In this final installment of our interview about the post-election violence in Kenya, Richard Kiplagat talks about the role of Kenyan runners in helping to reunify their country.
Intro photos by Toby Tanser. Intro music by Nick+Gerald. Outro music by Amaryoni.
Christpher Cheboiboch is a full-time resident of Iten, where KIMbia’s Kenya camp is located. He runs a primary academy and owns businesses in the town, including Iten’s only gas station. On Monday, he’ll attempt to improve upon his second-place finish at the 20002 Boston Marathon.
You’re a resident of Iten and a business owner there. How was that affected by the post-election violence?
After December, it was really hard for everyone in Kenya for the next two months.
Did you close your academy?
We opened late by two weeks, because we could not take any chances. Once we resumed, everything was okay.
Were any of your properties or businesses targeted by the rioters?
No. If you talk with people all the time and are nice with them in your dealings, then you will be okay. In Iten, none of my colleagues or me were targeted. Iten is mostly Kalenjin, so things were not too bad for me in Iten.
How was your training affected?
At first you’re asking yourself, “What is going to happen tomorrow?” You see that people are rioting, that roads are being blocked and people are very angry about the stolen rights after voting for a change. I can say we were lucky in Iten because the KIMbia group, we have a camp there, and my home is there, so I was fortunate that my family was close. I was staying in my house and then in the morning would meet the guys for training. It would worry us—what might happen today?
Some runners were accused of helping to fund the violence, because they’re known to have more money than a lot of people. Were you ever accused of that, given that you’re a business owner in Iten, you have the academy there and so on?
Clearly that was a very bad thing. To me, as a person, I never thought those guys would do such a thing. These are the people who are well off in Eldoret. Why would they try to make things worse? To me, nobody accused me by name. But still, if people say athletes are providing money for these things, then some people might think that about me.
Since you’ve come to Boulder, what have you heard about what’s going in Kenya?
Every day I have to go and see what’s going on. I call my family every day to make sure they are okay. Things are much better than they were in January, but I hear that in the last few days, there have been a few problems again. People are still worried about what will happen.
How do you feel about your fitness compared to before other marathons?
I think I can say for a marathon, the most important thing is to have run all the training sessions. One thing I’m happy about for myself is I trained and did not get any injuries. I’m waiting for a big day in Boston. I know we will have strong guys. I have to run my own race, because you never know what will come in a marathon. I have in my mind that the person who will come through will be the best man on the day.
On Monday, James Koskei will try to better his fourth-place finish at last year’s Boston Marathon. In December, James won the Dallas White Rock Marathon, and then returned home to Kenya. Soon after, the country erupted into post-election violence.
Where were you when the violence started?
I was at home in Eldoret. I had planned to go to Iten on January 15th, but things at home were very bad. You could not move from one place to another because of a lot of vandals. I went to Iten in the middle of February.
When you were home, how was your training affected?
It was affected a lot. I could not train because of all the violence. I had to stay at home with my kids.
You weren’t able to train at all?
No. I started training only when I went to Iten.
Then how do you feel about your fitness for this marathon compared to before other marathons?
Once I got to Iten I was very serious about my training. I think I will be okay for the marathon. I was maybe two weeks late arriving in Iten, but I was able to train very hard in Iten and perhaps recover what was lost when I could not train in Eldoret.
You’re in the armed forces. Were you required to do anything as a member of the armed forces while the violence was going on?
We had to go to military training camps and stay there for some few days. That was on January 5th. Then they released us, but I had to get permission from them to go and train in Iten. The armed forces are good because we never get involved with political problems in Kenya. We were trying to tell people to stay calm.
Once you got to Iten, did you and other athletes talk about the role of athletes in helping to unify the country?
Yes. Lornah Kiplagat and some others arranged a race for peace in Iten, in February and also in March, to tell people to do away with the violence. We were telling them to turn to peace, and we came together as athletes from many tribes to show them how they should come together as Kenyans.
In this interview, Richard Kiplagat describes how his and his KIMbia teammates’ training was affected by Kenya’s post-election violence. Richard also speculates on how the violence will affect Kenyans’ performances during the spring and summer roadracing season. (The interview was recorded on April 7. Since then, it’s been confirmed that Stephen Kiogora will not run Boston on Monday, because of losing too much training time during the violence earlier this year.)
Photos courtesy of Toby Tanser. Music by Nick+Gerald.
