it a try, and the country’s depth is ample evidence that the best are indeed there.
If there is a downside to all this success, it’s that not everyone can win World Cross, or Olympic gold, or win the Boston marathon. Many Kenyan running hopefuls in the Iten area have met, seen, or heard about the fair number of successful, rich runners—men and women—who return home with wealth from running that will support them for the rest of their lives in Kenya. Everyone wants that, but everyone won’t get it. Often, Europe and U.S. road races now put a cap on the number of Kenyans who get elite entry into a road race or marathon, the result of an injudicious notion that too many Kenyans in a race would hurt the event. If there’s prize money for the top 10, then maybe 12 Kenyans are now invited, leaving many, many other country-men and –women scrambling to find entry into a competition to earn some money.
Last year Athletics Kenya tried to implement a registration process to account for all Kenyan athletes competing abroad. Often, AK officials would first learn of an athlete’s success in a smaller international road race only by reading about it in the newspaper. Only 400 athletes complied with AK’s request, with many declining to register after finding out there was a fee. In a November 2003 article in the East African Standard, AK General Secretary David Okeyo estimated that there were up to 2000 professional Kenyan runners, both in Kenya and abroad, but AK’s small staff of only five was too small to account for athletes’ whereabouts at all times. There are many more trying to join the ranks of Kenya’s professional runners.
Athletics Kenya, and the country itself, have also been hit recently with runners changing nationalities – ‘defections,’ as the nation’s papers term it. The most notable example is Saif Saaeed Shaheen, the former Stephen Cherono, who won the Worlds steeplechase for Qatar in 2003 after representing Kenya earlier in the year. Stories allege that Shaheen is being paid a monthly sum for life, plus Qatar will build a track complex either in Eldoret or near Iten. Leonard Mucheru and Abel Cheruiyot are hoping to represent Bahrain. The February 26, 2004 issue of the East African Standard had a story explaining that both Nicholas Kemboi (#2 10k time in 2003 of 26:30.03 behind Geb) and James Kwalia (bronze medalist in the World Youth Champs 3k in 2001) have also applied for citizenship in Qatar after getting a better offer there than from Bahrain.
Kenyans who change nationality will admittedly have an easier time making their new nation’s international teams, but the loss to Kenya is bitter pill for the nation to swallow.
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Posted in Training, Kenyans at 7:09 pm by Administrator
Kenya Diary: Iten Training Camp Part 2
(T&FN correspondent Kirk Reynolds is visiting Kenya this winter and will be submitting observations from time to time. The second major stop on Reynolds’ trip was Iten, a hotbed for distance runners.
Iten observations 2
There’s no secret to Kenyan running success. It’s hard work. Many others have listed what might be considered foundational variables that could give Kenyans a jump start on their running: being born and living at altitude, which boosts red cell counts and blood oxygen; abundant walking as kids, either to school, to fetch water or firewood, or with family cattle, and often without shoes, developing foot and leg strength; an ancestral history among certain tribes of cattle raiding involving miles and miles of foot travel out of the area; a high pain threshold attributed to circumcision rites; a diet high in both carbohydrates and protein, comprised of fresh, non-processed food; etc.
While this edges close to the precarious subject of a genetic advantage, I’m certain that these, and other reasons, all contribute—in a non-causal way—to running success. But you still have to train—and train with a single-minded fervor rare in today’s American society, where being simply passable at many things is supposed to demonstrate much-desired diversity. Many Iten- and Eldoret-area Kenyans run with a sole-minded, self-defining passion. And many Kenyans from tribes outside of this area are moving here to train, as well.
The Kalenjin people are one of three primary subgroups of the Nilotic tribes, an ethno-linguistic group in Kenya’s Western Highlands and Rift Valley area. They have produced, by far, the bulk of the country’s distance running success—both in road racing, and on the track, and for both men and women. Composed of people from tribes such as the Keiyo, Kipsigi, Marakwet, Nandi, Pokot, Sabaot, Terik and Tugen, the Kalenjin comprise about one-tenth of Kenya’s total population of 31 million people.
Kenyan running expert John Manners calculated in 1997 that the Kalenjin had earned about 75% of Kenya’s distance running awards in cross country, road racing and track and field. Here are Manners’ numbers (from www.Kenyarunners.com) on Kalenjin success through 1996: 43.6% of the top-10 positions from 1992-1996 in the five men’s distance events from 800m – 10,000m, 38% of the top-10 all-time list positions in those events, 34% of all Olympic and World Championships medals in those events from 1988-1996, 50% of all men’s medals in the World Cross Country Championships from 1988-1996. In sum, Manners estimates that out of all honors up for grabs worldwide in men’s distance running, Kalenjin men have won 40% of them.
