RUNNING NERD ALERT: This post is focused on almost completely on training details and ideas, and may contain only trace amounts of information that are interesting to the non-running nerd community. Read at your own risk.
As I said before, with school ending the main focus of the rest of my week was running with Kemboi. I'll describe what the runs we did were and talk about some of the things him and I talked about, but when and where we talked about everything is a jumble so I'll just intersperse arbitrarily through the post as I feel like it. That being said, I headed up to Kemboi's house the next morning, wondering what one of his "main training runs" would look like. I had decided I would toss what I was planning to do for the rest of the week out the window to run with Kemboi. I thought even though it probably wasn't a good training decision and I might set my training back that in the long term how often to you get a chance to run with an elite Kenyan marathoner? To me the tradeoff of what I could learn from running and talking with someone that fast was worth jeopardizing my training and potentially my season. I already could see the pitfall of becoming I self-described expert on Kenyan running on my return and forcing my ideas as the correct ones just because I had spent the summer in Kenya and trained with a top marathoner. If that turns out to be the case someone please remind me that I haven't run a 10k under 34 minutes or a 5k under 16 minutes and have no business pretending to be some ultimate authority on running, but I know that many of you are more than willing to do that, and that's part of what I love about you guys. You know who you are. Still, I see the value when parsing out the truth about what the East Africans may or may not do to be dominate us and the rest of the world to be able to say, "Well, I know this is what at least one Kenyan does, because I watched him do it and struggled along trying to do it myself". My mind was and still is swimming with ideas of how and why the East Africans are so fast based on my experiences, and I can't wait to bounce those ideas of some people when I get back. Let me say this though: it certainly isn't some secret formula they are trying to hide. Kemboi more than most, but everyone I have asked to run with has been welcoming, and have graciously answered all my questions. This might be weighted more strongly than it should be because of Kemboi, but I haven't sensed any hesitance to share anything about their training with me.
We followed the same routine Wednesday morning as we had for our "speed walk" on Tuesday, walking and slowly jogging along the path up through the houses to the side road where we would start running. The pace was not much faster than the evening before, and I was starting to wonder if Kemboi ever really did anything much faster than this on his regular runs. He mentioned as we were taking off that sometimes he would do repeats along that road, usually about 20, and the stretch it was along was around 700 meters. I asked him more about the speed work and he said that he would do speed work twice a week. I couldn't get a straight answer from him, but it sounded like a normal week consisted of a fartlek workout, some kind of interval workout, four days of easy recovery miles, and one day completely off. On all of the six days that he ran he would do the evening speed walk that, from what I gathered was usually 45-70 minutes and usually as slow as we had done the day before. He mentioned that some days he would run three times but, after asking him about that more, it didn't sound like there was any solid pattern to which days he would run three times, it almost sounded to me like he might just do it if he was feeling good and wanted to go for another run. If we assume that his average morning run is 70-90 minutes (which seems to be about the range from what I gather), on an average day he usually runs about 140 minutes, with 60 of them pretty slow, so my estimation is that it works out to about 18 or 19 miles a day, so I would guess him to be running somewhere in the neighborhood of 110 miles a week (since he's only running 6 days), which seems pretty low to me for a marathoner (a note here: I've noticed in analyzing Kemboi's training that my comparisons are really apples and oranges because I don't really know the ins and outs of what elite American marathoners do, so I'm basically comparing the training of an elite Kenyan marathoner who's been running professionally since high school to what I know about training for a three season college season where the longest race is 10k, but I think that's the beauty of getting this information into other peoples' hands; maybe someone who knows more than I do can make more useful comparisons. I'll give you my impressions of his training, but keep in mind that this is compared to college training or the few glimpses or rumors of marathon training in the US that I've been exposed to). I asked him about doing a long run, but that doesn't seem to be the instrumental piece of his training that it is in many American programs. He did mention that on Saturdays he will sometimes go for a 40k run (so about 25 miles), but the way he talks about it doesn't make it sound like it's a key piece of his training, and he certainly doesn't do it every week.
He said normally he stays in a pattern of two weeks training in Eldoret then two weeks in Iten, the village that serves as the Kenyan high altitude training center. I asked him what the elevation was at Iten and he couldn't give me a number, but Eldoret is pushing 7000 feet (I remember looking up the elevation of Eldoret before I left and seeing it was in the mid 6000's, but if the sign at Kaptagat that said it was 7742 is correct, I would guess Eldoret has to be close to 7000), so I would guess Iten would be at least 8500 to considered the altitude training center for runners that regularly train in Eldoret. I don't personally see this as the defining factor of the Kenyan running dominance, but it certainly can't be ignored. American runners do altitude training too, but as far as I know the elevations are lower. I know a decent number of pro athletes go to the Flagstaff area, but if I remember correctly that's only six or seven thousand feet (if that's wrong someone please comment to correct me, or even just to give the exact figure), around the same altitude that the elite Kenyan runners are training before they go to altitude. He talked a lot on this run about adjusting to the climate here, and the more he used the word the less sure I was of what he meant by it, because it was pretty clear he didn't mean climate as in the temperature and humidity and weather patterns and so on. The best I could figure was that he meant the overall training conditions, because he talked about how whenever you moved to train somewhere else you must adjust to training in the new "climate" and talked about how good for training the climate in Eldoret was. It's true that the climate is good for training in Eldoret, fairly mild and cool most of the year, without the dramatic season changes that I'm used to because it's so close to the equator, but cooler than Nairobi or Kisumu because it's at higher elevation.