Like almost all Kenyan runners, Timothy Cherigat was in Kenya when the post-election violence started in late December and early January. Between training sessions recently, the 2004 Boston Marathon champion talked about his preparations for Monday’s race in light of recent developments at home.
Where were you when the violence started?
I was already at the training camp in Iten. This was good because travel was very, very dangerous.
Were other KIMbia runners affected by the dangerous travel conditions?
Yes, there were guys who could not make it to Iten because the roads were closed. They could not travel safely. Stephen Kiogora could not come to Iten to train with us because he is from another tribe. He is not Kalenjin and it would have been dangerous for him to travel to Iten.
How was your training affected?
At times we could not train at all because we didn’t know what would happen next. We had to pay attention to what the politicians were saying to see what might happen next. We were lucky because nothing really bad happened to us, but you did not know what might happen from day to day, and this is what really affected the training. At first, for the first few days, we could not train at all. It was just too dangerous. Some days we could train only once, very early in the morning. This uncertainty went on for most of January.
Usually, manager Tom Ratcliffe and coach Dieter Hogen come over to Kenya during your winter training. This year, they couldn’t.
Yes, every year before, they come and help with our training. They support us morally and they solve any problems we have. That was not the case this time. It was much harder. We heard from coach Dieter daily. Most of the time he was calling. When he could not call, he would text us.
Could you eat your normal training diet?
Most of the stores in Iten were closed during the worst time, for most of January. We ate what we could find. Some days it was safe to travel, but then when demonstrations were called for, roadblocks would be set up. Then it was not safe to travel to search for food.
Given all that, how do you feel about your fitness for Boston?
The training has been pretty good since all the violence stopped. There were really those three weeks in January when the training was really affected. For the marathon, it’s all about having a strong mind and believing in yourself.
Matt Tegenkamp and Chris Solinsky opened their outdoor season with a 1500m at Saturday’s Sun Angel meet in Tempe, Arizona. Matt ran 3:40.12 to finish second behind Lopez Lomong. Chris was fourth in 3:40.68, with their training partner Jonathon Riley squeezed between. (See for yourself.) Matt’s post-race take:
So, flying home from the race, you’re feeling _____ about it?
Satisfied. Where we are in training right now, I am very pleased. Last year at this time I opened up with a 3:43.
How much of what you would consider mile-relevant training have you done?
Training has been going great, especially since spring is coming to Madison. This week I came off a month at 90 Badger miles, and two weeks of that we threw in 4 workouts. This week we still did four workouts (Tuesday being 10K worth of work) and Thursday being a little play day. Thursdays are the only day we get a taste of mile-specific work, so we have had 3 days of it so far. 57 for the first 400m didn’t feel so hot.
Did you have that feeling of not being able to switch gears, but that you could have kept going at near that pace for a little longer?
From the 800 mark to about 1275 was really nice, but that is because we slowed down. That is the thing in the early season, is that you have to know in the back of your mind that at some point the race will get easier. However it does take a few races to really remind yourself how to dig in and finish; that’s why it was nice to be in a quality field this early. I think if I had to do it over again, here is my thinking: Solinsky took the lead with 300 to go and went pretty hard. I went with it, but I should have gotten pole position before the turn. That was the biggest issue. But at this point I was thinking that I don’t know if I want to hurt; do I really want to dig in and hurt, and by the time I decided it was too late. Then once we got to the straightaway I got could smell the line and was like, “Okay, I can make it.” At the end I played into Lopez’s strength, but it is early and things will come around. Already off to a better start than last season.
What’s the meet like?
Congrats to ASU on a great meet. More people should head to Tempe. It was perfect race conditions and they had the one thing Stanford doesn’t, a crowd!! I think this meet could continue to get better in the years to come.
Did the kids in sunny Arizona laugh at your pale Wisconsin-winter legs?
Well, my wife says that I have permatan, so it must not be all that bad. You know I spend around 5 months a year running around in the little short shorts and no shirt; it seems to make up for no sun the rest of the year.
Richard Kiplagat was home in Kenya when the post-election violence erupted at the beginning of the year. In this first of a three-part interview, Richard talks about what things were like during the worst violence, his difficutly in getting to the KIMbia camp in Iten and what lies behind the violence. In the second installment, he’ll describe training conditions for him and his KIMbia teammates once he got to Iten.
