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.
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In the next five years she won just one other race, in Prague. Twice she came in fourth in London; in 2006 she came in second in Berlin. At the 2008 Olympics she finished a disappointing tenth. When she entered the race in Boston, she wasn't sure where things were headed.
It was obvious that Salina Kosgei wasn't a machine. That settled, I started to wonder what made her so good.
The latest version of the nature versus nurture debate revolves around the question of why some people are so much more successful than others. The writer Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, concludes that it mainly has to do with external conditions. Bill Gates may be millions of times richer than you, but he's not millions of times smarter. He never would have made it big without some big-time help.
Kenyans (and particularly members of two or three tribes in the western part of the country) have become spectacularly successful at long-distance running in recent years. Between 1991 and 2008, Kenyan men won 16 of 18 Boston Marathons. Between 2000 and 2009, Kenyan women won seven of ten. Those are some pretty crazy numbers. They argue that external conditions matter in a major way.
In western Kenya, the externals are certainly conducive: high altitude, mild weather, lots of dirt roads, and, more recently, plenty of role models. When I asked Salina what motivated her to run as a kid, she said it was seeing the big houses and cars of successful runners in the area. Her home village, which isn't on most maps, has produced two Boston Marathon winners.
The most significant external factors may be poverty and lack of opportunity. A running career is a high-risk proposition in a wealthy country, where there are so many safer, easier options. For a rural Kenyan, the effort-to-reward ratio makes perfect sense. And since so many other people are doing it, the work isn't even particularly lonely.
At some point, though, it comes down to the person. And there, spending time with Salina Kosgei was a revelation. I watched her do long runs and speed work and intervals. I watched her lift weights and pedal a stationary bike. I even watched her compete in a race against fellow prison employees (she came in second-to-last in a field of men). Her body was still recovering from Boston, but in four days she did what would have been, for me, a month's worth of exercise. This was a woman with extraordinary discipline and extraordinary drive.
Salina told me outright that she ran for the money. But again and again she said how gratifying it was to be recognized – to be, suddenly, "a big lady." I asked her what she was thinking about in the final seconds of the Boston Marathon, as she prepared to make her move past the defending champion, Dire Tune of Ethiopia. She said she was thinking that she was just happy to finish in the top three. But I don't believe her. The result speaks for itself.
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