I showed up at the stadium Friday morning at 8:30, eager to see what I would find. There were two guys jogging around the track warming up, so I joined them and recognized one as the man who had been timing the day before. He said his name was Justice. He was an 800 runner, somewhat quiet but still willing to answer my questions and talk through the rest of the warm up. The other man barely spoke at all; I never got a name but Justice told me he was a 10k runner so I said it would probably make the most sense for me to do his workout. Justice was doing a ladder workout going 200-300-400 and back down twice. It sounded like a pretty standard workout, similar to what our middle distance runners do sometimes. Justice said the other man would be doing a 3k, and he timidly added that he would be trying to do it in about 10:15. I said that would be good for me to jump into. I thought that would actually be great to do because Erika likes for us to get in a couple of two mile time trials during the summer to be able to gauge our progress. Our warm up pace was noticeably fast, and I split an 800 which we did in 3:06, so 6:12 pace for a mile. These guys surely did seem to be the opposite of Kemboi, doing everything faster than I thought it should be done rather than slower.
They pointed out their coach on the far side of the track and we went over to talk with him. He was a guy who wasn't much older and was definitely still in racing shape himself. He explained the workout, and I got the sinking feeling we were all going to be doing the short distance ladder. The coach was a pretty laid back, likable guy named Alvin. If it feels like I'm saying that a lot people are pretty laid back and fun to hang out with that has been my initial impression of a lot of Kenyans. We did some drills to finish warming up and Justice threw on some spikes for the workout, not an encouraging sign for me. I talked with Justice some more as we were getting ready, and he said his ultimate goal was to see if he could qualify to the London Olympics next summer, and that his training from here to then would all be focused on the Trials. We started with a 200, and I was amazed with how smooth they ran, particularly Alvin and Justice. They clearly weren't pushing and it was slower than their 800 race pace for sure. I came through in about 33 seconds, well behind them. I knew my form wasn't very good, but I saw that as kind of inevitable because even in the course of racing I might only run that fast once or twice in a season. We took a leisurely walk back around to the start for the 300, with Alvin warning the tug-of-war people along the way we would be coming through. Alvin seemed to me to know just about everyone around the track, and stopped briefly at one point during the workout to help some ladies who were doing the discus with their form, and after the workout he jogged over to help some people who were doing javelin. Justice had told me that he knew quite a bit about all sorts of track events, and that was proving to be true. Already just of the distance guys I'd seen that he was coaching guys running from 400/800 to 10k. We continued through the workout, with them smoothly pulling away from me on every repeat. They still weren't going too hard, running fast but clearly still comfortably. I could feel the strain of running that fast on my legs. With the training I've been doing right now they bound to feel better after a 12 mile run than after doing 300's and 400's at around 4:30 pace. I told them I might stop after the first set, but they said there would be a long break between the sets and urged me to continue, which wasn't too hard of a task because I wanted to spend as much time with them as I could.
After every repeat we would walk and jog slowly around the track to the start of the next repeat, so the rest was 1:1 distance wise, but probably 4 or 5 to 1 on time. After we finished the set we took about 12 minutes of rest between the sets, mostly just walking around the track. During this time Alvin explained more to me about their training and philosophy. He said the regardless of the distance you are running developing your speed is essential, and pointed to Paul Tergat and Haille Gebraillassie as runners who were able to be the best in both 5k and 10k on the track and also running marathons, arguing that the speed work they did served them well even in running marathons. It strikes me as almost the complete opposite of Kemboi's approach. We have to be careful making comparisons since Kemboi is a marathoner, but still, Alvin was arguing that this approach could produce top flight marathon runners, so I think it is appropriate to make at least a cursory comparison. Kemboi focus was on getting in mileage, specifically making sure he got his two run every day, almost always at least 2 hours of running every day with a good portion run very relaxed. He would supplement it with one or two speed days a week to make sure his legs were still fast enough. Alvin's training plan seemed to be focused around track work Monday through Friday, with recovery days between workouts, but undoubtedly the emphasis on the speed days on the track. They put a lot more emphasis on the Saturday long run, while that seemed to be something that Kemboi did occasionally but certainly wasn't a weekly staple. In short Alvin's approach struck me as very much a speed based approach, while Kemboi's approach was more strength/mileage based. Both acknowledged the importance of the other side of the equation, but it seemed to me that Alvin's long runs, or as he would say "road work", and Kemboi's "speed work", were both supplementary to the main focus of their training.
