I’m jogging along in what feels like a sea of runners, people bobbing around in front of me like I’m heading into choppy waters. For now, we’re going slowly, dust from the road kicked up in clouds that get in my eyes.
By the sides, up on the banked earth, stand farm workers taking a break, watching us pass. It feels like it should be an incongruous sight, a huge mass of colourful, lycra-clad runners streaming by the hand-ploughed fields and mud huts. Things seem even more unlikely when suddenly 300 watches start beeping simultaneously. But here in Iten, this is nothing unusual. It’s just another bunch of runners.
I’ve been in Kenya two months now. Despite the multitudes of runners, finding people I can keep up with has been hard. I’ve joined in on slow jogs (where I run hard and everyone else jogs slowly and we move along at about the same pace), and I’ve been on the track (where I can easily cut the session down to suit my slower legs). But now it’s time to join in with a “hard” session.
The three main hard sessions are hills, tempo runs and fartleks. I think a hill session – running up steep hills multiple times – would kill me, while I wouldn’t last long on a tempo run, which is where they run as hard as they can right from the start. So fartlek it is.
Fartlek is a common form of training around the world that involves alternating fast bursts of running with slow recovery jogs. I’ve done it before. Shouldn’t be a problem.
A huge group of runners have gathered in the late morning at the bottom of a long hill – worryingly, it takes me 20 minutes to jog there from Iten. As I arrive, a team leader of some sort is standing up on a mound explaining the day’s session to the crowd like some biblical preacher.
Even if I could speak Kiswahili, I can’t hear what he is saying from all the way at the back. Someone tells me it’s “25 times one-one”. That means we jog for a minute, then run hard for a minute, twenty-five times.
Before I know it, someone has let the plug out and we’re sliding off down a dusty track into the countryside. The pace is easy, for a minute. Then the swarm of beeping watches sounds, and without a word, they’re off.
I try changing up through the gears to keep up, working my arms, trying to find the smoothest part of the track to run along. But I’m already slipping backwards, runners nipping past me on both sides.
A minute later the scattering of beeps catches the galloping herd, pulling it to a halt. As the group slows to a jog, it begins to bunch up again.
A few stragglers, though, have become detached already. I’m one, but behind me there are others; mostly, if not all, women, their arms working side to side, trying to catch back up.
But it’s a cruel game. Before we can make contact with the group, the swarm of watches takes off again, and the main group is gone, stringing its way out along the distant track.
At the back, we team up in twos and threes, for support. I find myself running next to a tall girl with short cropped hair. I hope she doesn’t mind me running next to her.
“I don’t have a watch,” I say, by way of explanation.
“Three-two-one-up,” she says, and we’re off again.
I must be the only runner here without a watch. Before I came to Kenya, I had naively imagined everyone hurtling along without a thought for anything as restricting and analytical as a stopwatch. It would just be them and the open road, I thought, their bare feet pounding on effortlessly, the wind in their hair.
But Kenyan runners are just as obsessed with timing everything as British runners. Distances here are not measured in miles, but in minutes.
“How far did you run today?”
“One hour ten.”
Not having a watch, I don’t know how much further we have to run – I lost count of how many intervals we’d done after about the third one. All I can do is try to keep up with my companion.
“Three-two-one-up,” and we’re off again.
Eventually we catch up with groups of people traipsing along slowly like stunned survivors walking away from the scene of some catastrophe. All along the road we pass people in sweaty T-shirts, leggings and running shoes, hands on hips, not talking. They’ve all finished the fartlek, it seems, and are walking the rest of the way back to Iten.
My companion doesn’t stop, though.
“Three-two-one-up,” she says as her watch beeps again. We weave through the bodies, that turn to watch us, the mzungu and the girl, still going.
Up the final hill back into Iten I drop back. She is too strong. The altitude still gets me when I try to run up hills. At the top, she stops and I catch up. She’s walking now. That must be the end.
“Asante sana,” I say, shaking her hand, catching a glimpse of her face for the first time.
We walk in silence with the other runners the rest of the way back into town. The sun is beating down on the back of my neck. I’m tired, but still standing, my first “hard” session done. It has only taken me two months to pluck up the courage.
• The book Running with the Kenyans by Adharanand Finn will be published in 2012
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