From the moment the race started, my hamstrings began to ache — a dull throbbing that I knew could derail my run.
Just hours earlier, I had woken to an overcast May morning feeling excited to run the Cape Town Marathon. My lungs were strong, and my legs felt lighter than they had before any of my 15 previous marathons. My goal seemed possible: to run the race in 2 hours 50 minutes, more than seven minutes faster than the personal best I had achieved 14 years earlier, at 29.
My attempts to better that time over the years were mostly derailed by leg cramps. No gel, electrolyte drink, potato or salt packet could prevent those crippling moments in races, when it felt like someone was playing tug of war with my hamstrings.
As I reached my 40s, though, I began doing the little things that my younger, more athletic self ignored. I strength trained, foam rolled and stretched more frequently. I gave my muscles more time to recover. I slept more. I ran faster than I expected.
But I had cramped throughout the final 13 miles of the last marathon I raced, in November. I didn’t know how else I could improve at that point. A friend suggested training in Iten, a Kenyan village in the Great Rift Valley, which has produced some of the best marathoners in the world. I spent a week running there in April.
Now as the niggling in my hamstrings so early in the race began to worry me, I thought back on that training. If I wanted to hit my target, I would need to channel the skill I had not known was so crucial to those runners’ success: their mind-set.
On my first morning in Iten, I stood along the main road as packs of runners bounded past along the red dirt paths, like flocks of birds gliding in formation, their strides smooth, their posture straight. They moved with an envious efficiency. Almost every runner looked exceptionally fit.
This is a village where few people run recreationally. Most are hoping to win prize money in major competitions or, like the team I trained with, are trying to win scholarships to run college track in the United States.
“It’s running for their lives,” Richard Mukche, the team’s coach, told me of the ethos in Iten. Nearly 60 percent of the roughly half a million residents of Elgeyo Marakwet, the county that includes Iten, live in poverty.
About 30 years ago, Iten was a speck of a village with just a handful of rural homesteads and a handful of runners. After some of those early runners won international competitions, word spread about the benefits of training in Iten — the high altitude and the serenity — and it grew into a running mecca. It now serves as a base for Olympians and world champions from other countries, who spend weeks or months cloistered in camps that cater to their every training need. Amateur runners like me are a regular presence, helping to sustain the local economy — I paid about $700 for a week of training at a camp complete with meals and massages — as they try to improve their abilities by training with Kenyan runners.
Coach Richard is himself a Kenyan former elite athlete who trained in Iten and ran a 2:16 marathon in his day, which would still clock him in the top 20 finishers of last year’s New York City Marathon. He has been coaching for the past 16 years, mostly 20-somethings shooting for scholarships, but also world-class runners from abroad. Some of his athletes have competed in the Olympics and in major marathons. About six, including his daughter, have earned scholarships.
My first morning, when I joined the roughly 20 Kenyan runners currently under his wing, I was eager to run hard. Could I keep up with them?
But as I would come to learn, much of the training philosophy in Iten is about restraint, rather than excess. Coach Richard drilled in me an almost biblical commandment of Kenyan training: Listen to your body.
My first workout, he said, would be 5 miles at a relaxed pace — “Pole! Pole!” as they call easy runs in Swahili. He wanted my body to adjust to the altitude, which, at a mile and a half above sea level, is a half mile higher than where I live in Johannesburg.
So, I set off at a 8:30-per-mile pace, running past the not-so-subtle reminders of why Iten is a running destination. Past the arch over the main road that says welcome to the “Home Of Champions.” Past the “Champions Barber Shop” and “Champions Wines & Spirits.” By the end, I couldn’t help but feel optimistic — I hadn’t been bothered by the high altitude, which makes it harder to breathe but over time produces red blood cells that make breathing easier at lower elevations.
That evening, when I joined Coach Richard, his team and dozens of others at the Iten Sports Club to watch the Boston Marathon — local hero John Korir blazed his way to victory in course record time — I met Amanal Petros, Germany’s record-holder in the marathon, who was training in Iten for the London Marathon.
Petros has trained at other popular distance running hubs like Flagstaff, Ariz.; Boulder, Colo.; and St. Moritz, Switzerland. In those cities, he said, it takes months to find training partners on his level, while in Iten, he can find a dozen by just going to the main road in the morning.
“There’s nothing here. It’s just animals or runners,” he said. “You focus only on training, on your goal.”
For years after running in high school, I lost my motivation. The constant pursuit of faster times had made running feel like a chore. But then encouraged by a friend, I ran a marathon and then another. I broke three hours for the first and only time at the Chicago Marathon in 2012, clocking 2:57:32.
When I moved to Johannesburg five years ago, I was 38 and had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that my fastest days were behind me. But something changed. Living for the first time at a high altitude — nearly 5,600 feet — in a city with relentless hills, I became more fit than I had ever expected to be at my age.
In 2023, exactly six months before my 41st birthday, I won a half marathon in suburban St. Louis in my fastest time ever, bettering a mark I had set 11 years earlier. I felt like I was keeping mortality at bay. I wanted to see what my body could do.
And so, as day 2 of training in Iten began, I was excited to be able to push myself with the group. Coach Richard had us run 400-meter (one lap) repeats on the track. I felt great from the start, coming in a little over 80 seconds on each. I even talked Coach Richard into letting me do 15 laps, like some of the other runners, rather than the 10 he had assigned me. And when I was done, I wasn’t entirely drained.
