“It was one second, but it changed my life. I feel like I am somebody else. ” —Salina Kosgei, Runner
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: Jon Miller
I went to see Salina Kosgei a few weeks after her thrilling, one-second, come-from-behind victory in the 2009 Boston Marathon. I'd been moved by pictures of her after she won, raising the trophy with an enormous smile on her face. I wanted to show that Kenyan runners, who have dominated the sport for the last 20 years, are people, not machines. And I wanted to learn about the odd economics of this peculiarly demanding job.
Salina and I spent four days together. She took me to her training camp in the woods outside Kaptagat, a village on the escarpment above the Great Rift Valley, where she lifts homemade weights and runs in place on an old truck tire. We inspected the cottage she's building nearby, where she plans to go when she needs more privacy. We dropped in on a camp in the village of Iten, a global Mecca for distance runners, where the residents all gave her high-fives and hugs. We went to the high-tech gym where she sometimes works out.
We traveled three bumpy hours to Kakamega, a lowland town where Salina's two kids, Billy and Ruth, go to boarding school; where her husband Barnabas lives and works; and where Salina has a prison job waiting for her any time she wants to claim it. We sat in the spacious living room of her house outside Eldoret, a city roughly halfway between Kakamega and her training camp, where she and Barnabas try to meet each weekend.
We drove past burnt-out houses from the post-election violence of 2008, and rows of tents where refugees are housed. We saw the modest block of shops Salina owns for rental income, and a 12-room truckers' motel she and Barnabas are building. We went to visit the remote, seven-acre farm where Salina grew up, the tenth child of subsistence farmers, where Salina's mother gave us drinking gourds, then led the family in a beautiful welcome song.
Everywhere we went, I pestered Salina with questions. Why do you run? Do you enjoy it? How does the money work? As a kid, she said, she loved to run. She used to race her friends the 10 kilometers from her farm to her primary school. She ran in school competitions and did well. She wasn't elegant, but she was fast. At 16, she was chosen for the Kenyan junior team as a sprinter.
A fellow runner gave her running shoes and hooked her up with an agent. She spent 13 years competing in the 800 meters in Europe, Asia, and North America. But by her late 20s, it looked like her career was winding down.
If you're from a poor family in a poor country, you don't turn your back on a job like that until you've exhausted every alternative. Salina tried switching to the 10,000 meters but found she wasn't fast enough. Some of her women friends were making decent money running marathons, so she decided to give it a shot. When she ran in the Paris Marathon in 2004, it was the first time she had ever gone the entire 26.2-mile distance. She won.
