I spent some time living and working in Kenya's Western Rift Valley. The school I worked at was at an altitude of 2000m+ and the locals claimed that their tribe had at one time or another held every long distance running record in World Athletics.
I used to train the school football team in the evenings and I would often get to the playing fields a little early to chat with the students and also to warm up with the runners. I was a decent middle-distance runner at school - 1500m was my best event so I enjoyed running with these guys. However, I could only keep up for 2 laps! After 1 lap I thought - these guys are gonna get tired soon. After 2 laps I thought I better quit while i'm still alive. It was like watching the Duracell Bunny advert, my batteries ran out quickly but they just kept going and going and going and going.
For a lot of the locals, athletics represents one of their best chances to escape a life of poverty. That part of Kenya is a beautiful place, with amazing people and wonderful athletes but unfortunately, it is very poor.
Edit - If you look at the photos you've used, those athletes with the prefix "Kip" on their name are likely members of a tribe from the Kalenjin group who inhabit the area of Kenya I was in
Very interesting to know you lived and worked there. So you also have a physical education background? Must have been a great place to spend a few years in a totally different culture, especially a beautiful country like Kenya, did you manage to get the chance to do any of the safaris?
While I can't claim to have such an illustrious related experience, I know a fair few even of the lower standard Kenyan runners would fly over to England regularly to sweep up all the smaller running events cash prizes! My bro use to run in a lot of the small standard ones where there was around £1000 or something of that sort of prize money for first place, you'd see not just Kenyans but many other Africans partaking where you already knew the English runners wouldn't stand a chance on the whole lol
Not really but I was a young teacher with very limited classroom experience. You know what they say - those who can’t do, teach and those who can’t teach, teach PE :-)
The football team was given to me because I was young, idealistic and would say yes to pretty much any request! I even remember volunteering to invigilate and mark additional exams - that doesn’t happen anymore!
I was there for 6months as a volunteer teacher at school mainly teaching History and Geography but we were also helping develop and teach a curriculum around HIV/AIDS awareness because the disease is rampant in that that area.
Yeah, I did a fair bit of travelling around and visited Masai Mara and Amboseli National Parks.
I’ve got a few good sporting stories to tell including an attempted match fix in one of the local football tournaments we entered! Probably deserves its own blog sometime.
Doesn’t surprise me about the Kenyan athletes coming over to dominate those events. A few years of the students were hoping to get sports scholarships to continue their education in Western countries, it’s a real game changer for the whole family!