In their book “Kenyan Running,” authors John Bale and Joe Sang make the point that the nation-state of Kenya is simply a politically-imposed boundary. The Kenyan national uniform that Kalenjin runners wear in international competition accentuates differences between nations (i.e. Kenya’s medal count at the Olympics), while at the same time it minimizes differences between various tribes by promoting national unity through success (i.e., again, Kenya’s medal count at the Olympics).
So what makes Kenyans, and Kalenjin in particular, run so well? A quick analogy using the well-known food pyramid comes to mind. We all know the structure: a bottom underpinning of bread, cereal, rice, pasta, then a middle level of veggies and fruits, then a higher level of dairy, meat, poultry, fish, beans, and eggs, all topped by a small portion of oils, fats and sweets that one is supposed to “use sparingly.” Each area of the pyramid has a suggested number of servings per day for healthy living.
Now picture a running pyramid to maximize your running success. Your best running will come from sampling significantly from all the areas in the pyramid. On the bottom of the running pyramid you have the foundational variables listed above—the breads and cereals, if you will—of altitude, walking, ancestral history, pain threshold, etc. In the middle you might put self-care: sleeping a lot, and eating healthy, non-processed foods. And the top of the pyramid—the dessert of running—is hard work, but instead of “use sparingly,” it is recommended that a runner “use abundantly” from this top level.
Kenyans can, and do, sample heartily from all levels.
One could argue that the general Kalenjin population possesses the bottom- and middle-level traits. Stretching the argument further, you could say that most any Kalenjin could become a decent runner by adding the top layer of hard work. Indeed, Berkeley anthropologist Vincent Sarich has statistically estimated that the average Kalenjin could outrun 90% of the rest of the human race.
You could also argue that the general U.S. population possesses very little from any of the levels of the running pyramid. Stretching the argument further, you could say that most national-class U.S. runners possess traits from the top levels—many runners work hard and take care of their bodies through rest and nutrition—but are missing the foundation. The food pyramid analogy eventually breaks down because a runner simply can’t opt to take something from the bottom level; that is, a U.S. runner can’t go back and be reborn at 8000’ altitude, or choose an ancestral history of cattle raiding.
I’m not saying it is a lost cause for any U.S. runner to catch up with the Kenyans, but it would seem to take an inordinate amount of the running pyramid’s middle and top layers to even the playing field. U.S. instances do exist to prove it is possible (see Deena Drossin, Bob Kennedy).
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Posted in Training, Kenyans at 7:03 pm by Administrator
Kenya Diary: Iten Training Camp Part I
(T&FN correspondent Kirk Reynolds is visiting Kenya this winter and will be submitting observations from time to time. The second major stop on Reynolds’ trip was Iten, a hotbed for distance runners.
A detour to Western Kenya (Iten observations 1)
I’m in Kenya on a spring term sabbatical from my job at a small U.S. college, and I have traveled to Kenya for two reasons. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Training, Kenyans at 6:55 pm by Administrator
POST RACE
13 Feb 2004 - Friday
After the six Kenyan National Cross Country Championship races are complete, the entire crowd of 5000 begins to congregate near the grandstand, either up in the seats or surrounding a stage area that has been set up for awards. The band has continued playing and people are talking and laughing, and runners are still running-maybe a warmdown for some, maybe because it’s just what you do.
There is a long stretch while waiting for results to be finalized. The band takes a break. A group of women dancers in red wraps comes out onto the grass, two drummers sit on the stage corner, and festive singing, clapping and movement fills the area for 15 minutes.
The music and dancing end, and David Okeyo, the General Secretary for Athletics Kenya, takes the microphone and begins to hold court. A garrulous, imposing man, he wants to call up and recognize all the runners who earned national team berths. There are six teams: long, short and junior teams for both men and women, and Athletics Kenya will take 8-9 runners in each race to the team camp that begins next week in preparation for Brussels. As those runners sidle up to sit in one area of the grandstand, roll call is taken to see who’s missing. As might be expected, most of the 12k men are absent; they finished most recently and are probably still warming down.
“Kiprop, John Cheruiyot, Kipchoge, Charles Kamathi, come here, okay please? Where are you?” Okeyo demands in Swahili in a booming voice that echoes across the entire Ngong Racecourse. The crowd chuckles. If the runners are anywhere in a one-mile radius, they should hear him.