We ran along the main road dirt road that had become my favorite training ground, especially now that I knew how it connected into the garbage dump route. Kemboi said this was the main route for the training of many of the athletes in the area. This was my first time running in the early morning, and as many people had told me before, there were plenty of other runners. Most ran alone or in pairs. I asked Kemboi about how he felt about training alone and whether he preferred that, and he replied that "it's no problem" as long as you are disciplined to stick to the program. He said he didn't mind training with other people, but he seemed to think there were more pitfalls training with others than training alone, because if you're training with other people then you aren't necessarily doing training that is exactly tailored to your needs. It was a fascinating perspective because I've always thought of training alone as something to be avoided if possible. Kemboi's whole perspective on training seemed to me to be a pretty simplistic one: as long as you stick to "the program", run in the morning and evening every day except Sunday, ate the right food and got plenty sleep, and didn't smoke or drink, you would quickly become "very strong". I asked him about what kind of food he ate and he proceeded to rave about how great ugali was and how fast it would make you. He said he ate ugali just about every meal and then would eat fish or meat three or four times a week, make sure to get enough vegetables and drink enough water and he said he also drank a lot of tea, like all Kenyans. Like his training, it seemed maddeningly simple, but then again, maybe that's part of why it's so effective.
We turned down one of the side roads that I had wanted to explore, still running at a very comfortable pace. Kemboi picked up the pace, but not the effort, as the road descended, winding through the fields and farther into the country. Maybe it was just because his stride was so effortless, but Kemboi seemed to flow with the land, gracefully opening his stride on the downhill and shortening it on the uphill, but always extremely relaxed and seemingly completely effortless. I was envious. I would alternately be encouraged and dismayed by the smoothness of his form, sometimes feeling as if I was starting to pick up pieces of it, and sometimes feeling like I was just lumbering along using twice as much energy as he was. This road was provided possibly the most beautiful run I had been on in Eldoret yet. It was much narrower than the main road, with barely room for two vehicles to pass, but was actually far smoother than the main road, probably because of the lack of traffic. After a mile or two the rolling of the road seemed to start going more uphill than downhill, including some pretty significant hills. Kemboi didn't run the hills hard at all, if anything he seemed to me to let up on them. He explained to me later that it was better to relax on the hills and make sure you can finish the run than to run too hard on the hills and get tired. Yet another funny perspective, but it matched with the relaxed, comfortable approach we had taken on this run. Despite the comfortable pace I began to struggle on the hills, and reminded myself that we were running at 7000 feet. Also, I begin to be suspicious that maybe the pace seemed slower than it actually was because of Kemboi practically jogging next to me. The minutes had been flying by though, and I realized that we had been running for almost an hour, so it wasn't too unreasonable that the legs were feeling heavy.
The road we were on curved back around, and we ran along some roads that were not much more than a two track between fields, and eventually connected back into the main road. The last major hill we came up we pretty much jogged up, with Kemboi's main concern seeming to be that I wasn't straining at all. He runs with a watch but doesn't have any set distance markers so I don't think he runs off of pace at all, always based on effort and "sensory data", to borrow the Wetmore-ism. We finished maybe a little faster than we had started, but not fast by any means. The run had been 86 minutes total, and it had been one of the best training courses I'd been on: 100% dirt roads with pretty smooth footing for most of the way, rolling through most of the run, with a decent amount of climbing in the second half of the run. My legs felt kind of heavy, but not too fatigued, just the way I think they should feel after a solid long summer aerobic-base building run. I remember thinking, and still think, that you could do a lot worse for training than to just run that course every day for a summer. We went through a similar routine of stretching at the end of the run, then headed back to Kemboi's house for water, bread, and tea. One thing that makes sense to me that I think he does a better job than I usually do of is refueling immediately after a run. He always does his minimalist stretching then immediately goes back, pounds down two glasses of water then has a cup of tea and a couple pieces of bread. He never emphasized that to me, but it was clearly part of his regular routine. Kemboi said we would take the afternoon off because the run had been pretty long, but I was pretty sure he said that for my benefit, and the next day I found that he had indeed gone for a run in the evening. Before we headed back into town he showed me all of his gear, which was pretty extensive and of a couple different brands. I asked him if he was sponsored, and gathered that he didn't have a contract with any company, but got lots of free gear and shoes at races, so he really didn't have to worry about buying his own gear, and he had some really nice stuff, mostly Nike and Adidas, but also some New Balance and a couple other brands I didn't recognize. He was fascinated with my Brooks gear, and it took some clearing up to explain to him that I wasn't sponsored by Brooks. It was interesting explaining to him being on the college team and how that worked, because that was a new concept to him, since he had started running professionally right after high school. I think he still sees me as a much faster runner than I actually am, and it seems to me that his assumption, and rightly so in this area, is that if people are training hard they are elites who are running professionally. He gave me one of his Nike shirts, and I thanked him and said I'd bring him one of my Brooks ones in return. It was funny to think of Brooks as an exotic, foreign brand here since it was so common in the Seattle area. Looking back on it I was disappointed to get a plain Nike shirt that I probably could have bought anywhere in the US rather than one of his shirts from a marathon in Europe or Asia that would be super exotic to have, but he had given me the shirt so I didn't think it would be appropriate to ask for a different one. I still have a twinge of regret thinking about the possibilities of some of the cool shirts I could have got though.
