KIMbia Athletics

Brandeis student Paul Norton traveled to Kenya this past summer to intern with the KIMbia Foundation.  Below, we continue sharing his journal entries, which will run daily for the remainder of the 2009.

Perhaps American investment bankers (if any of them still exist) could learn a thing or two from Kenyan athletes.  Paul Koech and Lornah Kiplagat serve as two of many examples where Kenyan athletes have operated successful businesses while giving back to the community around them.

Paul Koech’s school, Silgich Hill Academy, is the best-run primary school in the area.  The facilities are superior, the teachers caring, smart, and thoughtful, and the food filling, consistent, and good-tasting.  Paul even has plans to build a library at Silgich that will serve all the primary schools in the area.  In addition, Paul’s wife Zipporah has formed a partnership with a local stationary store her friend owns.  This partnership allows Zipporah to buy school supplies very cheaply for all of the schools in the area. Read the full article

Select shots featuring KIMbia athletes racing in the 2009 Chicago Marathon. Race recap here.

Last Wednesday night, @SimonBairu‘s twitter feed read: “8 National titles in Cross Country/Road Racing and 0 on the track-hopefully I end the curse tomorrow in the 5k!”  It took until about 4k into the race, but Bairu was able to capture that elusive track title at the Canadian Athletics Championships in Toronto on Thursday.

Simon initially wanted to go after the World Championships ‘A’ standard in the race to qualify for the IAAF World Championships in Berlin later this summer, but the humidity made that all but impossible.  Battling with Canadian Olympic team member, Eric Gillis, for the first half of the race, Simon pulled away over the last three laps and finished in 13:39, with a comforatble lead over the second place Gillis, who came home in 13:49.

With Matt Tegenkamp capturing the USATF 5k title last Friday, Simon’s 5k Championship makes KIMbia athletes 2 for 2 in the event in North American countries that are north of Mexico, a feat heretofore unheard of for a single agency. (This fact is unconfirmed. But probably true.)

Simon plans to forgo a trip to Europe in hopes of chasing the ‘A’ standard. Instead, he will stay in Portland to concentrate on making his marathon debut this fall.

360 Athletics LIVE is Marathon coverage like you have never seen before.  In the Live blog below, we will be providing up-to-the-second race updates and commentary, video features, live video commentary from our on-site analysts, and (best of all) audience participation.  Let us know what you want to see in this coverage and we will do our best to get that to you.  So, sit back or stand up, cheer on your favorite runners, and enjoy 360 degree coverage of the most famous foot race in the world! Read the full article

On Monday, defending champions Robert Cheruiyot and Dire Tune will try to hold off strong Boston Marathon fields that include the best American hopes for a Boston Champion, in Ryan Hall and Kara Goucher. Flying a little under the radar is a talented group of KIMbia athletes — Timothy Cherigat, Elva Dryer, Stephen “Baba” Kiogora, James Koskei and Ben Maiyo — looking to make their own mark on this year’s race, and we will be tracking their efforts LIVE, in real-time, right here, with a one-of-a-kind live blog featuring video features, interactive polls and audience commentary, and a contest giveaway.

So, Monday morning, come chat it up with your fellow running fans in our virtual sports-bar while you watch the Universal Sports video feed.  And, for you iPhone users who can’t get to a computer, you can follow our play-by-play right on your iPhone.  In the meantime: whether you have a question for our competitors, or about some aspect of Boston — the city or the event — leave a comment below and we’ll do our best to cover it on Monday!

Matt’s 5,000m final is scheduled to start at 8:10 p.m. Beijing time on Saturday. That’s 8:10 a.m. on the East Coast, 7:10 a.m. in Madison and an eye-rubbing 5:10 a.m. on the West Coast. Rumors are that NBC will show the day’s track session live.

We had been intermittently lucky earlier in the week with live Internet feeds through various end-run machinations, but NBC and the IOC seem to have contacted our friends in Denmark, the Bahamas, etc., and those feeds are no longer available. If the promised live showing on NBC doesn’t pan out–and we are nothing if not defensive pessimists–here are your back-ups:

Amby Burfoot will live blog the race on the combined Runner’s World/Running Times Beijing site. He’s in China, and will no doubt frequently update where Matt is in the field.

Parker Morse is live blogging the entire meet for the IAAF. His accounts aren’t as American-focused. Of course, if things go as they should, there won’t be a distinction between writing about the leaders and writing about Matt.

Our Peter Vigneron sent us the following analysis of Kenya’s public primary education system. In Kenya for the past few months on behalf of the KIMbia Foundation, Peter has immersed himself in issues related to his work on education.

I saw a teacher beat four of his students last Thursday. They were late returning to class after lunch, and they carried plastic bags of berries, which the teacher took and threw away. “They were collecting wild fruits in the bush,” he told me with a smile. “What if one is bitten by a snake? What can we tell the parents?”

Two weeks ago I visited a different public primary school, on the other side of Kipsomba Location from where I found the berry collectors. With my research partner and translator, I was investigating a family we had come across while surveying in a remote corner of the location. We had found the family—seven children and their father—through a neighbor. The mother was dead, and we were told that the father, an alcoholic, spends most of his time drinking or looking for drink. I wanted to see if there was something the KIMbia Foundation could do for the children, whom the neighbor indicated were struggling to feed themselves.

