I spent a day last week with some Kenyans in Teddington, London. Really fast Kenyans, such as Micah Kogo, the 10K road world record holder, and Vivian Cheruiyot, the world 5,000m champion.
While they may run quickly, they seem to do everything else very slowly. I spent most of the day sitting watching former Kenyan 5,000m champion Mike Kigen channel surfing on the big widescreen TV they have, or just sitting on my own in the kitchen wondering where they all were. I think they were sleeping, mostly.
We went for a couple of runs, but even those were fairly slow. I found myself wanting to pick up the pace on the second run, but thought that would just be weird, to run off on the Kenyans. It wasn't as if they couldn't go faster.
I wrote up the day in full detail in today's Independent on Sunday magazine. It's the cover story and everything. Here's the link to the web version if you don't get around to picking up a copy.