Finally everyone has been accounted for, and introductions can commence. There is one special ceremony to begin the awards, and it’s for a single highlighted race. The top three finishers in the men’s 12k are called up after Okeyo’s introduction. Then Okeyo turns to the grandstand and welcomes a special presenter here today. Heads in the crowd turn, and Paul Tergat, five-time World XC Champ and current marathon WR-holder descends the club-level stairs to applause and then hands bags with race sponsor Energizer labels on them to Eliud Kipchoge, John Korir, and Wilberforce Talel.
One of his country’s best-loved runners, Tergat chose not to race today in order to concentrate on his training for April’s London Marathon and then the Athens Olympic marathon this coming summer. Tergat first announced this in late December, but everyone kept hoping he would change his mind and run here today. Attired in a dark suit, Tergat looks striking on stage and beams as he shakes his countrymen’s hands.
Next each of the individuals on the six national teams are introduced-“Clap!” commands Okeyo repeatedly in Swahili to the gathering-and the runners sit down in the hot sun on the grass in front of the grandstand. After all the runners are introduced, over 50 lounge on the grass in what must be one of the most remarkable collections of athletic talent worldwide in any sport. The runners don’t seem awed, just hot, and Okeyo dismisses them back to sit the stadium shade.
Okeyo turns back to the crowd and makes a grand announcement: “We have appointed six coaches. We are entering in all six categories of the cross country (world meet), so you can know why we have selected six coaches. Now these six coaches, guests of honor, will be coordinated by another coach by the name Patrick Sang.”
Sang, the 1992 Olympic steeplechase silver medalist, will oversee a new format for Kenya, which has a long and controversial history of selecting and dealing with coaches heading its national teams-whether through favoritism, back-room deals, or seemingly unfair national governing body machinations.
Instead of a small staff like before, Okeyo announces that each of the six teams will have its own coach under Sang, plus the overall squad will have a chaperone, team manager, assistant team manager, and a physiotherapist.
“We have selected these teams (of eight or nine runners),” continues Okeyo. “But according to the IAAF, we shall only enter six in every category. That’s the team that will finally travel to Brussels, and four will score in every category. That’s the rule. And we all are looking forward to big success.”
Okeyo then turns serious, “I want to say one thing: I request everybody not to politicize the selection of the coaches. The Coaches’ Commission had their own meeting, and 42 coaches were drawn from all over the country. They sat down and recommended the coaches who were named. They agreed among themselves. So nobody should politicize the selection of the coaches. And if we fail, we shall blame you, the coaches.”
In the U.S., a public comment about blaming would be considered light-hearted and be greeted with chuckles. Here, the only sound is the rustle of a light breeze rounding the grandstand corner. Okeyo is dead serious, and the weight of his words lands heavily on the coaching staff’s shoulders. ‘Big success’ can only mean world team titles, and six of them. But Okeyo isn’t through doling out his and his country’s expectations.
“You have been given the mandate to ensure that these teams come back not only as successful teams, we need this time individual positions. The titles, we need them back. And I have no fear in my mind that we are going to win the cross country in Brussels.”
Not only does Okeyo want six team titles for Kenya, he’s now asking for six individual crowns. A clean sweep of the World Championships? It seems a tall order, but if any country can do it, Kenya can.
In the past two years, Kenenisa Bekele of Ethiopia has won both the long and short course individual titles for men, to Kenya’s great frustration. In the men’s team score in the long race, Kenya won last year with 17 points, with Ethiopa an unnervingly close second place at 23, which is the best second place team score ever in the meet after scoring 45 two years ago. Kenya’s East African northern neighbor is closing the gap in the junior men’s team score, too. On the women’s side, Werknesh Kidane of Ethiopa won the 2003 long course individual title, and Ethiopia has won the last two women’s long course team titles. With only a few exceptions in the past five years, if Kenya hasn’t won the title, then Ethiopia has.
Kenya-and David Okeyo specifically-feels the heat, and it’s not just the equatorial sun.
Okeyo completes his speech, and then turns the microphone over to other officials to take their turn, including Najib Balala, the Minister for Gender, Sports, Culture and Social Services, who announces cash awards for all medal winners. As the speeches linger on to nearly two hours after the end of the 12k, the crowd outside the stadium gets louder and louder with conversational chatter as people’s attention wanders. Finally the speeches stop, and the band brings the crowd to its feet with the Kenyan national anthem. People scatter and begin to leave.