In the course of my research, which I have just recently concluded, I focused especially on public primary schools. KIMbia is principally interested in supporting education efforts in Kenya, and I wanted to understand better what problems we were up against. When I asked parents about schools, I expected to hear about overcrowding and the poor quality of instruction. In fact I did, but for weeks I was puzzled at the number of parents who told me that too many families cannot afford to send their children to class. Kenya is famous, of course, for instituting free and compulsory public primary education in 2003.

When the government launched free primary education it neglected to fund the effort properly, and the number of teachers nationwide increased only slightly against a tidal wave of new students. Within months, student-teacher ratios, which were high before the initiative, exploded to 60- or 70-to-1 in some schools. The number of students going to school has risen, but for most of them, the quality of instruction has declined precipitously. And there is this: free public education is not entirely free. There are nominal fees for uniforms, books, and examinations, usually totaling about 1,200 Kenyan shillings per child per year, about $20. It is unknown how many more children would attend if these expenses were also waived.

I have spent the majority of my time in Kenya at private schools, especially at Paul Koech’s boarding school, Silgich Hill Academy, which I have long viewed as an oasis of scholarship and learning in a vast expanse of failed and failing classrooms. My perception of the public schools—as overcrowded, understaffed, and unruly—had affirmed our decision to focus the Foundation’s efforts in places where education is succeeding. Right now, at the primary school level, education is succeeding only in private institutions.

It has taken visits to public schools over the last weeks, however, to jar my understandings of overcrowding and disorder into a visceral and more realistic appreciation of what happens at these schools on a daily basis. Most classrooms are in a state of startling disrepair—they are dirty, without chalk boards, and often lacking even glass in windowpanes. Students are dismissed for lunch at 12:30 p.m., and in grades four and above, are due back for afternoon instruction at 2:00 p.m., meaning that older kids must complete two round-trip treks between home and campus every day. At one school, the principal told me that he had a staff of 12 teachers for 667 students. He counted himself among the 12, but I did not see him perform anything but administrative duties during the course of my visit, and I imagine that the number of actual teachers is 10 or 11.

We met with three of the seven children that day two weeks ago. Three more have dropped out to work as laborers on nearby farms, and we were told that another, a seventh-grader, was home sick. One of the three we met, a 14-year-old girl, short and rail thin, did not look a day older than 10. “They don’t eat enough,” the principal said after they returned to class. “The one who they said was sick is probably home looking for food for the others.” He explained that, twice a year, when crops have been planted and the last harvest has been eaten, the school experiences a dramatic drop in attendance: children are kept home by their parents to look for food or earn money to buy it.

I suspect that the children I saw being whipped Thursday were searching for lunch. If they knew they would find no food at home, they may have decided to scavenge on their own. It is a realization that, for me, makes the reality of their beating difficult to bear.

Yet teachers are hardly to blame. They are responsible for too many students, they work in inadequate facilities with inadequate teaching materials, and cannot readily use the threat of suspension or expulsion to discipline their charges—it is a challenge enough to maintain regular attendance in perfect circumstances, and probably close to impossible in these. For its part, the government, which has struggled to meet payroll deadlines for prison warders and teachers over the last month, appears close to bankruptcy and unable to consider education reform.

In six weeks of research, I never encountered a family willing to admit that they were too poor to send their children to public primary school. I visited dozens of houses with a full complement of children running around during school hours, but my questions about their attendance were met with polite smiles and little more. Those fees for uniforms and books are enough, evidently, to prevent many children from attending class, and in times of hunger, I suspect, education becomes only a passing concern. I worry, as Kenya prepares to confront its own unique national food shortage, and as the World Food Program warns that it will begin limiting food disbursement as international cereal depots run dry, that the crisis in Kenya’s public schools will continue unabated.

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.

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.

Paul Koech (26:36 10,000m, 2:07:07 marathon) sent us this report from Kenya on Wednesday, one day before the leaders of the country’s rival political parties signed a power-sharing agreement. A captain in the Kenyan Army, Koech founded Silgich Hill Academy in 2004. The school provides free primary education for more than 150 students.

We are fine, although with some tension in relation to the security state of the country. Silgich Academy is going on well, although most of the parents were affected by the violence after the disputed election results of two months ago. All of the school staff are safe and well, but some students transferred, for their parents feared that the situation in the country would deteriorate into an out-of-control ethnicity-based conflict.

There is only one student, Kenneth Ngetich, whose father was shot by police along Eldoret-Nairobi road while he was walking to the shopping center. The boy is among the students sponsored by Mr D’s class [at a Massachusetts elementary school]. I will send you his picture and some of the pictures of the affected area.

The main problem we are facing is the feeding of persons who ran away from the clash-torn areas, and payment of school fees for parents who are mainly farmers and were not able to sell their produce or had it destroyed. We are struggling to sustain ourselves with the little we have. Our neighboring academy was closed, for they did not have the resources to continue.

The closest area to Silgich that was affected is 6 kilometers from here, a shopping center where houses and shops were burned and destroyed, for it was said that these were people who supported the government. The effect in Eldoret is substantial in areas outside the town. All parts of the country, except Central and Eastern provinces, had a considerable share of destruction of properties due to anger of the ODM’s [the opposition party led by Raila Odinga] supporters and sympathizers.

Despite all of these problems we are optimistic for the future. I know that as athletes, we always considered ourselves to be one Kenya. I have confidence that in the end we will again return to the state where we are all proud to be Kenyans.