Alvin turned out to be a very interesting guy to talk to, and definitely the most charismatic and talkative of the group. As he talked about training he came to a similar concept to Kemboi that I'm still seems kind of funny to me, acclimatization. He talked about how if they were racing somewhere else it was best to have a little bit of time to get "acclimatized" and if you didn't have that time it would be tougher to race well. Related to this was Alvin's thoughts about training in Kisumu rather than in the Rift Valley, the area that is famous for producing the great Kenyan runners. He said that it was fine training here because they could still do their speed work and get strong so they could race with the guys from higher elevation. It didn't really make sense to me, and my impression was that most of these guys were here because they weren't professional athletes and this was where they lived and worked. My guess was that given the choice any of them would gladly move to go train in the Rift Valley. The perspective still seemed funny to me because Kisumu, which I believe is somewhere above 5000 feet, is seen as low elevation. The only place in Kenya that is much lower than that is toward the coast, and I'm pretty sure that there's basically no runners there, so there probably isn't much concentrated training done in Kenya below 5000 feet. Talking about training and acclimatization for racing gradually bled into some of Alvin's old racing stories. He was more interested in telling me about the races themselves rather than where and when the races had been, but they sounded to me like championship races, with at least one round of prelims. I asked him where these races had happened, and he mentioned the South African championships, but didn't really explain, and moved on to talking about something else like it wasn't really that important. I asked him about what events he ran and he said 800 was his main event. That meant that they had two 800 runners and a 10k runner doing the same speed workout, which I would have thought was just a case of the 10k guy getting thrown under the bus but based on what Alvin had said about training his feeling was that the 10k runners needed speed just as much as the 800 runners. To further that idea, another man showed up to join us for the second set that was a 5k runner.
Alvin was a solid runner, as was the rest of the crew, but they weren't on Kemboi's level. I think Alvin was the only one who had competed out of the country, and I'm pretty sure none of them are professional runners. Part of their problem was that these were track guys, and my I think most of the money there is in running is in half-marathons and marathons. Alvin, for his part, is a professor at Moi University across the street, which I was pretty impressed by considering his age, because I couldn't imagine he was much older than 30. He taught PE teachers and did some early life development/psychology I think, and in general struck me as something of an exercise science nut. His job was demanding though, and he had to fit his training in around the responsibilities at the university. He said sometimes that meant coming to do a morning workout then going directly to teach a class without showering or anything. On this particular day he said he hadn't done a track workout in a week.
I was pleased with my performance on the second set, keeping all my splits at right about the same speed as the first set. Alvin and Justice, who had been cruising pretty comfortably through the first set, appeared to show a little more strain, and judging from the gap they were opening on me were running faster than the first set. I would guess their splits were maybe 28-30 for the 200s, 41-44 for the 300's and maybe 60-63 for the 400's. If I just saw them running I would have guessed they were running slower than that, because they looked super smooth, even as they started to strain more on the second set. The 10k guy fell well off the pace, and I was skeptical of Alvin's 10k training, between what he was doing today and the fast 300's Kennedy had been doing the day before.
We finished the workout and Alvin said I had maintained better than most people do on their first workout and that I had good endurance. I told him that it was tough doing that much speed, and replied, similar to what I would picture Kemboi saying, that I would get much faster if I kept doing the speed workouts. Like Kennedy the day before, they didn't seem to have any plans to do a cool down of any type, so I thanked them for letting me run with them, confirmed the plan to meet them the next morning at 6 am for their long run. I gave my email to the guy who came late, and I was glad to have a more permanent contact with them. Like in Eldoret, it's always precarious meeting with people when all you have planned is the next meeting, because then there's no contingency plan for if you don't meet up. I was really looking forward to doing a longer run with those guys too. Not only did I want to find out as much about their training as I could, but they were a pretty fun group of guys and I realized how much I missed running with a group. They had a pretty easy going manner around each other that hinted to me that they were all pretty good friends and they had no problem joking and laughing with each other, even during workouts, which was something I hadn't seen with any of the runners in Eldoret. Most of them were pretty solemn and quiet and these guys reminded me more of my high school and college teams.
