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68 GQ.COM APRIL 2020
the hills of the Kenyan highlands, among the world’s
most spectacular marathon runners, morning comes
early, with the 5 a.m. ring of a bicycle bell.
It’s December and Eliud Kipchoge is stirring in the
predawn gloom, already thinking about the work-
out—one of his first hard runs since he made history
in October, finishing a marathon course in Vienna
in under two hours. That achievement—thought for
decades to be impossible—instantly made Kipchoge
famous around the world. But it did little to alter the
rhythms of his ascetic life at the rural training camp
where he lives six days a week, sequestered from even
his own family. Here the walls of his room are virtually
bare, except for a picture of Paulo Coelho pinned above
his bed and a quote from the Brazilian novelist: “If you
want to be successful, you must respect one rule: Never
lie to yourself.”
Kipchoge slips on his black half tights, his blue
half-zip top, his Nike trainers. And then he’s outside,
greeting a dozen or so teammates in the blue darkness
before sunrise. I’ve been invited to join the workout,
something of a rarity for a journalist—and a daunting
prospect for a 45-year-old amateur.
The elevation is no small challenge. The camp is
perched at nearly 8,000 feet, overlooking the Great Rift
Valley, in a swath of East Africa regarded as the great-
est hotbed of distance runners in the world. Along with
Kipchoge, our ranks include Geo≠rey Kirui, who won the
2017 Boston Marathon, and the unrelated Abel Kirui, the
2012 Olympic silver medalist. Nearly every man in the
group has run a marathon in under two hours and ten
minutes—a feat only three American runners managed
last year. I’m hoping I can hang for even a few miles in
such lofty company.
We begin slowly, jogging a couple of miles down a
rocky red-dirt road, farmland stretching in all direc-
tions. At a nearby juncture, we sync up with dozens
of other local runners. As the rising sun brightens the
surrounding fields, Kipchoge explains the workout:
11 miles broken into tough 10-minute intervals, with
one minute of easy jogging between each. Silence falls
over us as we face the impending exertion.
Suddenly someone cries out: “ONE! TWO!—”
“Wait, wait, wait,” interrupts another runner. “We
forgot to pray.”
And so, from the middle of the country road, the man
leads us in prayer, thanking God for our bodies, for the
opportunity to run.
“Okay,” says the first guy, beginning again. “ONE!
TWO!—”
“KENYA!” shouts another teammate, and Kipchoge
and his crew rocket across the dirt road at a pace that’s
hard to fathom sustaining for even one 10-minute seg-
ment. The terrain is brutal—rocks the size of grapefruits
protrude from the road—but these guys are cruising at
well under 5:00 per mile.
I’m a solid runner: I grind out 70 miles a week,
I clocked a 2:33 marathon a few years back, I’ve won
some races in my day. But I’m nowhere close to being
able to keep up, even for a mile. After the second turn,
they lose me. I’m still doubled over when I see the pack
coming back. As they fly toward me, one runner slices
his hand through the air like he’s scything wheat. “Move!
Move! Move!” he shouts. I jump out of the way. It’s the
first and last workout I attempt with Eliud Kipchoge.
LATER, BACK AT CAMP, after a breakfast of fresh-baked
rolls and sweet, milky tea, the mood is light. Inside the
compound of low-slung cinder block buildings, a couple
of the runners are getting massages while others nap.
The only one who doesn’t seem to be at ease is Kipchoge.
We’re sitting, a small group of us, on plastic chairs out-
side in the sun, and Kipchoge is fixated on the garden—
specifically on a young man hacking away at the hedges
with a rusty machete. After a few minutes, Kipchoge
strides over, takes the blade, and demonstrates proper
hedge-trimming technique, gently lecturing the young
man in Nandi before he returns to his chair. “I was show-
ing him how to trim,” he explains. “In the
future we want this to be trees all over.”
He gestures toward the edge of the prop-
erty. “So when you’re here, you can relax.”
The runners ensconced in the camp—
o∞cially and grandly named the Global
Sports Communication training camp—
each log an average of 130 miles a week.
But there’s something more than running
going on here. In addition to being the
world’s most elite running enclave, the
camp—founded by the Dutch Olympian
turned agent Jos Hermens in 1994—
serves as a kind of stripped-down well-
ness retreat, an austere training ground
for the mind as well as the body. You
sense it in the zen-like energy of the
place, which resembles a high-cardio
Tibetan lamasery. And in the rotation of
chores in which each of the 25-odd men
and women who train here partakes.
Kipchoge might be the greatest runner in
history, but he’s still mopping the bath-
room, just like everyone else. “You cannot
live alone in
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