Kemboi took a quick shower after our run and was heading into town, so he walked back to Roger's with me. Looking back on it now it might not have been a good idea to let a guy I had basically known for two days come back to Roger's house, but I didn't worry about it that much at the time because in my mind Kemboi was someone I felt I could trust. He was heading in to get a massage in town, and said that he would do that every week or two but definitely daily or even every couple of days. I hadn't thought about it, but I was glad he had come back with me because I was able to take a picture with him on my camera, and I hope I can get a copy of the picture to him eventually. I was beginning to realize how this could become a long-term relationship, and that Kemboi definitely expected that, and that really excited me. To have a personal friend in the Kenyan running community was a better scenario from running on this trip than I had even dreamed of. I showed my Gatorade powder and poured a glass for him, which he was very enamored with. I explained to him that it was a formula that would get quick energy back into the muscles to help them recover from runs. He was very excited about it, and I decided to give him the rest of the container I had with me because I would be doing the rest of my runs in Eldoret with him and then had another container in Nairobi, so I gave him the container, which he was thrilled with. He asked me about how he could get more, and I told him I had no idea if you could get it in Kenya, and thought it would probably be an expensive hassle to try to get from the US. Since school was now out Roger was around, and he came back and was able to meet Kemboi. He at least didn't seem upset about Kemboi being there, and I think maybe being the sportsman that he is he didn't mind having a stranger in his house quite as much with it being an athlete of that caliber.
I was somewhat worried about trying to keep up with Kemboi for the whole week, but decided that even if it wasn't in line with what my training was supposed to be I was going to run with him as much as I could. It wasn't a good decision as far as having a good cross country season in the fall goes, but it's such a unique opportunity that I couldn't bear to let it go. Looking at this ten or twenty years down the road, I thought, is it more likely I would regret that I'd overextended my training and set myself back a couple weeks back, or that I would regret passing up the opportunity to run with a world-class marathoner? I was more willing to risk my training. Kemboi didn't seem to have any reservations about me running with him, as far as me being able to keep up or getting injured. His idea seemed to be that as long as I stuck to the program, there would be "no problem". In general, he struck me as the kind of guy that was always, upbeat, undaunted by whatever challenges or obstacles he was presented with in his training. He has unwavering confidence and trust in "the program", and I never saw any questioning or hesitation from him about what he was doing. I know he changed what he was planning on doing, moving his speed work days around, I was afraid because of me, but always seemed certain and confident of what we were doing and how it fit into his overall training.
I remember Kemboi originally saying that he was going to do some speed work on Thursday, but when I showed up and asked what we were doing he said we were just going for a "moderate" run. I insisted several times that he shouldn't change what he was doing because I was here, that I wanted to see exactly what his training was like and didn't want him to change anything or worry about whether I could keep up, but every time he dismissed my concerns with one of his sometimes endearing, sometimes frustrating "It's no problem" exclamations. As we started out Kemboi complained of some pain in his knee and I got the impression maybe he wasn't doing speed work today because he didn't want to push too hard with his knee hurting. I asked him more about the knee problem, and he said he had had some problems with it in the past, but when I asked if he had ever taken time off for it, he brushed away the possibility, saying that if you didn't run you would lose fitness so he wouldn't stop running because of an injury. I was certain that that kind of approach would eventually catch up to him, but I asked him about past injuries and apparently in his 6 year professional career he had never taken time off for an injury, just ran through them and apparently made it through fine. That reminds me of another conversation we had the day before about time off after races. I didn't get a concise answer from him, but it appeared that he really didn't take too much time off after races either. In both cases he seemed somewhat confused by the question, like he'd never considered the possibility of taking time off from training before and didn't see any sense in doing so. Of the handful of other runners we saw out on the road, Kemboi pointed out one that he knew was recovering from an injury, who was jogging pretty slow even by Kenyan standards. On our way back we saw him walking along the side of the road, and I felt like one of the Spartans in "300" that just saw one of the immortals die, and had proof for the first time that they weren't invincible. I'm still not sure what to think about the Kenyans on the subject of injuries, but from my limited experience and what I've seen and heard they seem to get injured, or at least miss time because of injuries, less than American runners. That's based on a lot more on my perception than on any sort of facts though, which is exactly why I'd like to explore this factor more, because I could see this being a significant factor in the success of the East Africans if they really get injured as little as it appears to me.
