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.

Next: trying to visit the national cross country team camp.