As the crowd thins, the national team runners stay in their seats in the middle of the grandstand. Pretty soon, they’re the only ones sitting there, and Okeyo turns and faces them directly to discuss team details.
“Haya (Okay), how many of you don’t have passports?” he asks. Out of the over 50 athletes, only 8 are without a passport, mostly very young-looking junior team members. The others must all have some sort of international experience, which is astounding. “We also need to get visas. Belgian visas are needed two weeks before travel.”
Okeyo also knows that many of the more veteran, passport-carrying runners he’s talking to have coaches and managers outside the country. These runners will shortly be heading into a month-long team camp with the six announced team coaches directing their training.
“I don’t want to hear of anybody hearing how to train by telephone,” Okeyo demands. He points to the coaches seated before the group. “These people…,” he trails off with the point made clear. “This is a national team.”
Okeyo insists that the runners all report to camp on Monday. “No exceptions. None,” he says. The camp will be held near Embu, on the slopes of Mt. Kenya about 140 kilometers north of Nairobi, and the squad will be based there until leaving for Brussels three days before the World meet. A few of the younger junior runners express concern about school and letting their teachers know, and Okeyo compromises to the junior men’s and women’s teams on a Wednesday arrival. None of the others raise any questions. They will be at camp on Monday.
John Kibowen asks about the camp facilities, but with his gentle voice, Okeyo has to ask him twice to repeat the question. With the camp being held at a teachers’ college, Okeyo assures him that the camp accommodations will be adequate for their needs.
The team meeting ends and Okeyo heads up into the grandstand’s clubhouse for a post-race luncheon. I catch up to him to see if I can ask a couple more questions about the change in the selection of the country’s coaching staff.
“The coaches were recommended by the Coaches’ Commission,” he says. “The ones picked were in the IAAF Level I and Level II. Another consideration was past experience, and their current performance. And we came up with the six we have named. There’s not much difference (than how it was done before), but, you see, it’s always good to give all the stakeholders a say in anything before you actually can make it work properly.”
I want to sit down with Okeyo and get his thoughts comparing the U.S. to Kenya, but he’s obviously antsy to be finished. I want to ask him how it’s possible to have a month-long training camp in Kenya, but not in the U.S.-about how it’s possible to have team coaches who actually work with the runners in training rather than be little more than 4-5 day team managers in a mostly ceremonial role. I want to ask him his thoughts on how the U.S. can have a ‘team’ at the world meet when, after the U.S. Championships, everyone who has earned a ‘team’ berth returns home to train individually, in most cases.
I want to imagine Craig Masback scheduling a month-long camp in a terrific U.S. location and demanding (“No exceptions!”) on the afternoon following the last race that all national team members quickly report. Think of the team! Think of the training! I regain my senses and the dream poofs from my brain. Couldn’t happen. Granted, the U.S. is a large country, but blame can be directed all around, from the USATF (Umm, a camp?), to U.S. coaches (Someone else is going to tell my runner what to do?) to U.S. athletes wanting some exception to something (I can’t come until a week later. And will there be cable tv at the camp?).
By this point Okeyo is looking over his should and backpedaling. I quickly ask him about Kenya’s format for their National Cross Country Championships. Kenya, unlike the U.S., holds all of its races on one day, effectively eliminating the chance for an individual to double in both the long and short races. I frankly don’t know how most other countries in the world host their national cross country trials. One day? Two?
Would Kenya ever consider going to two days like the U.S. does? How would Chebii do in the 12k? How would Kipchoge do in the 4k? I’m curious whether Kenya, with its vast depth of world class runners, has chosen this process to ensure the best teams possible. If a runner qualified for both teams, coming back at full strength on the second day at the World meet might be a gamble that jeopardizes the team’s chance for winning. According to Okoye today, second place at the World meet is unacceptable.
Okeyo laughs, “No, that is just the way we have always done it,” and then turns and heads into the luncheon crowd.
Next: the team camp
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Posted in Training, Kenyans at 6:49 pm by Administrator
RACE DAY
13 Feb 2004 - Friday
“I don’t think the horses are racing today,” says my taxi driver. “And certainly not at 8am.”
We’re heading out onto Nairobi streets, and I’ve asked the driver to take me to the Ngong Racecourse, the capital city’s horse racing venue about 10k southwest of downtown.
