We were standing in a line outside the changing rooms on a blustery September morning. I was nine years old and had just started at a new school where I didn’t know anyone. “Watch out, Peter’s our secret weapon,” the other boys were saying, jostling and pointing at a skinny boy in a red rugby shirt. We were all wearing the red of our house, Thursby. Next to us were three other rows of boys, in green, blue and yellow shirts for the other houses. I had very little idea what was going on.
I’d come from a small school on the other side of town where we didn’t really do sport. My only previous sporting memory was being disqualified from the hula-hoop race on sports day because my teammate was holding the hoop up with his arms. We won, then we didn’t. I couldn’t work it out.
Now this new school was sending us out for a cross-country race. Most of the other kids were grumbling about it, as the teacher stood there explaining the course. I wasn’t really paying attention. I was just following, moving with the flow of children, copying everyone else. They had all done it before, I just had to go along with it.
The teacher, a tall man with a moustache and a loud voice, yelled at us to stop talking and to follow him out on to the football pitch. I remember standing in the rain in a long line that stretched right across one side of the pitch. Then a big blast on a whistle and we were off, down across the bumpy field. It had once been used for tank exercises, and the ground rolled in satisfying dips as you hurtled across it, as though you were on some fairground ride. Down through a gap in the hedge, up some wooden steps, on to the lower fields, past gardens full of vegetable patches and bordered with tall poplar trees.
At some point, I overtook our secret weapon, Peter. I wasn’t racing, or running that hard. I was just being blown in the wind, but it seemed strong at my back. Around the fields we went, up a gravel track. Now it was just me at the front and a boy from the blue team. He was smaller than me. Pee-wee, they called him. We ran side by side until there was only one field to go. “Let’s finish together,” he said suddenly.
I looked over. It was a friendly gesture, one that a more polite, mature me would have found difficult to turn down. I don’t remember my actual thought process, if there even was one, but at that moment something in me fired, and I sped up, sprinting away to win the race. Afterwards, I stood in the cold watching as the other boys came in one after the other, collapsing over the line. “He’s not even breathing hard,” the teacher said, holding me up as an example. I remember thinking: secret weapon? What secret weapon?
From that moment on, I became a runner. Putting on my trainers and heading out for a run has become my regular ritual for more than 30 years. I still can’t decide if I really love running, but something compels me to do it. As a junior I loved being good at it — winning races was motivation enough. I joined a running club and trained hard. Most of my weekends involved races spread far around the country. Even as a teenager, when I grew my hair long and played guitar in a band, I still ran. My friends thought I was mad. It was like I had this double life. But I kept at it, pushing myself to a pulp on hill sessions in the park on a Tuesday night, or lapping 400 metre reps on the gravel track that became my second home. Afterwards, I’d jog home, eat, do some homework and go to bed completely exhausted, but buzzing from the endorphins, the cold air still fresh in my lungs.
In my 20s I drifted away. I put on weight and was more likely to be found inside than on a running track. But it gnawed away at me. At least once a week I’d dig out the old running shoes and sneak in a few laps of the park. Once or twice I even joined a running club and attempted to get going again. Then, as the onset of middle age reared over the horizon, I did something mad. The fear I had always had was that I’d waste my running talent. I had just about accepted, by 35, that I wouldn’t make the Olympics, but I wanted to at least see what happened if I pushed myself, if I took running seriously one more time. So, in my late 30s, before the sun had set, I moved to Kenya. I had a young family by then, three small children. They came with me.
The greatest runners in the world live in Kenya. Most of them seem to live in one town in the Rift Valley called Iten, and so I moved there. I ran every day. I wrote a book about it. It sold well and I became a writer. Another book, about running in Japan , followed. My life had changed, and running was once again at the centre of it. And that feeling I had had as a nine-year-old, racing away in the rain, the wind behind me — it still felt exactly the same.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Adharanand Finn is the author of The Way of the Runner and Running with the Kenyans