We took off noticeably faster than we had before, and when we hit a long gradual downhill after about 20 minutes, we started really rolling, I would guess in the neighborhood of 6:00 miles, but still running very smoothly because of the gradual downhill grade. I was feeling good and it felt good to run faster, but I was still worried about being able to sustain that. I didn't have the assurances I had running with the college guys that were in similar shape to me that eventually the pace would probably settle down if we were running too fast. I had no doubt Kemboi could smoothly run this pace another 15 miles without giving a thought to the fact that he probably would have pulled me through to a half marathon PR and then would have to back track to find my body curled up in the ditch somewhere. We had lapsed into silence over this fast downhill section, falling into the rhythm of footfalls and breathing that can become so magical and peaceful at times like this. After about 10 minutes Kemboi turned to me and said matter-of-factly, "You know, we're running fast," as if maybe I hadn't noticed. I readily agreed with him, enjoying the statement all the more because I was almost certain that the humor of it was completely lost on him. I asked him why we were running faster today, and he said it was because sometimes people take off fast in a race so you have to be ready to do that too. The logic was little bit round-about to me, but the concept was very similar to what Erika preaches to us about making sure that we are running different speeds in our training, particularly during the summer months when we're building mileage base and not doing workouts to make sure we don't get stuck in a rut of running one pace. I had been surprised with how slow we had run, but on the three runs we had done so far all had been at different paces. We turned down another road that continued going slightly downhill, and I realized that at some point we would start gaining the elevation back and wondered/dreaded if that would be right about when this fast pace would, as Gavin Brand so eloquently says, turn from a rocket ship into a death march.
Kemboi's concept of pace fascinated me. Whenever we were running around 7:00 pace or faster he would consider us to be running "fast", but it seemed to me that he must still be extremely comfortable at that pace, and I wondered how much he ran faster than 5:45 pace, but then I remembered I still hadn't seen a "speed work" day, and I imagine he probably runs at or a lot closer to race pace on those days. The road we were running along popped back out on the main road and we turned for home, this being the beginning of the long uphill hall that I knew was coming. If I remember right we were maybe 50 minutes into the run by this point, and as smooth as the pace felt I could still feel that it had still been quietly sapping the energy from my legs. I knew where we were now though, which helped me mentally prepare for the rest of the run. We hadn't been going more than a minute or two on the main road when we saw the landmark that I recognized and, to my horror, I realized it was the farthest point out on the main road that I had been on, meaning that we actually had probably 40 minutes of running ahead of us, with most of it being a gradual but steady climb to gain the elevation we had lost during the swift, effortless early minutes of the run. We weren't pushing the pace hard up the hill, but we weren't jogging as we had the day before, and Kemboi explained that sometimes you had to push the hills hard because people would push the hills hard in races to test how strong you were. This seemed to me to directly contradict what he had said the day before about taking the hills easy to make sure you could finish the run, especially in the light of a day like today where I was decidedly unsure about whether I could finish the run. Still, I had seen and heard a lot of the concepts in Kemboi's training that followed what I consider to be the most fundamental rule that exists in training: your training must prepare you for the racing you plan to do.
Towards the top of the main climb and about halfway home I jumped off onto a side road for a potty break, which didn't seem to bother Kemboi in the slightest. I half expected him to be annoyed at having to halt the run, especially this late in a run that we were taking at a pretty fast pace, but ise response seemed to be the standard "It's no problem." I was still getting used to removing Kemboi from the ideas of how high-strung I figured an elite athlete must be. The cover was woefully inadequate, and several young boys giggled at me the other side of the patch of brush I squatted behind. After the break I felt better about my chances of being able to finish the run, but the next climb put that back in doubt. Still, we were less than 15 minutes from pay dirt now, and I like to think of myself as a runner who will always hang tough with there's someone I need to stay with, in either training or racing. I soldiered my way through the last part of the run, several times falling several yards off the pace only to pull myself back as Kemboi would thrust his finger out beside him to show where I should be, right next to him. Kemboi's stride and form suggested that the run had hardly challenged him, though I remembered watching elite runners that look like they aren't working at all right up until the drop off the pace. I've tried to duplicate that appearance but with basically no success. I finished the run extremely exhausted, breathing very heavily and reaching to Kemboi to steady myself. Kemboi didn't even seem to notice, he was just happy and impressed that I had finished the run. The run had been 92 minutes total, with Kemboi pushing the pace to what I would guess to be faster than 6:30 pace for most of it, though between the elevation and the hills I don't really trust my pace estimates. If I use the effort scale that Kemboi is fond of, my legs were solidly in the "very tired" category, and I felt like I should add a "legs are about to melt into a puddle" category for this occasion. I definitely hadn't run that hard since track season and I don't think I'd ever done a run that long where I really pushed the pace. Anything over an hour and a half had always been a long run that should be taken at a slow, comfortable, conversational pace, but that certainly wasn't the case today, and I imagine runs like this are essential for marathon training, as you have to get used to running hard and running while your legs are tired. The best thing I could compare it to workout-wise was a long, relaxed tempo that was about twice as long as any I'd ever done. As we talked more about it I realized that the whole second half of the run he had been testing me just as he said people would in races, picking up the pace on the hills to see if I was strong enough to go with him. I think he ran the whole last 20 minutes just at the pace where he wasn't sure if I would be able to stick with him or not. Our stretching and drills after the run were even more brief than usual, which I was grateful for because I had that feeling where even standing seemed to take a huge amount of effort.