“No, not horses. Runners are competing there this morning,” I say. As we thread our way through cars and people, I tell him about the Kenyan National Cross Country Championships, and he tells me he knows that Kenya has good running athletes, but that he didn’t know they were running at home today. The papers again had no mention of the event.
Nairobi has been in a transportation crisis the past couple of weeks. The government is cracking down on the licensing of public buses and matatus, the local mini-buses, vans and trucks that typically overload with passengers-sometimes 15-17 in a vehicle. The government wants fewer passengers, seatbelts, and speed governors on the engine, plus regular inspections to stem the continual rash of accidents-many lethal-in the country. As a result, people have had trouble getting into the city to work. The few trains are packed, and even have crowds of people hanging outside on the outside walls and sitting on the roof. Many more people than normal are simply walking miles and miles to their job.
As we head out of town to Ngong, we’re fighting upstream against a mass of cars bumper-to-bumper heading in, and hundreds of people walking along the road edge. Car horns and thick clouds of black diesel exhaust from trucks and buses fill the crisp air.
As we near halfway I begin to see a few others swimming against the current as well. Runners. And they’re running. On the dirt paths on the side of the road, they’re wearing sweat jackets to ward off the morning chill, and some are clutching racing flats. Occasionally, they’re even going faster than we are, and they’re getting a pre-race warmup through the often thick haze of exhaust. I wonder how far they’ve had to come.
Ngong Racecourse is beautiful: well off the main road, and serene in the morning light. A once-a-week schedule of horse racing occurs on the wide, 2400m grass oval, but today it has been transformed into a terrific cross country venue. A small grandstand sits next to the track edge, and the cross country course is a 2000m loop that has two long, side-by-side straights going both directions in front of the grandstand, with two sweeping loops on each end. It’s slightly rolling the entire way.
Large signs mark the start and finish areas, and the course is edged with plastic ribbon wrapped around what look like thin, 1-inch tree saplings that have been hatcheted into 4-foot lengths. The grass is thick, long and dewy at 7:30, and it’s probably 60 degrees, sunny. It will get hotter throughout the morning. Tall trees frame the track edge, and a 9-hole golf course tucks inside the horse loop. It’s perfect.
Anticipation fills the air, which is an improvement on the diesel exhaust down on Ngong Road. Runners are warming up, coaches are huddling with athletes. Officials are setting up tables and banners, and running a long white electrical cord from the stadium to the results tent by the finish.
As a sport, cross country pits runners of various strengths into a smaller number of races. Instead of the multiple track options of 800m, 1500m, 3000m steeplechase, 5000m, and 10,000m races, all runners get to choose between only two cross country options: long or short. Shortly, here at Ngong, what some term ‘the toughest race in the world’ will commence, with scores of the world’s best runners competing against each other for a handful of berths to the 2004 World Cross Country Championships. I can’t believe I’m here.
Teams have arrived from many areas of the country: Armed Forces, Police, Prisons, North Rift, Western, South Rift, Central, Nyanza South, Southern, Nairobi, Coast. But what strikes me most of all-visually- is the profusion of national team wear. You know, the green, red and black singlets and warm-up jackets that turn your head at U.S. and international meets (“There’s a Kenyan! Who is it?”) As athletes pin on bib numbers among various groups sitting in different team camps, someone is usually wearing national gear. My neck hurts, and I have to remind myself that I’m in Kenya and, well, nearly everyone is a Kenyan, so get over it. But then I counter myself by realizing that I’m walking among world-record holders, Olympic Champions, World Champions, major marathon winners, all-time lists runners, etc.
The PA announcer begins to talk, and it’s a verbal stream of Swahili and English: instructions to athletes and coaches, pleas for officials to report, and a continual welcome to everyone to this “wonderful event.” He won’t stop all day.
The first race at 8am is the women’s junior 6k, and about 50 toe the line-with half the field doing so literally, without shoes. I even see a handful wearing dresses or skirts. After three laps of the course, Chemutai Rionotukei wins by two seconds in 20:02.
It’s still cool for the senior men’s 4k at 8:30, but I’m swearing because my camera has stopped working. Last year’s track sensation Abraham Chebii and two-time World Champion John Kibowen lead the group as they come back in front of the grandstand at 1k and head toward the other end. Suddenly, they’re back again at 2k. Now, I know running, or at least think I do. I’m constantly around high school and college runners, I’ve seen U.S. Champs and Olympics in person from stadium seats, and I’ve run most of my life, but this is insane. They scream around their two loops. I scream at my camera just enough to unfreeze it and snap a shot of Chebii winning just near the line. His time is 11:00, and eighth place is just five seconds back. It’s awesome, awesome.
