Lonely lives of Kenya's astonishingly gifted runners

The harsh, lonely lives of Kenya’s
astonishingly gifted runners
In Two Hours Ed Caesar tracks the footsteps of
the remarkably athletic Kalenjin tribe
BOOKS
Ben Markovits
11 July 2015
Geoffrey Mutai leads the New York City marathon in
November 2013
Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon
Ed Caesar
Viking, pp.256, £16.99, ISBN: 9780670921898
Two Hours is a kind of Hoop Dreams for runners.
Ed Caesar follows a handful of Kenyan
marathoners, tracks their races and careers,
and talks to them about their lives. Part of
what’s moving about the book is the sense
you get that these athletes (the children
mostly of subsistence farmers from the Rift
Valley in East Africa, who sometimes had to
break rocks to pay for their primary
schooling) were born with an inheritance as
rich as any Notting Hill trustfunder’s —
except that instead of stock options and the
deeds to a house they have inherited a series
of genetic codes which give them long, light
legs and an extraordinary capacity to burn
oxygen efficiently.
At least, that’s one way of telling the story:
What’s so intriguing about Kenya’s success at
long distances, and what makes the scientists
who study the reasons behind that success so
excited, is that their champions almost
uniformly hail from one tribe: the Kalenjin.
Caesar quotes from David Epstein’s book The
Sports Gene , which puts their success down to a
curious historic combination of facts. The
Kalenjin are originally a valley tribe who
have moved up recently into the mountains,
so they combine the lung surface area of
people born at altitude with the ‘sea-level
ancestry’ that allows their haemoglobin to
respond quickly to training at elevation.
And yet gene science hasn’t managed to prove
the nature side of this argument — at least
not yet. The consensus seems to be, we don’t
have enough information, and some of the
smart money is on nurture, too. Culture plays
a large part in all this. Kenyans themselves
seem to take a democratic view of their
success. It’s a peculiarity of Kalenjins, says
one European coach, that they possess utter
faith that ‘anybody can run — it’s only a
question of training.’
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Regardless of the reason, what’s happened in
Kenya in the last half-century, ever since
Wilson Kiprugut won bronze in the 800m in
the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, has been a kind of
gold rush: towns, people’s lives, a micro-
economy, have been shaped by the discovery
of an unpredictable source of wealth. ‘In the
village of Iten, in the forest of Kaptagat, and
in the backroads of Kapsabet, the dirt roads
teem with young men and women, running
in groups. They train twice or three times a
day. There are few joggers; casual running
barely exists.’ But it’s a funny kind of gold
rush, since it rewards an almost monk-like
humility and willingness to tolerate pain.
Millionaire athletes live in simple huts,
breakfast on chai and a piece of bread, run
over the unpaved hills at dawn, and again at
nine, and later in the day. . . sleeping as much
as they can, sometimes watching a movie in
the evening.
Like any good book about sports, Two Hours is
also a book about other things. What frames
it is the quest, if you can call it that, for the
first sub-two-hour marathon — and the
question of whether such a time is even
possible. This allows Caesar to talk about the
history of the marathon, its roots in Greek
mythology, various famous races, the role of
money and science and drugs (Alberto
Salazar, Mo Farah’s coach, makes a brief
appearance), not to mention technology and
shoe companies.
At the centre of the picture stands Geoffrey
Mutai, who survived poverty, civil war,
teenage hopelessness (the beginnings of a
drink problem) and a difficult relationship
with his father to become a four-time major
marathon champion and the breadwinner
and paterfamilias for a large network of
dependents. In 2011 he ran the fastest
marathon in history at the Boston marathon,
in the ungodly time of 2:03:02 — which
equates roughly to 460 16-second 100-yard
dashes.
Yet in spite of Mutai’s extraordinary success,
the tone of the book is very far from
triumphant; one gets, more strongly than
anything else, the sense of missed
opportunities. For reasons to do with the
topology of the course, his Boston marathon
time doesn’t count as a world record. And
he’s running out of chances to match it. A
marathoner’s peak is extraordinarily brief.
Training carries the constant threat of injury.
You can race only a few times a year. And the
races themselves depend on so many factors
outside the runner’s control — pace-makers,
cramps, the competition, the weather. So that
the dream of a sub-two-hour marathon is
really a dream about something else — what
humans can accomplish unfettered by
contingency.
Runners have in almost its purest form an
athlete’s detached, yet deeply invested
relationship to the self. At 15 miles, at 20
miles, over the final stretch, the marathoner
has to ask his body, again and again — what
can you give me still? And even though that
body represents everything they are and have
worked for, this doesn’t make it any less of a
you. Somehow, whatever the answer turns
out to be, they have to live with it.