Since we were going to be headed to Nairobi, I decided to put off my long awaited day off another day and go for a run along the lake. I felt as if my legs were mad at me for going back on our deal that if I made it through the week with Kemboi they would get a day off. I decided regardless of what our travel plans were I would take Tuesday off, because my legs were dead enough that there wasn't any point in running any more without taking some time off anyway. I came back and relaxed and napped through most of the afternoon, then went to check with Flo on when we were leaving. She said we could leave that night, but I told her that I wanted to go during the day to be able to see the route, because there was supposed to be a lot of wildlife and cool stuff along the way that would be fun to see. She replied that we could go back in the morning, and I said that sounded good. Neither Flo or I seemed to be in a hurry to get back to Nairobi though, and the plans to head that way just kept sliding. I was happy to be able to run in Kisumu and was having fun hanging out with Elijah and Elisha since both of them were home on break.
That afternoon Elijah and I headed to the pool, which he said he did pretty regularly when he was home. The pool was more of a resort type pool irregularly shaped so that it was clearly not for serious swimming, with tables and lawn chairs next to it. I guessed that even if you really wanted to train for swimming this was about the best place other than the lake, and there you ran the risk of getting the Kenyan equivalent of beaver fever (I'm going to work on that term, I don't want to throw anything out there until I have something appropriately catchy, but I've got my people working on it as we speak). I remembered a morning conversation with Roger while waiting for the bus where he lamented the lack of pools to give people a chance to train. Let me say that there was definitely a lack of good swimmers, and it wouldn't surprise me if that's the case in a lot of Kenya because there aren't very many pools. There certainly don't seem to be swimming lessons or swim teams like back home. In fact, I might have been about as good a swimmer as anybody there, and anyone who's seen me swim knows that that is a pretty alarming situation. The best area to swim was about 10-15 yards across, which was fine with me, because I'm not very good and swimming with head underwater except to breath so that was a good distance to work on that without trying to go a full 50 yards. Swimming seemed to me like the only thing that really made sense to do in the afternoon in Kisumu, because it seemed too hot to me to do anything else outside, and even inside sometimes.
Most of the evenings that week were spent hanging out in the room with Elijah and Elisha, sometimes listening to music, sometimes watching movies, sometimes falling asleep early laying on my bed. Those were good times, and they reminded me of the summers I had spent before my freshman and sophomore years of college hanging out with Andrew and Aaron in their basement. It was exactly the kind of thing that I had hoped for on this trip, not necessarily to meet relatives, but to be able to just hang out and relax together. One of the nights we had ugali, scrambled eggs, and kale (a green vegetable, that kind of looks like seaweed) and Elisha tried to convince me the eggs were dog intestines, which turned into a running joke for the rest of the week. Their sister Atieno was also pretty entertaining, and I appreciated her because she also treated me like one of the cousins. Normally I would have said that I wouldn't like someone that was as loud, talkative, and confrontational as her, but I actually really enjoyed some of the ridiculous exchanges, and I don't think there's anyone here that I feel as comfortable teasing or harassing as much as Atieno, even though I've only known her for a week.
On Tuesday Elijah and I went to play basketball in the afternoon with one of his friends, which was another occasion I was grateful for my broad sports background. It was another occasion where just playing sports was a great chance to hang out without trying to sit down and have a conversation, which I am rarely a fan of. It was interesting talking with Joseph, his friend, who was going to a British school and said that if he worked hard and did really well, he could potentially have a shot at going to Cambridge because the school he was going to was connected there somehow. Tuesday afternoon Elisha and I headed down to watch the sunset, and it was a much better one than the last time I had been in Kisumu, and it was a lot more fun going down to watch it and just sit there and hang out with Elisha rather than heading down to quickly snap some pictures with the girls then heading back. Hopefully when this post goes up I'll be able to put up the pictures from that time down at the lake because they're pretty cool. After that we went farther down the lake to Steve's house for dinner. I had thought until now that Steve was just one of the relatives, but I finally put it together that he was Atieno's boyfriend. He was a really laid back guy that I really enjoyed hanging out with. It was a fun evening, watching a movie and relaxing there which was a really good time. I thought this kind of night was the reason I had decided to come for this long. I was able to come spend some time relaxing in Kisumu with the family there without messing up the schedule of my trip at all.
