This is an article from the New York Times that was sent to me by Joel Patenaude about the training camp that I would have been staying in. It is pretty frightening to think that if I had arranged to travel a few days earlier then I would have been caught up in the violence.
Lornah Kiplagat’s afternoon run is out of the question. Even though her training center in Iten, Kenya, is only a mile from her house, the short trip is more daunting than any race.
Daily life in her village 18 miles outside the city of Eldoret, which has been battered by bloody violence in the past week, is punctuated by the sound of gunfire. Every day brings more roadblocks of blazing tires soaked in gasoline. Vigilante groups, wielding knives and automatic weapons, are constantly on patrol.
“It’s very tough to go running,” said Toby Tanser, a member of the New York Road Runners board of directors who is training with Kiplagat, the half-marathon world record holder. “Because if one of the vigilantes catch you, they want to know what you’re doing just running when the country is at war. And the mobs are always trying to recruit anyone who is healthy.”
The violence that has torn across Kenya since the disputed presidential election last Sunday has reached some of the nation’s top athletes.
With communications worsening on a daily basis — people are unable to purchase mobile phone credit — some of running’s biggest names remain unaccounted for.
Several calls to the home of the former marathon world record holder Paul Tergat went unanswered, and Lisa Buster, the agent for the marathon world champion Catherine Ndereba, said that a text message on Friday was the first time she had heard from Ndereba in several days. Ndereba’s message to Buster said that she was safe.
Still, many athletes have committed themselves to continue training. Tanser said that one marathoner he knows completes his daily hour-and-a-half runs by staying within a five-minute radius of his house.
Kiplagat, who is preparing for the Dubai marathon Jan. 18, has had to limit herself to a single run around 5:30 a.m. Afterward, she spends the rest of the day indoors at the High Altitude Training Center, which she operates with her husband and coach, Pieter Langerhorst.
This week, she also took responsibility for the safety of 15 visiting athletes from Ireland and the Netherlands. In cooperation with the Dutch embassy in Nairobi, she orchestrated an evacuation Wednesday.
“We got heavily armed police escorts to take them to the Eldoret airport, which is about 25 miles from here,” Langerhorst said in a telephone interview from the couple’s home Thursday.
“From there we had a charter flight to Nairobi. They slept in Nairobi and this morning took a KLM flight to Amsterdam.”
The next day the camp was in danger of being torched. “There was a house next door that the mob wanted to burn,” Tanser said. “And we were taking things out of one side of the camp to another because the flames climbed so high. They’ll burn any house that happens to belong to someone of the wrong tribe.”
The only people left at the training center and Langerhorst’s home are Langerhorst; Kiplagat; Tanser; Hilda Kibet, the New York City half-marathon champion; and a dozen or so refugees. Five girls ages 3 to 12 are also staying in the house. It is because of them that Tanser has decided to stay in Kenya.
“They witnessed people being sliced to death and they need people here to cheer them up and take care of them,” he said. “For children to see people cut up with knives, it’s a horrible situation. So we stay up with them, playing the guitar and singing.”
Athletes have not been spared from the violence. Last Saturday, the marathon world champion Luke Kibet walked to downtown Eldoret from his home about two miles away. He was trying to buy food. “But when I arrived with two of my friends,” he said, “there were people shooting in the air.”
In the Rift Valley in the far west of Kenya, the conflict has largely broken down along tribal lines. The Kikuyu support President Mwai Kibaki, who was declared the winner of last week’s election by a narrow margin despite evidence of ballot rigging. The Kalenjin, of which Kibet is a member, and Luo back Raila Odinga, the opposition candidate who has said he was robbed of the presidency.
So when Kibet headed into town, he knew that any run-ins with the Kikuyu would be incendiary.
“I saw a big group of Kikuyu coming towards us on the street,” he said. “And suddenly I was on the floor, trying to stay awake.”
Kibet had been struck in the back of the head with a stone. His friends rushed him to a hospital, where he was treated for a deep flesh wound and a concussion. Doctors told him he would be unable to train for three weeks.
Three hours later, Lucas Sang, a middle-distance runner who competed in the 1988 and 1992 Olympics as part of Kenya’s 4x400-meter relay team, was hacked to death. Kibet said he believed it was the same group that assaulted him. Reliable information is sparse, and Kibet said it took two days of searching before he discovered Sang’s fate. Sang’s funeral will be in Eldoret on Saturday.
But Kibet says he has no plans to leave. “Some days it’s not dangerous and some days it is,” he said. “But I’m staying here to recover and I want to start training again.”
Other athletes who had made plans to compete abroad long before the election barely managed to escape. The marathoners Simon Wangai and Peter Muthuma, who are competing this weekend at a marathon in Xiamen, China, traveled to Nairobi separately from the Ngong region in central Kenya. Rioting has been especially intense on the outskirts of Nairobi. Now the police have blocked all traffic into the city.
“I had to walk the last five kilometers into Nairobi,” Wangai said in a telephone interview from Xiamen. “I was very frightened that I would be robbed or hurt by the mob because I was carrying my bags.”
Muthuma had to do the same, but he and Wangai said they still planned to return to Kenya on Tuesday.
Despite the violence, Kiplagat and Tanser still make their way to the training camp through the bush. Members of militia groups line the main roads. “It’s a waiting game,” Tanser said. “We just watch news all the time, but there’s no information around.”
For the time being, the afternoon runs are staying off the schedule
Saturday 5 January 2008
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