Kenyan Running and Me

It was probably around my sophomore year in high school when I really started to develop an interest in what Kenyan runners were doing. I was running track and cross-country at the time and I was doing pretty well. Not great, mind you, but pretty well.

So I naturally wanted to find out who else was doing pretty well. Actually I wanted to know who was the best in the world. And the word on the street was that Kenya was the land of world class runners. So to confirm this, me and my friends did some research. The internet wasn’t that big at the time (1992) so we looked to the school library’s back issues of Sports Illustrated to find some gems of Kenyan running lore.

We hit the jackpot with a certain SI issue whereby the writer went to the Rift Valley in Kenya and explored the lives of the runners. I can’t remember the title exactly, something like “Children of the Wind”, but it added to the aura that surrounded the Kenyan runner.

He wrote about how these runners as children ran several miles to school, up and down the steep hills that make up the Rift Valley landscape. He also told of boys as young as 13 purportedly running 1500’s in the low 3:40’s! If that didn’t stir the imagination of a wannabe running star, I don’t know what could!

Fast forward 4 years and I dropped out of university to volunteer and live in Kenya, drawn to that country in no small part because of the running legacy.

Fast forward 12 more years (that’s a total of 16 years for those that don’t want to do the math) and I’ve now decided to pursue my re-kindled passion for running by providing news, commentaries, interviews and a bunch of other stuff about running in Kenya.

I plan on keeping an updated blog which will present and analyze running news coming out of Kenya. In addition I hope to hunt down past, present and future running greats and interview them for this blog. If time allows, I’ll also attend some of the local track and cross-country meets and pass on to you what happens there.

This will be a lot of fun for me but it will be a learning process as well. Although I’ve been involved in media training and production here in Kenya for the last 5 years, I’ve never thought of myself as an active journalist. But that is exactly the role I’ll have to assume if this blog is to be of any value.

So wish me luck and let me know of anything you’re interested in finding out about running in Kenya!