Photos courtesy of Toby Tanser. Music by Nick+Gerald.
Next Sunday, Elva Dryer will run her third marathon, and try to make her third Olympic team. After debuting in Chicago in 2006 in 2:31:48, she ran 2:35:15 at New York City last fall in what was essentially a solo run, because of the elite women start. Elva’s Chicago time makes her the second seed in Sunday’s Olympic Marathon Trials. A little appetizer to start an exciting week for us here in KIMbialand.
Your last race was the half marathon championship in January, where you dropped out. What was the issue there?
Looking back, it’s easy to see now, but at the time I was doing a very good job of ignoring it. I think just, in general, fatigue. The couple of months before it was a busy time, with lots going on. I felt like I had recovered well from New York, and just ended up doing a little too much too soon, not necessarily training, but a lot of other stuff I felt like I wanted to catch up on, and my body just said, “This is it,” and just kind of crashed. So it was a bit of a reality check.
With running New York, and then having to recover and turn around and get ready for the Trials, did you feel an impetus to rush things?
Not necessarily. That first week following New York, my body just felt so much better than it did after Chicago, so I didn’t think I would have a problem coming around to get ready for the Trials, especially in that I already had that big base from the fall marathon. So I felt comfortable with the fact that it would be basically be recovering, then regrouping and starting to train again. But then once I did go out and run the half and that didn’t go well, then I got worried. Then it was, okay, there’s no time for setbacks, it was crunch time and I had to step back and say, “Okay, what do I have to do to get myself back together, because I have no time to figure it out, I have to figure it out today.”
One of the things you’ve done is to not go to another race before the Trials. A lot of people would be looking for another opportunity to get in a good race, just for positive psychological reinforcement.
It was pretty obvious to me to why the half marathon went the way I did, and once I got to feeling good again, I needed that time in training and for the training to go well. We put checkpoints in the training for immediate feedback to measure my progress. I’m confident in the progress I’ve made and that that’s going to have to be good enough. Coming into the Trials, I feel better prepared and more confident that I’m ready to race the marathon distance, compared to where I was going into Chicago and New York.
Can you give an example of those checkpoints in your training?
We have, every other week, a progression run of roughly 18 miles. It’s starting off the first 8 miles comfortable, then the last 10 miles progressing until the pace comes down to below marathon race pace. It’s always on the same course, so throughout the training I can see how I feel going into it, how I feel coming out of it. It went really well this time around. I felt like before my other marathons, those were the workouts I struggled with. Especially at altitude, the longer you go, sometimes it’s really difficult to get that pace down below marathon race pace. And this time around I was able to meet a lot of what I set out to do in training.
That was at around 5,000 feet in Albuquerque?
Right. It’s very flat with a few turns, so it really mimics the course for the Trials—long stretches, then sharp turns.
Do you have other experience with no racing for a long time before a key race?
Actually, going into my 10K PRs, I don’t believe I had raced for awhile before those. Usually I would run the 10K at the Stanford Invite, and that would be my first track race of the season. Last year I raced quite a bit in my training before New York, and looking back now, I think maybe that left me a little sluggish for the marathon, not only because of the physical challenge, but the emotional energy to get up for the race each time. You want to do well, regardless of how important the race is, you still want to have a good performance. This time around I used that energy in my training. I didn’t have to travel, I just felt it gave me more time to really fit in the recovery and all the other things that are so important to come together in training to prepare for such a big race.
How do you think the race will play out? If nothing else, it will certainly be different than your experience in New York, which was basically a 25.5-mile time trial, right?
Yeah, I don’t think it will be like that! I think whoever makes the team will have really earned her spot. I think it’s going to be a really good race. I think there’s enough women who feel they have a shot at it. The way the course is laid out, people will have an idea of where they are at every point of the race, and that will help everyone stay focused.
When you look through the list of the top qualifiers, one thing that’s striking is the age of most of the top qualifiers, relative to what was the case in the men’s Trials. Why do you think that is?
I don’t know. I think with the last Olympics, between then and now, the men drew great inspiration from Meb and Alan Culpepper and the other men that were having such good success in the marathon. Maybe that gave others the idea that to take it on earlier. I think we have a lot of young women who are starting to focus on the marathon, but still, it seems like a lot of our young women still have a lot to achieve on the track. I’m sure that we’ll have a future of great marathoners, but right now the women in it are the ones who have already gone through the track and progressed to this end of it.