On my run on Wednesday I explored further down one of the roads near the house which got pretty busy and had a lot of market stalls along it. As I was coming back along the dirt on the side an older woman got my attention and said she worked for the Kisumu Athletic Club and showed me her home which I guess doubles as the headquarters for the club. She struck me as one of those hup-yo old track ladies that you find at any USATF meet, herding fidgety, nervous young runners to the start line to make sure the meet stayed on time, and it was a funny connection to make to find a lady like that here. She told me if I came back I could get a schedule of races that would be happening which I said I would be very interested in and asked her if there was anywhere I would be able to meet other runners. She said they usually went over to the stadium to work out, which made me think they were probably shorter distance or field event people, so I thanked her, told her I would come back to get a schedule and left. Making connections with a track club here would be a really exciting thing, so I hoped that would materialize into something, but it was another case where there wasn't a ton for me to do but pray about it and hope God opened the right doors because I still didn't have much idea of what I was even looking for or how to go about it, other than that the more I could run with the fabled Kenyan distance runners the better.
On my run Thursday morning I decided to head out in a new direction on my run, having pretty much explored all the roads down by the lake. I was really disappointed that I couldn't find any roads heading around the lake, but somebody (one of the relatives, can't remember who) told me that a lot of the land around the lake is privately owned so there's no road around like I would kind of expect to find in a similar area in the US. I expected there would at least be some roads heading inland out into the more remote areas, but if there were I couldn't find them. Maybe I've got unrealistic expectations now after being spoiled with the training ground in Eldoret. Kisumu is spread out enough that it isn't as easy to get to the edge as in Eldoret, where as long as you avoid the main highway you'll be in rural farmland in about 10 minutes of running in any direction from the city center. I tried a couple roads, trying to find some dirt roads going to nowhere, but I found I was still pretty solidly in the city. After enough turns that I wasn't quite certain where I was anymore, as I was heading down a pretty main road with a very generous dirt shoulder that made me suspect that a significant portion of the traffic along the road was on foot, I came upon Moi Stadium, the main stadium in Kisumu. It looked somewhat imposing from the outside, with a tall concrete wall around it with the name in big block letters and the Kenyan national symbol, the one on the flag, painted on both sides against a red background. I had dismissed the old lady's comment the day before about the athletes training at the stadium so quickly that at first I didn't even think to head there and see if anyone was training. The only reason I ended up heading into the stadium was because running along the side of it was a promising dirt road that I ran down, where a couple guys yelled after me asking me if I was going to run at the stadium. I shouted over my shoulder that I was, and turned off to head in and see what was going on. It wasn't until I was headed into the stadium that it dawned on me that I might be able to find people training here. I guess in the back of my mind I figured that a stadium that big and official wouldn't be open for public use. For how big the stadium looked from the outside, it seemed much smaller once inside. There were grandstands on either side, but overall it looked about like I would expect a really old high school stadium in the US to look like. There was a dirt track with a soccer field in the middle, and people were scattered around the stadium and the stands at various points in their exercise routines.
The first people I encountered were a group of mostly out of shape middle aged people, mostly ladies, that looked like they were doing some sort of fitness/team building/we-want-to-look-like-we're-more-active-than-we-are exercise with a long tug-of-war rope that was tied to one of the post of the grandstands. This was something I expected to see in the US, not in Kenya. I guess if I had any stereotypical notion left that all Kenyans are fantastic athletes and could probably run a 32 minute 10k on command, that was shot down by the majority of the crowd here, who didn't look so different from the I-want-to-get-in-shape-but-as-you-can-see-I'm-sure-not-right-now crowd that you would find jogging around a lot of tracks in the US. The cheerleader/leader/lady-who-had-too-much-coffee-this-morning that seemed to be the ring leader of the tug-of-war crowd ushered me over, to which I hesitantly walked over and told them that I'm just here to run. They asked me if I knew how to pull the rope, a question to which I wasn't sure how to answer. Were there people here who didn't know how to pull a rope? Don't you just put both hand on the rope, dig your feet in and pull? Is there something I'm missing here? They cheered me to help pull the rope, and my Kenyan mode of try everything I can and experience everything I can kicked in, and I decided I might as well go for it. A couple of the more in shape guys also grabbed the rope and instructed me on how to dig my feet in and pull together, moving up and down. We did that for about thirty seconds with the overly energetic, overly un-athletic ladies cheering the whole time. Then we stopped, I got some high fives and handshakes and was told I was very good and I could come back anytime. For all the times in Kenya that I've gone with the flow not really knowing what's going on and just trusted things to make sense eventually, this was one where what they were doing seemed more senseless to me after I had done it than before. Over the rest of the time I was at the stadium I never saw them do anything more useful than pulling on the rope attached to the grandstands very cheerfully and pointlessly.