The PA announcer is terrific. In addition to calling the races, he is giving some background on individuals-both in the races and in the crowd. “Here in the stands is the winner of the Boston Marathon.” Or, “Olympic medalist…” Or “This runner is the two-time cross country world champion.” Or, “Commonwealth Games winner…” I begin to scrawl a list of names on a scrap of paper, but it fills so fast I eventually abandon it and decide simply to soak it all in. Crowds line the fence along the course and roar and cheer at runners, and encourage individuals in Swahili as they pass: “Catch her!” “Keep going!” “Now! Right here!”
In the senior women’s 8k, Alice Timbilil breaks away mid-race from Sally Barsosio, the former 10k World Champ, who is returning from maternity leave. Timbilil clocks 26:46. Finishing sixth and earning a spot on the worlds team is ageless Jane Ngotho, who first competed in the world champs 17 years ago.
Standing near the finish line, I also notice that a man is holding up a lap counter along with a bell, and is giving every single racer their bell lap. It’s not like the track, however, where you have only a short kick to the finish. Only 2k more to go! It’s easy for the 4k runners. I imagine it’ll be much more helpful for the six-lap men’s race at the end of the morning.
I also become aware of something quite interesting. Among all the runners heading to the start-whether junior, senior, man or woman-no one seems to be filled with the near-paralyzing, going-to-the-gallows dread that I see in many U.S. high school, college and even national races. Kenyans, if nervous at all, at least express it differently. Instead of panicked, near-to-vomiting faces that many U.S. starting lines feature, Kenyan runners act as if embarking on a challenging adventure that they know will be exceedingly tough, but survivable-an opportunity that just might even be enjoyable, all things considered. Faces project confident but not cocky coolness. Sure, there’s some bouncing and fidgeting while anticipating the gun, but it’s done along with lots of smiling and hand-shaking and interaction among competitors. Then the gun goes off and the racing is forceful and hearty.
The sun is getting higher and it’s probably 70 degrees now. In the junior men’s 8k race, Barnabas Kosgei separates himself from a pack of seven halfway, then raises his arms at the line to win by five seconds in 23:28. Kosgei leads a 1-2-3 sweep by the North Rift team.
A nattily-uniformed school band has arrived and has set up shop in the shade of the grandstand. The director regularly stands up and strikes up the band-sometimes during a race, sometimes after. Never, however, during the starting gun. With trumpets, trombones, woodwinds, bass drum, etc., it makes for a raucous, boisterous atmosphere, especially since the PA announcer tries to continue over the top of the music.
I am probably one of 15 white people among a crowd that the following day’s The Nation newspaper will estimate at 5000. We wazungu (the non-derisive plural Swahili term for people of European or North American descent) stand out. As I move around the course, I’m repeatedly asked, “Jambo, are you here with your runners?” Or, “Are you a manager?” I chat, and tell them I’m just here watching as a fan. Other wazungu aren’t. Some seem to be managers, coaches, and somehow runner-affiliated. One races in the 4k.
It’s somewhat unsettling to acknowledge the fact that most Kenyan runners are represented internationally by wazungu. Here at 2004 National Cross Country Championships at Ngong Racecourse, surrounded by Kenyan fans, runners, coaches, and officials, my mental alarm goes off, telling me that something’s not quite right with this fact. I also can’t come up with any easy answers to placate my unease.
Kenya, a former British colony, gained independence in 1963 and has a population today of about 31 million people. The country depends highly on income from tourism, mainly from vacationing wazungu on safari to the fabulous game parks. Put crassly, this results in a two-tiered system, with many Kenyan citizens (on one level) employed in difficult, often low-paying jobs to enable money-laden visitors (on another level) a posh international adventure. Even though many Kenyan runners have earned untold riches on the world’s track or road running circuit, the numerous relationships between Kenyan runners and wazungu agents seems disquietingly similar.
Meanwhile, on the golf course inside the expansive horse loop, a lone golfer mzungu (the singular term) arrives at the hole nearest the grandstand. He’s with a Kenyan caddie. He looks over at the hubbub curiously. “Some of the greatest athletes in the world, pal,” I want to yell at him. “And carry your own bag.” But I don’t. He hits a middling iron shot and heads off, caddie trailing.