Let’s say you make the team and aren’t out-of-the-ordinarily hobbled. What occurs between the Trials and the Olympics?
Well, there’s not a lot of time. So I think immediately will be recovery. I’m scheduled to come back to Albuquerque and get into therapy right away. And then I’ll be going down to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to visit my friend Jenny Crain, who would have been at the Trials but, unfortunately, got hit by a car and got sidelined. And then closing up shop here in Albuquerque, moving out of this apartment that we rented to have a place to train for the winter, and back home to Gunnison, Colorado, where the weather is beautiful to train for a marathon later in the year. Whether I run the Olympic Trials in the 10K, I’m not sure. I haven’t ruled it out at this point, and maybe I’ll do a race or two in between, but other than that, not much is planned.
The men from Madison open their outdoor campaign this evening with a 1500m at the Sun Angel meet in Tempe, Arizona. We’ll have a first-hand report from Matt and Chris after the race. Results will be available here. For now, a few pre-race thoughts from Chris.
Why this race as your outdoor opener?
We chose the Sun Angel meet for our outdoor opener for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is a good sized meet with good competition, where we wouldn’t have to worry about exceedingly large fields as many meets this time of year have. Secondly, it is nice because the track has got the same surface as the track as does in Beijing. Additionally, it is sunny and mid 80’s, which is a nice change from the 30’s and rain/snow we have now, plus we have some friends out here, so it’s nice to come see them.
What’s next after this?
After this meet we are all heading to the Stanford Cardinal Invite for a quality 1500, then back home for a fast mile to give the home crowd a treat! (So if you’re around the Madison area on May 10, you should stop by the Dan McClimon track to catch a good mile race!!) After which we all separate and go to different meets taking different build ups toward the Trials, depending on what we need.
You do things in training like a 2:56 1200m time trial. Why not stay put if you can run so close to a race effort on your own?
It’s true we could stay home to get in a hard effort that is comparable, but when we stay home it is hard to fully get into the whole race routine. Traveling to meets allows us/forces us to take the effort more seriously. Also, we have to travel to get the top end competition that really pushes us past what we could do in a workout in Madison. I think we would have trouble attracting the caliber of competition that we will see tonight to Madison. With that said, we would like to have some pretty good guys come to Madison that weekend of May 10th. So, I invite/challenge anyone who wants a good mile effort to come race.
In Kenya for the next few months on behalf of the KIMbia Foundation, Peter Vigneron has a few thoughts about running in the Rift Valley.
I’m staying at Silgich Hill Academy now, where even the gardener is a better runner than I am.
On my morning run Sunday, as on many of my morning runs since I’ve come to Kenya, a group of children playing near the road fell in alongside me as I passed by. This morning one boy raced me, and he almost won. Before he dropped I was wondering how long I would last if he didn’t get tired very quickly. I realized when I finished that since my arrival to Kenya in early March, this boy, this nameless, anonymous child, is the first Kenyan who couldn’t hang with my pace. I don’t think he was older than 12.
There’s been a lot written about the successes of Kenyan runners over the last 15 years, some of it by very smart people. I may not have much to add to the discussion, except to say that I think there are a lot of reasons why Kenyans are so good and why they are so good in such numbers. I think that in Kenya there exists a perfect storm of reasons, that there are layers of explanations and some work for some athletes and don’t work for others. I’ve read that Kenyans are fast because all Kenyans run or walk miles to school everyday, and that no American will ever be able to match that type of childhood aerobic development. Then I read that Paul Tergat rode the bus as a kid.
One afternoon early in my trip Paul Koech pointed to a group of children playing soccer at a local school and told me that probably one of them could be a world record holder. “It’s just a matter of organization and encouragement,” he said, “the talent is here.” That talent isn’t in the United States or Europe, or even Uganda or Tanzania, Kenya’s neighbors to the North and West. In must exist to an extent in Ethiopia, a country that has produced the world’s two best male runners, but Ethiopia’s depth is not comparable to Kenya’s. The talent is very much right here, in Rift Valley Province. Paul was exaggerating about the children playing soccer. There cannot be a potential world record holder every 100 kids, as he boasted, but I’d believe it if that ratio always produced a runner who reached world class.
