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It's
hard to imagine Bob Kennedy, Alan Webb, and Sara Wells sharing a
one-story, 25-foot-long house for most of the year, but that's what
Augustine Choge, Isaac Songok, and Rebbie Koech do — gratefully — in
Iten, Kenya.
We
might as well get the stats out of the way: Choge has run 7:28 for
3,000 meters and 12:57 for 5,000 meters (to Kennedy's 7:30 and 12:58),
and he won the world junior title at 5,000m last summer. Songok
is a 3:30 1,500m runner (to Webb's 3:32) and made the Olympic final
in Athens. Koech, whose overseas experience consists mostly of European
road races, has a half-marathon best of 1:13:02 (compared to Wells'
1:12:50). In March, Choge won the junior race at the World Cross
Country Championships, and Songok placed third in the senior men's
4K. That weekend, Koech was off in Rotterdam setting her half marathon
PR at the Fortis CPC Loop race.
The
tiny house that Choge, Songok, and Koech share is on the grounds
of St. Patrick's High School. It's about 15 yards behind the house
of their coach, Brother Colm O'Connell, who took on the three as
his first professional athletes in 2003. The entrance to the house
is a common area that has a table with two chairs around it, and
two other chairs elsewhere. On the other side of the latter two
chairs is a bunk bed with bare mattresses for visitors. On the walls
are articles illustrating stretches from Irish Runner and
a German running magazine, as well as photos of Wilson Kipketer
(a St. Patrick's alumnus), Haile Gebrselassie, and Kenenisa Bekele,
and an Athletics Kenya calendar. A small transistor radio with poor
reception is set up via a jerry-rigged extension cord system. The
miniscule kitchen contains a small refrigerator and a toaster.
Choge
and Songok share a room. It has space for little more than their
two single beds and a few-foot gap between the mattresses. Koech's
room is similar; its extra bed is often occupied by visiting female
runners.
When
in Iten — more than nine months of the year — the three
seldom venture far beyond the St. Patrick's grounds when not running.
Like nearly all of the Kenyans I spent time with during my month
in Iten, Choge, Songok, and Koech spend what to Westerners is an
amazing amount of time sitting around between runs doing nothing
much at all. When Americans speak of "resting" between
training sessions, they usually mean engaging in low-stress activities
like surfing the Web, reading a book, cooking, etc. For the Iten
trio, "resting" means sleeping or sitting outside their
house, perhaps talking with visitors. The main activity I observed
was a necessity — washing the running clothes that get so easily
soiled by Iten's red dirt roads. Frequent laundry duty is all the
more urgent when you train three times a day while wearing layers
of gear. They have access to a primitive clothes washer on site,
but it's little more than a glorified spinning rinser, and you can
get clothes cleaner using the traditional hand-washing method.
The
first run of the day starts a little after 6:00 a.m., as daylight
arrives. Says Songok, "After morning training and breakfast,
we wait, and then we start again, with the second training at 10:00.
After training, maybe we can have tea and then sleep for awhile.
We take lunch at 1:00. Maybe then we will sleep a bit, and then
there is evening training. [The schedule says 4:00, but they usually
get going between 4:15 and 4:30.] Then we cook dinner. If we have
no evening training, maybe then we will go into town to use the
computer." By this he means one of the four computers with
internet access in Iten's post office, which is half a mile from
their home. "When we have three training sessions [in a day],
mostly we just sit around," Songok says.
They
go into Iten for supper occasionally, "when we are too tired
to cook," says Songok. "But there are drawbacks. We don't
know how it is that they are cooking. They may use a lot of oil."
Also, Iten's restaurants cater mostly to people working in town
during the day; there's neither a tradition of, nor money for, most
people to eat dinner out. As visiting Westerners quickly learn,
the number of available items shrinks during the day, and what is
for sale in the evening has often been cooked in the morning and
then left out, unrefrigerated, since.
Sundays
are the most atypical. During non-race weeks, the three go for a
90-minute run in the forest, starting a little after 6:00 a.m. That's
it for training for the day. Church follows the run. "After
church, we rest the whole day," says Songok.
When
I was there in December, the three were in base training for cross
country. They receive a month's worth of workouts at a time from
O'Connell. See the
sidebar for Choge's and Songok's training in December.
Except
for when they were home for Christmas, Choge and Songok did every
run together that month. They were joined occasionally for hard
sessions by 3:36 1,500m runner Bernard Kiptanui, who was attending
the three-week-long juniors' camp O'Connell conducts at St. Patrick's
every December and April. Otherwise, it was always just the two
of them, unless an intruding American invited himself along for
easy runs. And by "easy," I mean almost unimaginably easy
by American standards. One morning I joined the two for their 6:00
a.m. run, which lasted just more than 49 minutes. Three hours later,
for a "30 minutes high" session, they covered the same
10K-or-so loop in less than 31 minutes. On all of the runs I did
with them — read: when the schedule stipulated "easy"
— they seemed not to care when less accomplished runners passed
us, and didn't vary from the gentle pace.
Koech
is most often joined by an Iten resident known simply by his first
name, Cleophas. A few other women in town occasionally train with
her, because they're eager to partake, however surreptitiously,
of O'Connell's guidance. The few runs I did with Koech were more
like the ones I did with the junior campers than with Choge and
Songok — each started at a stumble and gradually but inevitably
sped up well past comfortable, regardless of what the schedule said.
One afternoon I joined Koech and Cleophas for what was supposed
to be an easy 40 minutes. Less than halfway into it, Cleophas started
pushing the pace. Koech's form of protest was to spurt ahead and
make us work even harder. When we had finished and were sprawled
on the grass outside her house, Koech pointed to Cleophas and me
and said to O'Connell, "These guys — they're trying to
kill me." My claim that I was just trying to keep up fell on
deaf ears. Koech rose wearily and said, "Now it is time to
rest."
(Posted
May 16, 2005)
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Sidebar:
December 2004 training of Augustine Choge and Isaac Songok
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The
house in which Augustine Choge, Isaac Songok, and Rebbie Koech
live.
(All photos by Scott Douglas)
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Isaac
Songok (front) and Augustine Choge checking e-mail at the
Iten post office.
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Rebbie
resting inside the house.
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