The biggest upset of the day comes in the senior women’s 4k. The race features Edith Masai, who has won the last two straight short-course world titles, plus Jane Gakunyi, third at last year’s world meet. But barefooted Beatrice Jepchumba surprises both late in the second loop to win, with Gakunyi second and Masai third. How can a two-time defending world champion, seemingly at full strength, finish third in her national champs? Yes, this is Kenya.
The last race of the day, the senior men’s 12k race, is scheduled to start at 10:30, but it’s closer to 11:15 when the gun fires. It’s probably 80 degrees and humid, not perfect for racing, but I don’t hear anyone complaining. This field is the day’s biggest, and the front pack after 2k is huge, with a front wall of eight runners.
After the lead group rips by, the rest of the field begins to thin out, and then individual trailers follow. I think the entire pack has passed, but then I see one more runner making his way toward me. He’s an older gentleman, with a well-worn shirt and shorts. Slightly hunched, but still possessing good turnover, he looks to me to be 45 or so, which in this country would probably make him 55. Although he gets lapped during the fourth circuit, he finishes the race.
Up front, notable names include 5k world track champ Eliud Kipchoge (in that thrilling, last-lap WC win over Hicham El Guerrouj), last year’s national xc winner John Korir, former 5k world champ Richard Limo, former 10k world champ Charles Kamathi, former Boston marathon champ Robert Cheruiyot, and numerous others all within striking distance of the lead. Also up front are brothers Abraham Cherono and Saif Saaeed Shaheen, the former Stephen Cherono, who changed his nationality last year to Qatar in a controversial decision that has privately embittered many in Kenya, although his decision has rarely been chastised in public. After running a world-leading time early last track season representing Kenya, Shaheen later won the world championship 3k steeplechase representing Qatar. He still lives most of the year in Kenya.
Shaheen moves into the lead and forces a torrid pace, with Cheruiyot in pursuit. But a chase pack of four captures them again, and by 8k it’s Kipchoge who’s pushing the tempo. Shaheen drops out. Kipchoge breaks everyone by 10k and runs the final loop solo to win by 7 seconds in 35:19.
Out of the chute, Kipchoge is mobbed by friends, fans and reporters, and he gives a breathless yet animated interview in Swahili for both TV and radio. My Swahili is rough, but in response to a question, I’m pretty sure I hear him say, “I don’t know. I’ve never raced 12,000 meters before.” I’m pushed out of the mob and can’t hear anymore. In The Nation the next day, Kipchoge is quoted as saying, “The race was like a glimpse of hell. At one time I did not know whether or not I would pull this one off.”
——-
Next: post race awards, plans for the national team camp, and a quick interview with Athletics Kenya General Secretary David Okeyo.
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Posted in Training, Kenyans at 6:33 pm by Administrator
2004 World Cross Country Championships – Brussels, Belgium
DAY ONE
After coming in with high expectations, after all the preparations at a 4-week high-altitude camp in Kenya, and after all the history of success at previous World Cross meets, the first day of the 2004 World Cross Country Championships is a disaster for Kenya. Three races are scheduled, with opportunities to chase three team titles and three individual titles. Kenya wins nothing.
The day is cold, blustery and rainy, and the course becomes a slippery mess as the day’s races progress, but any explanation that uses the weather as an excuse for Kenya’s demise is flattened by the steamrolling success of Ethiopia, Kenya’s east African neighbor. Ethiopia’s success today is, well, Kenyan-esque, with individual sweeps and dominatingly low team scores.
The world cross course is a 2000m counter-clockwise triangular circuit that keeps steering the runners near the finish section where the majority of spectators line the fence. When the runners are out of sight, a commandingly huge TV screen on the trailer of a truck gives spectators, both commoners with hoods and VIPs under a bleacher cover, a live view. National teams gather in a large team tent behind the starting area that would rest in the shadow of the Atomium if the sun was out.
Inside the tent, metal cage walls separate all the nations alphabetically, and teams sit in their area on chairs or on the floor. The whole environment has a cattle effect to it, including the dank, musty smell of mud and restlessness. Sitting on chairs, the Kenyan squad seems somewhat ill at ease. The junior women are out warming up. The men’s 4k squad sits over in one corner under their nation’s flag hung on the cage wall. In another corner the women’s 8k squad sits, many with eyes closed. The coaching staff of seven comes and goes.
The Kenyan women’s 6k junior team is the first to appear on the starting line for the day’s opening race. The starting area is quite different from the one in Nairobi. Instead of a line in the grass with a banner over it, this starting area has a huge scaffolding with bars that separate the teams into separate boxes on the starting line—almost like a horse race.