“Who still has more energy?” Coach Richard asked us afterward. “In training, it’s better when you finish, you can still do something after. You don’t have to die completely.”
Paying attention to how I felt was the focus of much of my training in Iten. That simple question — how do you feel? — guides most runners in the area. It’s an approach that stands in stark contrast to the emphasis on technology and markers like VO₂ max and average heart rate promoted by most coaches and online influencers these days.
“Eat, sleep, run,” is how Coach Richard described the routine in Iten.
The simplicity is in some ways born out of circumstance. Most athletes here can’t afford the watches, carbon-plated super shoes or electrolyte gels that many privileged runners rely on. Some of the young people I trained with — people who were running at elite speeds — had holes in their shoes and drank water mixed with cheap glucose packets.
When athletes reach world-class levels in the United States and Europe, it’s common for them to follow individualized training plans. They often run alone or with just a few partners.
But there’s a pack mentality in Iten — runners generally run in big groups. In a crowd, a strenuous pace can feel comfortable; you’re syncing your strides with those around you and focusing on staying on the heels of the person ahead of you.
“Enjoy the rhythm, forget the pain,” is how Emmanuel Kipruto, an elite runner and coach in Iten, described group running.
The runners explained to me that the group also encourages discipline. You cannot sleep in when you know you need to meet your teammates in the morning to run. And there is competition within the group. When you see your teammates have success, it pushes you to try to keep up with them.
The ultimate group session in Iten takes place every Thursday when there is a fartlek workout, open to anyone who wants to participate. In fartlek trainings, runners alternate between fast, intense intervals and slow, relaxed ones as a way to build endurance and practice changing speeds.
The workout can attract hundreds of runners, from elites to amateurs. Dozens showed up the day I was there, and the regimen for the day was daunting: 13 repetitions of running one minute easy followed by three minutes hard.
By the end of the first 3-minute interval, I had slipped to the back of the pack. By the second, they had left me in their dust, literally — even the runner I saw hunched over vomiting during the first interval. I called it quits after 10 intervals. The pack was far out of sight, and each breath I took felt like someone was smothering me with a pillow.
It was humbling. The altitude I snickered at on previous days was now exacting its revenge. I felt like an amateur among pros, like a rec league baller trying to dunk on LeBron James.
Coach Richard said he saw progress, though. My body seemed strong, he told me, and that was important so that I could train the next day. I controlled my pace well, which is critical for racing, he said.
“I told you, listen to your body,” he said.
I had come to Iten hoping to find the secret to running success. What I was learning was that the secret was trusting how my body felt — understanding my own boundaries. It was OK to slow down if my body demanded it. But it was also fine to let loose.
Two days after the fartlek session, I prepared for my final run in Iten, nearly 16 miles along Moiben Road, a paved, relatively flat stretch where local runners do most of their long runs. Coach Richard told me to start my run at 75 percent effort, and pick it up if I felt good.
I was a bit uncertain as I set off alongside Vincent Cheruiyot, the team captain assigned to pace me. We settled into a nice rhythm faster than 7:15 per mile, a brisk but far from brutal pace. The running felt comfortable as I focused on the beautiful mountain vistas and watching the elite athletes blow past me, including the 10 kilometer world-record holder, Agnes Jebet Ngetich.
With about three miles to go, my body told me I could handle more. Our pace dipped below 7 minutes per mile. By the time we were on our last mile, the sweat was dripping, my hamstrings were taut, but I knew I could push the pace, matching Vincent next to me stride-for-stride. When we were done, my body felt bent but not broken, my lungs refreshed. Vincent and Coach Richard flashed wide smiles. I felt the progress.
As I prepared to leave Iten, I knew the workouts I had learned were sustainable. I hadn’t trained long enough to experience the full physical benefits, but running is as much a mental challenge as a physical one. I could sense that I had achieved a mental recalibration that I had not been expecting.
“Listen to your body.” That had been Coach Richard’s instruction, and hamstring troubles early in the Cape Town Marathon meant that my body needed me to be conservative. So I relaxed my pace, hoping that I would warm up and the discomfort would go away. By mile six, I felt better.
I was a little behind my goal pace, so I decided to open up my stride. Eleven of my next 13 mile splits came in under my target of 6:29 per mile. I was blowing past other runners and my lungs were at ease.
Then on mile 20, we hit a long, steady, sneaky hill. My pace slowed. I kept my focus straight ahead, and thought about the efficiency of the strides of the Kenyans I ran with in Iten. I tried to mimic that. I pushed, but my body didn’t have more to give. My watch said that 2:50 wasn’t going to happen. But I still could beat my personal best, I thought.
I grit my teeth through those final miles. The sun beat down. I started losing my breath. But I thought back to Iten, when the thin air had me gasping and the steep dirt paths had my legs straining, and I felt more than prepared for this moment. I thought about Emmanuel’s advice to “enjoy the rhythm, forget the pain.”
I saw the finish line and found one last surge.
I crossed in 2:53:50, smashing my previous record by nearly four minutes.
Edwin Okoth contributed reporting from Nairobi, Kenya.