We headed back to his house for our usual post-run water, tea, and bread, except this time with Gatorade powder mixed into the water which was nice. I insisted that not only would I definitely not run in the evening but I would need to run very easy tomorrow for my legs to recover from this run. He responded as he did with a regularity that was starting to wear on me a little bit, that it would be no problem. He said he would give me a massage so my legs could recover and we would run easy tomorrow, so it would be no problem. Kemboi said he had learned how to massage at Iten, the high altitude camp, and still urged me that I should go there with him some time in the next couple of weeks. I really wanted to go, but I wasn't sure it would fit into my whole trip itinerary, and there was still a part of me that was uneasy about taking off to a remote village with a man I had known for less than a week, as much as I liked Kemboi. I had never received a real massage before and I'd heard that they were pretty painful, but I was still surprised at the level of pain for something whose purpose is to help my muscles recover.
Kemboi had told me the day before to wear my "track suit" to his house so I could shower at his house rather than waiting to get home. I was pretty hesitant, but I thought that might afford more time to hang out if I wasn't trying to get home to shower. At the back of the compound were several small, dark, concrete rooms with holes in the ground that served as toilets, and next to them were a couple of likewise small, dark, concrete rooms but without the hole in the ground that served as "shower rooms". Kemboi gave me a tub of water, a bar of soap, a towel, and pointed me in that direction. Somehow I hadn't put together that this was the shower situation, and if I had I might have declined Kemboi's suggestion, but now I decided to go for it, and figured it would be, as my dad would say, a real cultural experience. The problem was that the shower rooms looked just like the toilet rooms and so I didn't realize the shower rooms were there, so I just squatted there on the concrete outside the rooms, shielded from the main courtyard by the row of bathrooms, and begin washing in my running shorts. If it were somewhere where it wasn't already such a strange and new experience I may have suspected more that wasn't quite right, but I figured even what was right wouldn't feel quite right and figured maybe in a compound like this there just wasn't the privacy that I was accustomed to, even in Kenya. Eventually I stripped off my running shorts to finish washing and not long after some motherly lady came in and, when I noticed her, gave me a look that indicated was definitely not in the right place. Kemboi came in after not too long to shower himself, and seemed confused that I was squatting there in outside the shower room washing rather than in the shower room. He explained it to me like he was saying something I should already know, and I nodded and told him I was almost done anyway.
I was correct in that we sat around and talked a little more, both because I was much more comfortable after having showered and also because I was so dead after the run I felt like I needed to gather my energy to be able to walk home. I stumbled my way through trying to explain the American perspective on Kenyan running, and I realized as I went I'm not even sure what that is. I told him that many American runners and coaches were determined to be able to compete with the East African runners, and that there were different ideas about why the East Africans were so dominant and asked him why he thought they were so successful. I got yet another long, rambling answer that didn't really answer the question at all, but was still very interesting to listen to. Kemboi seemed to me to hardly acknowledge how successful the Kenyan and Ethiopians had been, and instead focused on the idea of consistency in training and sticking to "the program", which he really believed anyone could do. I don't think he saw himself as being at any kind of an advantage over other people in the world, he just stuck to his training plan and seemed to think that anyone could be successful as long as they did that, which was and is alternately encouraging and frustrating to me. In talking with him about training out on the runs, he maintained that if I came and trained with him, by next summer I could be "very strong", and, I can only assume, believed I could be running at the elite level. It seemed to me that the only difference he saw between us was that he had been training consistently on a good program longer, and that if I just buckled down and started training, I would be running 2:15 for the marathon in no time. On the one hand a part of me wondered if it could be possible. I would be done with college in the spring and there would be nothing stopping me from coming over here to train, at least for 6 months or a year to see if I could make something of myself as a runner. But then I would say to myself to look in the mirror and ask if I could really be an elite runner. My running career for the last five years had been little more than one setback or disappointment after another, and before this trip I was just trying to gather enough enthusiasm and excitement for running to make the most of my last shot at having that successful college cross country season that so far had eluded me. Sometimes my frustration would turn to Kemboi, for making a successful running career look so simple, requiring only commitment and consistency. It couldn't be that it's really that simple. But could it? It so, then where had I gone wrong all these years? He himself seemed to be of the opinion that an American could be fast just as easily as a Kenyan with the proper training, something I'm still not sold on. I wondered what he would say if I came, trained with him for a year, and couldn't break 2:40 for the marathon. Would he admit that that at a basic level his upbringing, build, and genetics were better suited for running than mine? I doubted it. I suspected that there was no setback I could face that would stop Kemboi from being upbeat and optimistic about my running career. Maybe that's part of what makes him such a great runner.
