I took off running at 5:45 in the morning on Saturday to make the rendezvous with my buddies at 6:00 for the long run. Running that early is nice because not only are the roads almost completely clear but there's a peaceful serenity about the stillness of a day that hasn't really started yet. The downside is, it's still pretty solidly dark and if you're not careful you might get trucked by a boda boda driver (the name for the bicycle and motorcycle taxis) getting an early start on the day. Plus, it turns out they drive on the wrong side of the road here so an experienced American runner who thinks he's watching for traffic is liable to get sneak attacked from behind by a driver looking for a new hood ornament. Running down the dark tree lined street toward town lighted by periodic street lights strongly reminded me of Missoula, and a new wave of homesickness hit. I've been here over a month, and while I'm feeling more and more comfortable here, I still definitely miss home and am eager to get back to the comfort of the familiar. I got down to our meeting place at the Central Bank of Kenya building just outside of downtown. Alvin and Justice were already there, and we waited a couple minutes for the unnamed 10k runner and the man I had talked to on the phone at the old track lady's house. We took off at a very leisurely pace toward town, a direction I hadn't gone before because of all the traffic. I thought it kind of made sense that they would run these miles so easy since almost everything else they did during the week was speed intensive. As we came to the first main round about Kennedy bounded up and joined us. I had been surprised not to see him there, considering that he was one of the 10k guys and had also seemed the most gung-ho about the long run. If they always did workouts with everyone together like they had yesterday I could imagine that this was Kennedy's day to be able to stick it to the 800 runners, who clearly didn't look forward to the long run. Once Kennedy joined us the pace quickly increased once Kennedy joined us, which I doubt was a coincidence. I didn't have trouble keeping up with the pace, but it was much too fast for a long run, I would guess somewhere around 6:00 per mile. No one was talking very much, I would guess mostly because of the aggressive pace. Justice was struggling to stay with the pace and disappeared after about ten minutes. Even with the pace much faster than I would have preferred I really enjoyed running in a pack, something I hadn't done since track season. We cruised through town on one of the main drags which was pretty cool because there was so little traffic, but you still had to stay on your toes mostly because of the matatus. I got a lot of shouts from the matatus, and I wonder if they found it more humorous to see me running along on my own or with a pack of Kenyans. We were quickly through town and the road turned into the highway to Eldoret. Other than the short runs I had done down along the lake, dirt roads to run on had proven pretty hard to find in Kisumu, and this run turned out to be completely on roads around town, although for a lot of it you could run along the dirt shoulder. When we left town the view was fantastic, with the sun rising over the fields and hills, and an awesome view of the mountains to the East. We passed a lady running who was also pretty elite-looking, and she ran along with us for a bit, but dropped off pretty quickly. I was envious of both her and Justice and considered dropping off myself, but I wanted to hang with these guys as long as I could. It was another case of sacrificing my own training to a certain degree to learn more about Kenyan training. And besides, my training had been lacking speed and this was basically turning into a tempo run for me.
The relentless pace continued as we headed toward the large hill heading toward Eldoret and I was sure that if they took me up the hill they would drop me pretty quickly. Instead we turned just before the hill and headed down a side road. By this point I was struggling to keep up, and had dropped back several times, only to be urged back to the group by whoever happened to be at the back of the pack. From my view struggling along at the back it seemed that all of them were working fairly hard but were pretty comfortable, or at least none of them were falling off the pace like I was. They told me to relax my breathing more, which is pretty exasperating thing to hear when you were struggling just to keep up. It's easy for someone who is handling the pace fine to tell you to relax when you're struggling along. To my surprise we turned around quickly, only 28 minutes after we had left the bank. I was now both confused and exhausted, but the more confused I got the more intrigued I was to figure out what they were doing with their training. I doubted I would be able to stay with them the whole way back unless the pace slacked off, which I was quickly losing hope of. I fell off the group again and Kennedy dropped back to encourage me. He was able to pull me back to the group as we got to the main road and headed up the gradual hill toward town, but they quickly dropped me on the hill. The execution scene from Braveheart popped into my head, with the executioner softly saying, "Beg for mercy, and you shall have it", as he uncovered the large axe. I imagined the hills as my mercy, with the long flats being the torturous sections that were painful, but not tough enough to finish me off, and the hills as the merciful execution, difficult enough to finish me off where the flat sections couldn't. It was a perspective I'd never had on running and I found it amusing.