In the evening I went for a pretty easy jog, including a stop by Lois and Kevin's house to pick up Kevin for a short jog. Kevin isn't a runner at all and is pretty overweight, so we just did a quick loop, but he was hoping to do more running to get in shape. After I left Kevin I headed back down to the track lady's house that doubled as the office for the Kisumu Athletic Club to pick up a schedule of where and when competitions were taking place. When I got down there as the sun was going down and the gate was already closed. There were a couple kids in the yard and I told them I was looking for the lady that was the head of the track club, who, after some confusion, informed me that she was their mother and they would go get her and then let me in to wait in the yard. After a couple minutes she came out and enthusiastically greeted me and gave me a big hug. I wondered if she expected me to actually come back for the schedule as I had said I would. She invited me into the house and gave me a soda, which I reluctantly accepted and took a seat on the couch, where she soon brought out a plate of what I would best describe as large, unsugared doughnut holes. She brought some pictures of her back in her racing days. Clearly what I had considered a quick stop to pick something up she considered a house visit. She begin bombarding me with stories about both her racing days and trips she had gone on with various Kenyan contingents of athletes. I wasn't sure how much to believe, because if I swallowed all of it she was one of the most popular people in the Athletics Kenya (from what I gather the equivalent of USATF) system. She emphasized several times how much everyone involved with Athletics Kenya loved her and the trips she got to go on as team leader. She did eventually give me the schedule of events though, but it didn't look too promising for any racing opportunities. There are a couple I might be able to hit, but as I thought more about it I realized how much of a long shot it would be that it would actually work out to hit a race. She called one of the guys from the track club to make sure I could meet with them for a run, but when we got on the phone it turned out to be the guy I had given my email to that morning, which at least confirmed that everyone I had met was part of the same organization, which I guessed probably consisted of most of the competitive runners in Kisumu because I doubted there were a lot of them scattered all over the place like in Eldoret. I gave her my email and waited while she fumbled through a bunch of old paper work for quite a while to find her email. She told me about how she was in charge of the anti-doping sections of Athletics Kenya and had first aid courses, but wanted to go to the US for more training and implored me to "contact my representative" to help her get to the US. I tried to diplomatically and clearly tell her that it is difficult to get into the US and I don't have influence to make that happen, but I would keep her contact information. I wondered if I was only getting the honored guest treatment I was because she saw in me the golden opportunity to get to the US, but I was still happy to make the connection with the Athletic Club and have their contact information. By the time I left it was completely dark and she insisted on walking me home, which was maybe a mile. Her and her husband, who had said almost nothing after greeting me but seemed pleasant enough, walked with me, and as we went she told me about how they were limited with what they could do with the club because they lacked funding, because people here didn't care that much about athletics (a note here: athletics is used here to refer specifically to track & field, and from what I've seen that's pretty standard in Kenya). It sounded interestingly similar to what I think a lot of track club leaders in the US would say, and although I know it's on a different level here, I wonder if it's similar proportionally. She also continued to share her accomplishments as an athlete with me, which she was very eager to talk about. Apparently she had been a race walking champion in her prime and even demonstrated her champion form. She complained about a lack of masters events here and talked about how she was trying to advocate to get that going, and told me about the marathon in Kisumu that she was director of, and urged me to come back in December for it, which I assured her I wouldn't be able to do. I was relieved when we reached my house because, as much as I was glad to make the connection with her and be able to get in contact with the track club again if I wanted to, she was the kind of lady who could talk all night and I was pretty tired of listening because as far as I was concerned we'd ran out of things to talk about that were actually really related to why I came to see her.
I watched a movie with Elisha that night, but turned in pretty early as he started another late night marathon because of the early run I had scheduled in the morning. I've noticed that Elijah and Elisha, and especially Allan, rarely watch one movie for a night and then call it good. They pretty commonly will rip through three or four movies in a night and not sleep until just about when the sun's coming up. There's been more than once I've gotten up for my run to find them still watching movies. So far I haven't ever been up for more than a movie or two, mostly because of the early runs, but also because unless I'm doing a Lord of the Rings or Star Wars marathon watching that many movies just seems excessive to me.
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