Kemboi had promised me we would do an easy 50 minute run to recover on Friday to recover from the onslaught of Thursday's run. We took off at a relaxed pace in a different direction than we had gone before. Kemboi explained that the roads along this route were too rough for running fast, so you could only run this route on days when you were running easy. Indeed, the road was extremely rough in some places, and it looked to me like it got even worse whenever it got muddy and some sections I would have felt more comfortable taking with a four wheel drive vehicle. On this run I asked Kemboi about his coaching, because he seemed to me to be pretty much calling the shots with what he did in his training. He said he had a coach from Qatar (I think) who he talked with every couple of weeks. Hearing Kemboi tell it, it sounded like his coach had a similar idea concerning "the program" that Kemboi did: that as long as Kemboi knew the program and training was going well, there wasn't much need for more immediate coaching. I guess this kind of coaching is much more prevalent at the professional level, but it still surprised me with an athlete of Kemboi's level to not talk more with his coach. When I thought about what I knew of "the program" though, it wasn't a complicated one that required very much coaching. I would have guessed the coach would do more in terms of designing Kemboi's speed work days, but I guess that's part of the beauty of the system; every day Kemboi wakes up and makes a decision about what his training for the day will be based on how his body is feeling and responding to the work he's been doing, following the general guidelines of the almighty program, so it's really more personalized training than any coach could subscribe. I've heard coaches say before that athletes need to have input in their training because they are the only ones that know how their body is feeling, but I don't know that I've ever seen that approach taken to this extreme. Then again, Kemboi told me that there are some pretty fast guys in Kenya that don't have a coach at all. This would have surprised me for an elite runner before running with Kemboi, but seeing his approach made it very easy to picture runners training with no coach at all. What it means is that there aren't carefully designed workouts and close monitoring of training, there's just the simplified approach that you need to go out and run consistently and get in some speed days to get your legs quick. Kemboi's ideas of minimalistic coaching takes a runner like me, that has run in the school system through high school and college where you have at least one coach watching you work out at least a couple times per week, a little while to wrap my head around, but I think now it makes sense. The basic concept of it, and the one behind a lot of what Kemboi does, is that running fast isn't a complicated thing. It's hard work and demands dedicated consistency, but doesn't require an elaborate plan or extensive knowledge of the biological background behind what's happening with the training. I'm still can't sign on with this, I need to think about it more and bounce the idea of it off other people, but I certainly can't dismiss it because some of the fastest runners in the world, most of which are regularly burying elite American runners, by the way, are doing this.
As we were running through a neighborhood of dirt roads with some more spacious houses that appeared to me to be something like the suburbs of Eldoret, Kemboi told me that he hoped in the next couple months to buy a big house up here, maybe with some of the prize money he hoped to collect at New York in November. It would be pretty hard to find something that wasn't roomier than his current digs, I thought. I think he's pretty wealthy by Kenyan standards, as are most of the fast runners. One of the days we were sitting in his house after the run he had told me about the farm land he owned out in the countryside where his family lived, and how his running helped finance and expand the farm, which would in turn produce revenue itself at harvest time. Living off of prize money from races is an unforgivingly performance based career though. What if you train almost exclusively for a marathon for 6-8 months, as Kemboi was doing for New York, and then had a bad race and came away with no money from it? I think there are some protections against that, such as making money from pacing races and tune-up races getting ready for bigger races, both of which Kemboi did (including pacing the 2007 Boston Marathon and pacing for none other than Haile Gebreselaise in a race in Korea), but it still seems to me that that could make for a pretty stressful career if that is your livelihood.
As we were talking and in new territory for me, I didn't realize until we had been running over half an hour that we had been running away from the house the whole run, and I asked Kemboi when we were going to turn around, and he said we would turn on a road that he pointed out in the distance. I held out some hope that maybe we weren't as far from the house as I thought, but I was skeptical we would finish in anything under an hour, and was slightly annoyed with Kemboi, considering how adamant he had been the day before that this was going to be a short recovery day for my tattered legs to recover. The run ended up being 70 minutes, and I told Kemboi that my legs were still very tired from yesterday and that they felt just as bad today because we ran so far. He launched into a rant about how sometimes training is tough but it will make you stronger, which I wasn't in the mood for. Most of the time I enjoyed Kemboi's upbeat, optimistic outlook, but there were times when it would wear on my nerves, usually when I was telling him my legs were dead and that seemed to just bounce off him rather than sink in. I also let Kemboi know that I would be leaving for Nairobi on Sunday, which I think he understood when I explained that my primary purpose here was to visit family, but he still urged me to come back after I had spent a couple days with them because Nairobi was a bad place to train. He said it in such a way that it didn't feel at all like he was trying to pressure me into coming back just so we could run together more or because he didn't want to see me go, but rather he seemed to me to be giving sincere advice to try and help me become a better runner. It occurred to me that running was the top priority in Kemboi's life and I don't think he could quite get it through his head that that wasn't the case for me, and so returning to Nairobi just didn't seem logical to him. For him, his life was built around his training, and if something interfered with it then it was discarded. His life was designed to provide him with an optimal training situation, or "climate" as he might say. I would have said through the last 7 years that running has been one of the top priorities in my life, but I still went on family vacations and took heavy class loads that interfered with my training. Kemboi didn't do any of that and, while a big part of me was jealous of that, it also seemed a little bit eerie to me and all of a sudden, as much as I had dreamed of that, I wasn't sure that that was a life I would actually want for myself.