Contributing to when I dropped off from them was that it was about that time that we passed the lady who we had seen on the way out. I conveniently settled into the pace with her, which I think kind of threw her off a little. She was going at a pretty slow pace and told me I should be going faster, but I replied that I couldn't run much faster because of how hard I had been running trying to stay with those guys, which was absolutely true. For this supposedly being an easier week to recover from the week with Kemboi my legs still felt pretty drained. As it was if I hadn't been running with her I'm pretty sure I would have fallen off even from that pace as we got back toward town. As we talked I found that she was part of the same training group but operated somewhat separately being one of the only women. She was an 800 runner and shared the same sentiment as Alvin and Justice that the long road run for the week was a necessary torture in training that must be grudgingly accepted. All three of them also ran 400's sometimes, so for them to do this kind of distance was interesting to me, although I knew at least Alvin went up to 1500 as well. Her goal was to qualify for the London Olympics in the 800, and she was hoping to run under 2:00 to do that, which may be what it takes to get there out of the Kenyan trials. I was incredulous when I heard that her PR was just under 2:20, but as we talked more she revealed that she had been training for less than a year, so all of a sudden the 2:20 seemed pretty impressive and made running close to 2 minutes much more plausible. She raved about Alvin as a coach and filled in some of the gaps for me, saying that he had run 1:46 for 800 and earned a scholarship for college in South Africa. My assumption is that if he was earning a scholarship for college that 1:46 must have been run in high school or shortly thereafter which, for those of you who don't appreciate what a 1:46 800 means, I believe would break the US high school record and would put him in the hunt to be a NCAA Division I All-American. I wondered if he had run faster than that since. According to her his mom was a sports psychologists and he had studied exercise science and/or sports psychology (getting straight answers out of these people has usually proven to be like pulling teeth) and, as far as she was concerned, knew just about everything there was to know about training distance runners. I asked her about why she was training in Kisumu rather than in the Rift Valley like most of the fast runners, and she said it was because she needed to stay close to her parents. No one expressly said it, but the consistent story I was hearing was that no one trained in Kisumu by choice, but because they had other responsibilities here and felt like they could still get good enough training while they were here to compete with the Rift Valley athletes. I told her about Kisumu would be considered high altitude in the US, and that during the school year I trained at sea level, to which she exclaimed, "Are you a fool?!?!" I think to her training at sea level was a ridiculous idea that she had never even considered. Since training here I had to admit that the idea did seem kind of ridiculous, but it was a situation no different than the people that were here rather than the Rift Valley. I was at sea level for other reasons, and so training had to happen there whether it was an optimal situation or not.
By the time we came back through town things were pretty crowded and we picked our way through the matatus, pedestrians, and stalls, with hoots and hollers coming from all directions as they usually did. A group of guys yelled at me as I came by to come fight them, putting up their fists. Did they think that as a rule Americans enjoyed getting in fights? It reminded me that some of the kids in the estate in Nairobi had also asked me if I could teach them to fight. It was a perspective on Americans that fascinated me, and I pictured them being pretty disappointed if they went to the US and found that the average person on the street there wouldn't be much better off in a fight than your average Kenyan. Linda picked up the pace as we headed through town and I wondered where she was heading. I decided to mentally shoot for getting back to the Central Bank building where we had started and figured if she was going much farther than that I would throw in the towel. Today had quickly turned from my long run into a brutal tempo run, which was fine with me because it was about time for me to start incorporating that into my training, I just wish I had a little more warning. Finally we hit a pretty clear stretch of road and saw the guys on a street corner in the distance cheering us on, she picked up the pace noticeably and we ended with a sprint to the finish, to the delight of the guys waiting there. If anything I think they had picked up the pace on the way back, or at least the effort when you account for the steady climb most of the way back toward town. There were high fives all the way around and we started walking up toward the Central Bank building. I appeared to me that everyone was finished, but we had only run for an hour, not much of a long run especially for the 10k guys. As we walked Alvin and Kennedy explained relaxed breathing to me more, saying that I was wasting effort and tightening up because I was breathing so hard, and I think there's some truth in