There was a far more serious looking athlete that I hadn't noticed when I first came in, that motioned to me to join him as I started jogging that direction. There were about four guys in street clothes who seemed to be standing around watching him workout, and he was doing a track workout on his own. I went over and I asked if I could join him. He was doing 300 meter repeats and said he'd be happy to have me run with him. He was trying to run them in 43-44 seconds, and I told him I didn't think I would be able to do that, but I would give it my best shot. For those of you who don't regularly do 300 meter intervals (you can throw me into that category also), 43 seconds for a 300 is on pace to do a 400 in about 57 seconds, which is about as fast as this slow old 10k runner's legs can carry him. We jogged the 300 meters around back to where he started, avoiding the homestretch where my fitness friends were still determinedly pulling on the rope. As we were jogging back he told me he was doing 5x300, and he'd already done 2, which relieved me because it meant no matter how bad this went it would be over pretty quick without me doing anything damaging or way out of line with my training. I wanted to run with people here wherever I could, but that was easier to say when I was running the long, easy miles with Kemboi that I would have been anyway than when I was doing a track workout that doesn't really fit into my training. As we were jogging over he said that his name was Kennedy Wamisi and he was a 10k runner, which made it really interesting to me that he was doing a 5x300m workout, especially that fast. I don't think I had done a workout that fast since high school when I was training for the mile, and it was more the kind of workout that our 1500m runners do to sharpen their legs when we're getting close to competitions. I asked if he was getting ready for something, and he mentioned a couple races he might do in the fall, but pretty clearly wasn't doing this workout because he had a race in the next week or two, he was just doing it as part of his regular training. The jog had been very leisurely and, especially with this much rest, this seemed to me more like an 800m workout than a 10k workout. We took off, running faster than I had since the track in the spring, and maybe even longer than that. I was able to stay on his shoulder through the first half, but even then it was clear that I wasn't running nearly as smoothly as he was. If my legs had a face it would have looked like it had just gotten woken up by being thrown in a pond (and yes, I picture the Sanders pond when I say this). For the second time this week my legs seemed to be confused with what I was asking of them, and rightfully so. I started to think of them as a separate being that I had to appease and take care of in order to be able to run fast, and that tended to be irritable and complaining. In the last 150 meters Kennedy put four seconds on me with the man holding the stop watch at the finish announcing as we crossed the line that he had finished in 43 seconds and me in 47 which, by the way, I was kind of impressed with because that means I would have been running 63 second quarters at that pace, which is about as fast as I ever run. We leisurely circled around for another repeat. I asked him what his best time was, and was surprised to hear that it was just under 30 minutes for 10k. That's fast to me, but certainly not for an elite runner; you would have to run faster than that to qualify for the US trials I'm pretty sure. He said he had only raced in the country and he was hoping for a chance to race abroad, but that the competition was very tough. My thought was that unless he ran quite a bit faster than that his chances of leaving Kenya for running were somewhere between slim and none. The second repeat resulted in a similar result, but I was pleased that I had kept my pace. I was in no shape to do this kind of speed, and I wondered if maybe it was good to wake up the legs and remind them they could run fast if they needed to. For the last one I told him I would meet him coming off the corner, with 200 to go. I felt great on this, running smoothly with him for the whole 200 and coming across in about 33, 44 for him for the 300.