As we were coming down the last road toward home, another man came up running next to us. His name was James Cheriyot Biwott, and chatted some with Kemboi in Swahili as we continued down the road. I have to admit, I felt pretty cool cruising down the road between two Kenyan runners. We stopped at the top of the main road down to Kemboi's house and ultimately down to the road Roger lived on and stretched there rather than heading up to the side road we usually finish our runs on. James stopped with us as we stretched and did the goofy shoulder and hand strengthening, still chatting with Kemboi most of the time. Kemboi talked to him somewhat dismissively, and I got the impression he didn't really want to be talking with him at all. Eventually James ran off to continue his run and Kemboi explained to me that James had been asking him where he lived and if Kemboi wanted to run with him for his run. This was just the kind of person you had to be careful of, according to Kemboi, because once they knew where you lived and knew you were an elite runner, they might let friends of theirs know and they would come and rob you. He said part what was out of place was that he was an 800 meter runner, so there really wasn't any reason why him and Kemboi would train together.
I reiterated to Kemboi after the run that my legs were very tired and I didn't think I would be able to go very far the next day. He said no problem, just rest and come tomorrow and we would run. I had a sinking feeling that he hadn't really heard what I said. I was actually pretty pleased with how my legs had been holding up. Granted, the training hadn't been as brutal as I might have expected it to be, but maybe it had been tougher this way because Kemboi had made sure that he never dropped me, always staying with me to make sure I finished the run well. My legs were feeling extremely fatigued, but no injury concerns had popped up, which I was really pleased with. This was the first time I was really testing my surgically repaired knee as far as running a high volume, and it was passing with flying colors. Still, I was uneasy that maybe the increase in volume was creating unseen wear and tear that could contribute to a breakdown later in the season. As I thought about it though, the miles that week had been 95% on dirt roads with varying terrain and, with the notable exception of Thursday, none of the miles had been run at more than a conversational pace. Pulling back my thoughts about the lack of Kenyan injuries, I thought it was a pretty strong endorsement that if my body, which had been riddled with injuries through high school and college, could hold up to increasing my mileage like that here on the dirt roads and conditions that they train in, that it was that much more believable that the Kenyans, with their much more optimal running bodies, just don't have to deal with very many injuries.
I dragged myself out of bed Saturday morning, reminding myself that this would be my last run with Kemboi and then I would have at least a week in Nairobi to give my legs a little bit of a break before stepping up my mileage to the level I would maintain for much of the fall, hopefully 90-95 miles a week. I hadn't been able to find my phone the night before, but figured I would just head up at the same time we'd met the day before, at 7:30. I found Kemboi still in bed, and he apologized profusely for not being ready but I told him it was really no problem, especially when he revealed that he had sent me a text the night before telling me to come at 8:00. His girlfriend was there, and appeared to be cleaning things and such. Maybe it was the fact that I was there, but every time I came and his girlfriend was there, which had been a couple of the mornings, their relationship seemed kind of distant and almost business-like, and when Kemboi mentioned it, it sounded to me more like an arrangement that was logical and to the benefit of both parties than talking about whether he actually like her, but I'm already into this farther than a guy who's never held down a girlfriend for more than two months should be, so I'll stop there.