The Kenyan juniors sport spiked shoes that look a bit too new. I wonder how much practice the squad has had in their new racers, and I remember many going barefoot in the national race in Nairobi. Can you adjust to shoes in 4 weeks? Will they help? Would going barefoot on a muddy course be better? Two starting boxes over, the Ethiopians look taller and more mature. On the start lists, the Ethiopians have three born in ’85, one in ’86, and one in ’87. The Kenyans are younger, with one born in ’86, two in ’87, and three in ’88. The two teams plus one Chinese runner make up the entire front pack for two loops before an Ethiopian quartet forces the pace and the Kenyans lose contact and fade. Ethiopia defeats Kenya for the second straight year by scoring a perfect 10 points on a 1-2-3-4 finish. Meselech Melkamu of Ethiopia wins in 20:48. The perfect score is the second in that event’s history; Kenya also scored 10 in 1993. Led by national champ Chemutai Rionotukei (5th place, 21:04), Kenya runners finish 5-6-9-16 to score 36 points ahead of bronze-winning Japan (67).
Next is the men’s 4k race, and the rain begins to fall harder and horizontally as the gun fires. Kenya’s Eliud Kirui leads after one 2k circuit, with two-time 4k/12k winner Kenenisa Bekele of Ethiopia close. The awards are presented for the women’s junior race, and suddenly the Ethiopian national anthem is blaring on the loudspeakers. Inspired, Bekele makes a dominating surge to clear himself of the mud-stomping front group and wins with surprising ease in 11:31. Other than Kirui, who was the sixth and final qualifier out of Nationals, no other Kenyans make an appearance up front—unless you count the Qatar team. Abdullah Ahmad Hassan (formerly Albert Chepkirui) and Saif Saaeed Shaheen (formerly Stephen Cherono) finish 4th and 5th. Kirui (6th) is the first Kenyan to finish, marking the first time Kenya has been shut out of any individual medal in the men’s 4k short race. Ethiopia goes 1-2-3-11 to sweep the individual medals and win the team title with 17 points. Qatar goes 4-5-8-22 for second, while Kenya—after winning all six of the short course team titles since the race began in 1998—takes third with 52 points. Kenya places 6-7-19-21 with Kirui, Isaac Songok, Abraham Chebii (a pre-race favorite, but never a factor here), and Kiplimo Muneria. Two-time short course individual champ John Kibowen (1998 and 2000) is the last Kenyan in 32nd place.
“The Kenyans were not as strong as we expected,” says winner Bekele. “We thought they would come up with new tactics, but they were not so strong as we expected.”
Resting on the fence lining the course, my wife visits with an Ethiopian next to her. He clucks as the Qatar team is awarded silver medals and says that Ethiopians have more pride in their country than a desire for money, and that no Ethiopian athlete would ever jump ship to wear another nation’s jersey. I would imagine the same thing could have been said about Kenyan athletes some 15-20 years ago. Will Ethiopia, with its burgeoning success, be able to produce the massive depth that Kenya has produced? It is this depth, I think, that has sparked Kenyan athletes to agree to swap nations. A former Kenyan has a much easier time making his or her new nation’s teams (for Olympics, World Championships, or World Cross teams), plus there is often a lump sum and/or a monthly paycheck.
By now the Brussels course is trashed, and each lap the runners pick a wider, outside route on the corners in order to stay on grass out of the mud. The women’s 8k race begins, and this one looks promising for Kenya. For the first two loops, Kenya has four in the top group, while Ethiopia has only two. Others include Kenyan-born Lornah Kiplagat (now running for Netherlands), plus Australia’s Benita Johnson. Past the halfway mark, the Kenyans group begins to fall back, and an Ethiopian moves from the second pack to the front. Now the question is whether the four Kenyans can stay enough places ahead of Ethiopia’s fourth runner to get a team win. On the final loop Johnson moves strongly to the lead, and the Ethiopians look human for the first time all day. Johnson wins by 12 seconds in 27:17. Ethiopia’s Werknesh Kidane, one of the pre-race favorites, takes third behind teammate Ejegayehu Dibaba as Ethiopia goes 2-3-5-16. Ethiopia’s 26 points is just enough to edge Kenya, which places its top four 4-7-9-10 for 30 points. Ethiopia’s win is the third in a row in this race. Kenyan national champion Alice Timbilili’s fourth place in 27:36 leads the Kenyans, followed by Eunice Jepkorir, who was fifth at nationals.
The three races on this first day have a common theme for
