The need for speed

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Over the summer there are going to be lots of people sitting in front of their televisions, disconsolately prodding their thickening bellies and musing on lost opportunities. Could they too have become Olympians if only they’d eased up on those doughnuts and stuck to their training regimes? As a boy, Adharanand Finn had the makings of a promising long-distance runner. Named after the Sanskrit word for Eternal Bliss, he spent his teenage years competing in cross-country races in Northamptonshire. But he let it slip in his twenties and by his late thirties all that remained was a host of nagging what-ifs.

At the same time, he’d long been fascinated by Kenya’s dominance of middle and long-distance running. Of the top 20 fastest marathons ever run, 17 have been won by Kenyans. Between 1991 and 2009, Kenya won 32 Olympic and World Championships gold medals in middle and long-distance running — just in case you’re wondering, Great Britain won none. With middle-age hovering on the horizon, Finn decided to go and live in Kenya for six months. “I want to unshackle myself and run like a Kenyan,” he declares. He also hoped to discover the secret of Kenya’s success. Finn’s trip does not get off to a promising start. His time of 38 minutes and 35 seconds for a 10 kilometre race is, he’s appalled to learn, three and a half minutes slower than Kenya’s slowest junior girl athlete.

The vast majority of Kenyan runners are based in a small town called Iten in the Rift Valley. Everyone Finn meets there seems to have an Olympic medal of one sort or another. All of them live in large spartan dormitories, eat vast quantities of a completely tasteless but carbohydrate-rich maize paste called Ugali and are utterly dedicated to athletics.

The only heartening piece of information I can pass on to more sedentarily inclined readers is that they also spend a remarkable amount of time in bed. Lornah Kiplagat, the current world record holder at five kilometres, sleeps for a heroic 16 hours a day when she’s in serious training. To begin with, Finn suspects that the secret of the Kenyans’ success has to do with their not wearing shoes. Running barefoot, they land on their forefoot rather than their heels — thus saving on energy and reducing the risk of injury.

Soon, though, he realises if there’s a secret at all, it’s much more complicated than that. All top Kenyan athletes, without exception, come from poor rural families. From a very young age, they’re walking and running everywhere, usually at high altitude. As one man recalls, the big test of aspiring runners when he was a boy was whether they could catch an antelope. Then there’s the fact that Kenyan athletes won virtually nothing until cash prizes were on offer — whereupon they surged to the front of the field. Finn glumly concedes he is never going to catch an antelope. But while he may be a bit of a plodder himself, I’ve seldom read a better account of the exhilaration of running — the sense of testing oneself to the limit, the constant blur of impressions, the “stirring of something primeval in the depths of our bellies”.

However, what gives Running with the Kenyans its special appeal is Finn’s charm. Awestruck by rubbing shoulders with so many of his idols and all but broken by his hopeless aspirations, he’s unusually engaging company both on and off the track. At the end of the book, as he pants his way around the streets of Manhattan desperately trying to run a marathon in under three hours, there will be few, I suspect, who are not urging him on.

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