Kemboi had said that he was going to do some speed work today, which I had been eager to see all week to see what that looked like, partly out of interest in analyzing his training, and partly because watching guys that are as fast as him run fast is just a cool thing. Call me a running nerd if you want, but if you get to see an elite runner running fast, it's a beautiful thing. Head to the UW indoor track on just about any given Saturday in the winter and I think you'll see what I mean. As we took off though, he said his knee was still hurting. He decided to nix the fartlek workout that was scheduled, but he either didn't tell me or I didn't get the memo so about half an hour in I nervously asked when we would start the fartlek. I could just picture Kemboi enthusiastically responding that we'd start our fartlek workout after 45 minutes to make sure that our muscles were loose and ready to go, but instead he told me he had bagged the workout because his knee was bugging him and he didn't want to aggravate it by running hard. This meant that he hadn't done any speed work this week and I asked him if that was a problem for his training but, as you might guess by now, his response was that "it's no problem". Apparently he had went out for some speed work the night before, but as I probed for details it sounded like he had just gone out and ran fast for about 40 minutes, which I realized might just basically be a tempo run, whether he called it that or not, or whether he knew the physiological benefits associated with it. As we were heading out he asked me several times over the first 20 or 30 minutes if my legs were still feeling tired, as if they might get a little more spring in them if we just ran a little farther. That was the kind of thing I could see making perfect sense to Kemboi. We continued out on the main road farther than I had gone yet. Considering how major of a road this was I was pretty confident now that it did connect into the highway at some point, but there I wasn't as interested in finding the route because however much more running I did in Eldoret would be with Kemboi rather than running home from Kip Keino on my own. Also, unless I suddenly had the urge to do a 25 mile run, I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to find where the road came out unless I explored it from the other end.
The minutes kept ticking off, and I realized I had forgotten to start my watch after a bathroom break we took (those seemed to happen more often than not on runs with Kemboi. I guess we were losing a lot of fat) but Kemboi informed that we had been running for over 40 minutes. We were starting down a pretty steep hill, and my legs were already turning to concrete, never mind the 6+ miles back, so I told Kemboi I was going to turn around and he could catch me on his way back. He seemed to have that confused expression again where he wasn't sure why I couldn't keep going since we were going at such a relaxed pace, but agreed and headed down the hill. I turned and began the long struggle home, not looking forward to it at all. I was disappointed to not be able to stay with Kemboi now, at the end of our last run for the week, but enough was enough. I trudged back at a pace that was slow even by Kemboi's standards. I figured if I could make it up the major hills before Kemboi caught me I might be able to push it in and finish with him. The run back was a death march the whole way, and by the end it took a decent amount of concentration to just to keep running. I was disappointed to finish the week on such a sour note. I'd been less than an hour of running from successfully making it through nearly a whole week training with Kemboi, but despite his careful efforts to help me along he had still clearly broken me today. I made it over both the major hills at my excruciatingly slow pace and I was surprised that Kemboi hadn't caught me yet, but for all I knew he might be out on a two and a half hour run, "resting" his knee. He finally came flying past me less than half a mile from the end of the run, showing strain in his form for the first time. Watching his form as he glided away from me it didn't look as smooth as I had thought it would. It was little bit herky-jerky and his arm swing had a lot of side to side motion. I was pretty frustrated when I got done with the run and Kemboi tried to encourage me, saying he had been surprised at how fast I had come back that he hadn't caught me sooner, but I knew I couldn't have been running a shade faster than 8:00 miles and I would guess probably a decent amount slower than that. He said he had gone out about 55 minutes then decided to push it pretty hard on the way back. Total the run had been 103 minutes, which meant he had gone out 55 minutes and come back in 48 minutes, while I had gone out about 45 minutes and come back in 58 minutes. I think he could tell I was pretty disappointed with the run, but told me not to worry, that after resting on Sunday I would feel fine. I felt though that I had already seen that Kemboi's positive thinking alone wasn't enough to magically transform my training because, despite his promises that my legs would feel better after resting, they had continued to feel more fatigued through the week until the melt down the second half of today. In light of that I suspected the same thing was true of the training plan as a whole, that I wouldn't magically become the elite marathoner that Kemboi envisioned me being. Still, I was definitely considering running after a college a lot more than I had been a week ago.
I'm painfully aware of how interminably long this post has become, but I wanted to get all my training notes on my time with Kemboi together. I still want to give a lot of the stuff I've seen and heard with Kemboi some time to sink in, and I want to think through it a lot more, but I think it's definitely positive whether I agree or disagree with different aspects of his training because it will push me to look at my own training and think critically about what I'm doing and justify what I'm doing different from him and why I think he's right or wrong on different points and why I feel strongly enough about some aspect of my training to be willing to do it differently from a 2:07 marathoner. One point that I've seen as an important theme to keep in mind when analyzing training methods that was very much confirmed here is that there's more than one way to skin a cat. There's surely a plethora of different approaches and tactics that can produce fast runners. If there was any mystical concoction of training that magically makes fast runners surely I would have found it here if it existed anywhere on earth, but instead I found that what one of the top flight marathoners in the world does isn't so different from my own training and the concepts that I've learned as I've become a student of the sport. I'm also encouraged by the strengthening of my relationship with Kemboi. I plan to get back to Eldoret to train with him more before I leave, and I will definitely follow his career intently and hopefully stay in contact with him. Not only is he a really special athlete but he's a great human being and a fun guy to hang out with. Meeting him and the relationship we've created is really better than I had dreamed would be possible when I was thinking of what might happen coming to Kenya. I see it as a classic example of the exciting things God can do in your life when you leave things open to him rather than confining things to your own narrow view of what's possible. I can't wait to see what he does with relationship from here, and just hope that I can humbly use these wonderful connections God had provided for me in a way that honors and glorifies him.
