When I first met Japhet Koech, grinning outside a tiny wooden kiosk in a backstreet in Iten, Kenya, I didn’t realise quite how far we’d go together. After we trained for and ran the Lewa marathon in Kenya in 2011, I said goodbye and headed back to London. Our adventure was over, I thought. In fact, it was just beginning.
After I wrote the book Running with the Kenyans, people kept contacting me asking if they could help Japhet to find a race. His story had touched them: his unwavering dedication to training, his wonderful way with words, his heartbreaking story of losing his mother as a small child.
However, he had the same problem as most other runners in Kenya: getting a race. Every marathon in Kenya is either at high altitude, or somewhere very hot, so it is impossible to run fast times. Also, the competition is so fierce that getting anywhere near the front is nigh on impossible.
All that training, and no outlet. It seems too cruel, but it is the reality for many Kenyans. For all the 327 Kenyans who ran marathons across the world in under 2 hours 15 minutes last year (a time not one single British athlete managed), another 327 at least are stuck in Kenya with no way of proving themselves.
So last year I gathered together all these offers of help, and crowdfunded to get Japhet to Edinburgh to race the marathon. I wrote about it on these pages. He ran hard, but trailed in a disappointing (for him) fifth in 2 hrs 21 mins. We thought that was that. The chance gone.
But his efforts and charm won over many people during his brief stay in Scotland, and the race organisers said they wanted him back in 2014. They’d pay towards his flight and accommodation, they said. Japhet was keen, so I offered to help him again. And so here we are, back on Crowdfunder, and hopefully soon, back in Edinburgh. Japhet’s adventure, it seems, goes on. Who knows where it will end?
Note: A US reader of Running with the Kenyans decided to set up his own crowdfunding project last December to bring Japhet and another runner from the book, Shadrack Chepyego, over to Sacramento to run the California marathon. The story even made CNN news bulletins.
• To help Japhet make it to the starting line in Edinburgh, visit crowdfunder.co.uk.
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