I thanked him for letting me run with him, and he introduced me to the others standing there, who he said were part of the same training group but were 800 runners. I asked him more about their training and he said that mostly during the week they would be on the track for workouts. I couldn't believe that they would do track workout 5 days a week, so but that's kind of what it sounded like. He said they headed out on the road for what he called their "long race" on Saturday. He said I could come the next day at 8:30 to meet them for the workout, which I said I would, if nothing else because I wanted to see for myself if they were actually doing continuous track workouts. I had instinctively figured we would go cool down together, but it appeared he was going to change and head home, with no plans on cooling down, so I confirmed that I would be there the next morning and then headed out of the stadium to run more. I was fascinated and excited by this new training group, and hoped to be able to learn more about them the next day. Their approach seemed to me to be almost completely opposite of Kemboi's, which supported the idea that there isn't some magical formula the Kenyans follow, but there might be just as much variety of training approaches and philosophies as in the US. Still, there were a couple reasons it wasn't appropriate to compare Kennedy and Kemboi directly. First, Kemboi was a marathoner and Kennedy was a 10k runner, which could make their training plans significantly different even if they were under the same coach. Second, Kemboi seemed to me to be what Kennedy was aspiring to become: a runner that competed internationally and was able to support himself from that to be able to do nothing but train. I was pretty sure that Kennedy must support himself some other way, and just run on the side (I'm pretty sure you can't put a roof over your head and food on your table by running 30 minute 10k's in Kenya), which made me all the more interested to see his training because that put him in a category more similar to mine. Some of Kemboi's simplistic ideals about consistency in training were a lot more logical as a professional athlete than as a student who would be taking a full credit load, working a part-time job, and oh yeah, running.
That evening we headed to Elijah, Elisha, and Grace's sister Lois' house for dinner. Lois and her husband, Kevin, have been married for about a year and a half and only live about half a mile from her parent's house. They had a pretty big courtyard with a decent number of chickens running around but a fairly small house, although I guess not too small by Kenyan standards. I still haven't quite gotten used to how small houses are in general here. They're still nice houses, they're definitely not mud huts or anything, but I think Lois and Kevin's house was pretty much a (relatively) big room that was half kitchen, half living room, then a bathroom and a bed room, which I think is pretty standard for a couple without kids. With kids you could expect two more bedrooms, one for the boys and one for the girls, and that was about it. It was still a nice house and I think could be characterized without being overly polite as cozy. We had a late lunch of (take a wild guess) chicken and ugali and one of the mysterious green vegetables that looks like seaweed. As in most homes when we visited, they had the TV on, and people would often watch it even as they were talking with each other, seemingly unconcerned about making eye contact. What was interesting here was that the TV was hooked to a laptop and they were playing videos of concerts of what seemed to me to be somewhere between gospel and Christian country music from the US. I sat next to Kevin, and we chatted a little bit about the US and Kenya and my trip, then eventually the conversation turned to talking about his church. They went to a church of the same denomination as the church the wedding had been at, that focused on the teachings of William Brennam. He explained that they saw him as a modern day prophet who had a special message from God, and that he had traveled around the US preaching and his message had spread around the world. He said that Brennam's focus was on a more literal reading of the Bible and said that their focus was to base their church on the Bible. I was interested to ask him more about what they believed and how the church was unique, but never got the chance and, looking back on it, there's probably a decent chance that would have been a longer conversation than we really had time for while sitting around talking with the others. It struck me as a pretty charismatic denomination, and I guessed it was extremely conservative if it was based on the teachings of a preacher from the early 1900s. I still wasn't all that comfortable with how much emphasis they put on Brennam himself, but talking with Kevin there wasn't anything he brought up that struck me as what I would consider "weird" beliefs (as if I'm the one who can decide who's beliefs are weird and who's are normal). He asked me more about my church background and encouraged me to come on Sunday, which I said I would if I was still in town. He told me he'd like to start running with me a little bit to get in shape while I was in town, and I told him I'd stop by on my easy evening runs and we could go at a pretty easy pace.
We walked all walked home as the sun was going down, and I was disappointed to not get in my evening run, but I didn't care about it enough to risk going in the dark, and it was a solid case of missing it to spend time with the family and meet Lois and Kevin, which fit with my priorities for the trip. As we were getting home there were two runners, one male, one female, running up the road from the lake. They looked like they were pretty legit, and I was interested to see them running in the dark. I guess maybe that's what happens if you work full time but still want to keep training. Who knows.
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