There are significant, identifiable reasons for Kenya’s sustained success at distance running, of course. In fact there is an abundance of identifiable reasons, and the stories about walking and running miles to school everyday have a lot of truth to them. The Rift Valley is where Kenya produces most of its corn, and like farm communities worldwide, population density here is low. A school might have to cast its net miles to find enough children to justify hiring teachers, and there are few cars and buses to carry children those miles to class. Not every Kenyan walks 10K to school everyday—there are buses at a lot of private schools, some kids cycle, and some must live next door, after all—but many do. Even so—children run and walk to school the world over. Kenya isn’t the only poor country with farmland.
Wednesday afternoon I found myself chatting with a young man called Sammy. He had seen me go for a run that morning from Silgich, and he wanted to know about my training. Sam is the gardener here. He came because he is an orphan, and after he completed 8th grade the family he lived with turned him out, reasoning that he was old enough to fend for himself. (Incidentally, he may have been. I’d say he’s 19 or 20, and class is a notoriously unreliable way of estimating age in Kenya. A lot of kids don’t finish high school until they’re 22 or 23.) Paul houses and feeds Sammy in return for his labor, and perhaps pays him a modest wage.
In the course of our conversation, I learned that Sammy is a marathoner. He runs every morning at 5:00 before going to work at the school all day. Last year, at 5000 feet, Sammy ran 2:25. He asked if I wanted to join him for training the next morning. For the most part, I’ve been guided by an “always say yes” policy since I came to Kenya. I reason that most of the worthwhile experiences here are going to make me a little bit uncomfortable, and most of the people I’m around are intelligent and unlikely to make me do something I cannot or should not do, so I said yes.
I’ve read that the Kenyan diet is they key to their success. I’ve read that it’s the altitude, and I’ve read that it’s because they lie down and sleep in the grass everyday between runs. I’ve read that it’s because they do so much mileage, that it’s because they run twice a day every day, or even that it’s because they run thrice a day everyday. A rowing coach I met in Colorado told me it was because they sprinted all their runs. He was certain that they didn’t do high volume. I’ve read that it’s because they are poor and desperate and view running as a way out of poverty. I’ve read that it’s drugs. I’ve read that it’s genetics, and that the rest of us should just forget about beating them.
I don’t know if any of this is true. Distance running is a greatly understudied activity. Part of the confusion here is probably because we don’t know empirically if a high-volume program gets better results than a low-volume one, for example. We have loads of anecdotal evidence for what works, but it’s tough to tease apart the components of success in this sport, even on what should be a basic question like mileage. It would be one hell of study that controlled for sleeping in the grass everyday.
When Sammy and I began running Thursday morning the moon was shining and I had a terrific view of the stars. We started at a jog. The footing was difficult in the dark, but starting slowly seems universal to Kenyan runners, regardless of conditions. The first half mile is never, ever, faster than 4 minutes. Each time I run with them I get artificially confident as I warm up, and then the pace drops and suddenly I find myself fighting for every stride, running the tangents, and wondering if today will be the day I don’t get dropped. On Thursday I made it 55 minutes before I called it a morning and waddled home to school. Sammy added another loop and still beat me back. On Friday I found that my achilles had tightened, and I took Saturday off. Sunday saw my glorious victory.
Sammy is the rule in Kenya, not the exception. On Thursday morning we passed 5 guys just like him, all wearing faded Nike gear from the early 1990’s, training in torn shoes, most wearing winter hats against the early morning cold. When the sun rose we could see Mount Elgon, the site of a month-old government counterinsurgency campaign against a violent rebel group, looming ethereally against the fading dawn of Western Kenya and Uganda.
At World Cross Country in Scotland last month, a guy nobody had ever heard of named Leonard Komon took second behind Kenenisa Bekele and ahead of 2007 champion Zerseny Tadesse. I don’t mean nobody in the West had heard of him (which is certainly true), I mean nobody anywhere. None of the athletes I’ve talked to recognized his name beyond seeing it on the roster for Worlds. The Sunday Standard reports that another athlete discovered him in 2005 training in jeans and leather shoes. He finished 3 seconds behind Bekele, the greatest distance runner in the history of the world.
I’m a betting man, and I bet altitude has a lot to do with Kenyan success. I bet poverty is a powerful motivator, I think their diet helps, and the type of training they do should be studied and replicated further. But I also think that being the best in the world at something means that everybody else is not as good, and I’m not certain that the Kenyan dominance can be easily distilled and copied.