that. What I couldn't believe is that Alvin threw out 3:00 per kilometer as a pace to shoot for on these runs. For those of you who aren't math majors that means you would be clicking off 15:00 5k's, a solid minute below my 5k PR, and a very fast pace even for them. Clearly the long run in their training plan did not serve the same purpose as the long run in my plan. As we headed up the hill Kennedy and the other 10k guy took off, and Alvin explained that they would go another hour since they were training for 10k. I was interested as to whether they would maintain the same pace for the next hour, and the exuberance with which Kennedy bounded off suggested that's exactly what he intended. We continued walking and talking, and never ended up stopping to stretch at any point. They asked me where I was staying, and we started walking down that way. They were a great group to just walk and talk with, and I really enjoyed it. I forgot what a big part of running the group aspect of it is in my mind, something that is largely disregarded here I think. There isn't the same concept as high school and college cross country in the US where the team trains together and works toward team goals. Here training is more individualized and there aren't teams, there's just making sure you run fast enough to make money from it or go to the Olympics. For that reason I'm not sure I would be willing to come here and train, not because I don't think it would make me faster, but because I don't think it would be fun, and I'm not fast enough to be running for many other reasons than to have fun with it, certainly not to make money from it. As I've told people about my running and explained that I ran on the University team they would ask or assume that I had a scholarship, and I when I told them I didn't they would get kind of a confused look on their face and, whether they said it out loud or not, ask, "Then why are you running?" Running here is a business, which means people like me don't fit in very well, but with this group I felt more at home because it was a group who enjoyed being together, which is more like the way my training has always been, and the way I think it has to be for someone who isn't getting anything from it other than the joy of running. I said my goodbyes to them when we got to my corner and told them I would try to make it to a workout if I was back in Kisumu again. I wished I could train with them more, but their training really didn't match up with mine so maybe it was for the best that I was leaving. Still, in the short time with them I felt like a developed some good connections and I was really grateful I'd found them.
That afternoon I was laying around waiting to see if my legs were going to fall off when Lois came by and asked if I wanted to go down to the lake with them, to which I eagerly agreed. I loved the lake and wanted to see it a lot more than anyone I was staying with (which I can't blame them too much, because I guess it's something like someone visiting Missoula wanting to climb the M, which is cool, but not a regular activity), so I eagerly agreed. Miriam, the youngest daughter of Peter and Leah, also came, and we piled into Lois and Kevin's car. I was happy to spend some time with Lois and Kevin because they were pretty laid back and really nice. We headed through town and over to a spot on the other side of Kiboko Bay, the area of Lake Victoria that Kisumu lays along. For the whole ride over we listened to a sermon on tape that I realized was one by William Brennam. We stopped to pick up a friend of theirs before going on to the "resort". At the turn off the main road was a small, dilapidated metal sign that wearily announced it was the entrance to the resort (can't remember the name). The dirt road in was a couple hundred yards that was pretty run down, definitely nothing like the picture I had in my mind of what a resort would look like. When we got to the shore though, there was a nice area with a number of simple tables and a grassy area looking out over the bay. We had some fries and sodas and sat around talking and relaxing, which was an all-around good time. I talked some with Kevin about the Kisumu area and about Kenyan politics and economics and differences between Kenya and America. Kevin said this was pretty standard for them on a Saturday afternoon, to relax at the end of the week and I thought if I lived here I would do the same thing.
I was pretty much a zero for the rest of the day, my legs were shot. It was good to have some down time though because I was able to do some reading and catch up a little bit on this monster. Flo and Grace went out clubbing Saturday night, but I wasn't up for it at all. For one thing they were heading out at around 7 or 8, which meant they were going to be out for at least 8 hours. I asked Flo what they could possibly do for that long and she replied they'd dance and sit and enjoy the music, and from what I saw last time we were in Kisumu it would be mostly sitting and enjoying the music. Why doing that for that long is what someone looks forward to at the end of the week is mysterious to me. Flo harassed me about it a little bit, but not all that much. I fell asleep sitting on my bed reading at about 9, then woke up at midnight and actually went to bed, which basically just meant setting up my mosquito net and crawling under it.
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