She's in it for the long run
Tegla Loroupe aims to lower her marathon best and elevate Kenyan women
Posted: Saturday October 31, 1998 01:18 PM
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Loroupe holds the marathon world record with a time of 2:20:47, set in Rotterdam earlier this year Michele Limina |
By Merrell Noden
 Weighing
only 84 pounds and standing a shade under five feet tall, Tegla
Loroupe seems impossibly small, even by the diminutive
standards of women's marathoning. Upon meeting her, your
first impulse is to give her a hug or at least to shield
her from the big, clumsy
world. While she might accept the hug, she needs no one's
protection. Loroupe, who holds the world record for the
women's marathon, is as tough and determined a person as
you'll
find.
How tough? Here is a story: As a girl of 14 in Kenya, she
journeyed 120 miles from Kapsait, her village in the
mountains near the Ugandan border, to the city of Nakuru,
where she was to run a cross-country race. The race was six
kilometers through a
forest, and in the second kilometer Tegla, running barefoot,
stepped on a wooden spike that became embedded in her foot,
poking bloodily out the top. "I didn't have time to
stop," she says in her high-pitched, singsong voice.
She finished second, then sat
down and pulled out the spike. "It was painful,"
she admits, "but I couldn't wait to go to a
doctor."
Now 25, Loroupe has let nothing stop her progress toward
becoming the best female distance runner in the
world—not multiple injuries, tribal warfare, snubs by
the famously incompetent Kenyan track and field federation,
not even the sudden death of her
beloved older sister, Albina, who died of an undiagnosed
ailment just 13 days before the 1995 New York City
Marathon.
Loroupe won that race, then collapsed in
tears.
"I have a wooden head," she says, trying to
describe the obstinacy that has driven her to run in
defiance of her father and the
repressive patriarchal society in which she grew up. All her life
people have bombarded her with reasons why she should not
run, and always she has soldiered on, a small, smiling
pillar of courage and
will.
On Nov. 1 Loroupe is favored to win her third New York City
Marathon. That would provide the exclamation point to a
superb
year. In the past seven months she has
won the 10,000 meters at the Goodwill Games, claimed her
second straight world half-marathon title, smashed the
world record for the one-hour run (covering 11 miles, 696
yards) and twice broken 15 minutes in the 5,000. But her
most eye-catching
achievement came on April 19, when she broke
Ingrid Kristiansen's 13-year-old women's world marathon
record by 19 seconds, clocking 2:20:47 in Rotterdam. With
that performance
Loroupe established herself as the woman most likely to
break the 2:20 barrier,
which has beckoned the top women runners like a siren, raising
their hopes and then dashing them on the shoals of a
suicidal
pace.
Surprisingly, Loroupe is the first Kenyan, male or female,
to hold the world marathon record. While Kenyan men, who
dominate distance running internationally, emerged as a
force in the mid-1960s, only in the last decade have Kenyan
women begun to assert
themselves. Since they benefit from the same geographical
advantages as the men and log the same long miles to
school, we must look elsewhere for the reason that the
women have lagged behind. It is not hard to find. For
generations Kenya's women have
been little more than servants in their own
homes.
"The traditional system is, you listen to your father
until your husband buys you [in exchange] for cattle, then
you listen to him," says John Manners, an American
journalist who lived in Kenya for four years and is working
on a book about the country's
extraordinary runners. "The idea cemented by Tegla's
win in New York City was that women runners can do this on
their own and should not be pushed into marriage right
away."
Loroupe, one of the few top Kenyan women runners who is not
married, is eager to serve as a role model to other Kenyan
women. "I don't think she thinks about feminism as
such," says Anne Roberts, who as the elite-athlete
coordinator for the New York
City Marathon has become a second
mother to
Loroupe. "It's not male versus female. It's whatever's
fair. It's equality, just to be treated with respect. Women
are so downtrodden in
Kenya."
Though Loroupe now lives in Germany, whenever she
returns to Kenya she visits schools, hoping to teach girls,
many of whom tower over her, about self-respect and
independence. "I want to show them that they don't need to
feel like useless people," she
says. "They can use their brains. Women are capable of
helping their
communities."
Asked where her wooden head and its strange ideas come
from, Loroupe
proudly cites her mother, Mary
Lotuma. The first of her husband's three wives (Kenya is a
polygamous culture),
Lotuma has always resented the unfairness of Kenyan society
and has
drilled into her four daughters the idea that they should
aspire to be more than wives and mothers. "On my
mother's side of the family, they are strong women,"
Loroupe says. Literally so, it seems. The last time Tegla
was home, she and her
fiftysomething
mother ran 30 kilometers to visit
relatives.
"She was faster than me," says the world-record
holder. "It was hard, because I was not used to the
altitude."
The cradle-to-grave rigors of Pokot
tribal life at least partly explain Loroupe's
remarkable talent for distance running. "In the village no
one is ever idle," says Loroupe, who, minutes after
winning $37,500 and a Mercedes in her first New York City
Marathon, in 1994, amused reporters by telling them she had
to get home fast—to help herd the cattle. There is no
electricity and no running water in Kapsait, and the
nearest phone is 15 miles away. People go everywhere on
foot, often carrying 40-pound
sacks of maize or buckets of water.
Like the boys whom she often beat,
Loroupe was six when she began running six miles each way
to and from school. "You cry at first," she says.
"There are lots of hills. After a time, you get used
to it."
Remember that this is at an elevation above
9,000 feet. Loroupe ran her first races at age nine, at a
school sports day, winning the 1,500, 5,000 and 10,000
meters against boys and girls, all in one day.
The other girls were puzzled by
Loroupe's strange passion. "What kind of woman do you
want to be?" they asked. But Loroupe was determined,
as well as a little devious. When her father pressured her
to give up running, at age seven, she proposed a
deal.
"I said, 'Can I run if I do better than [her older
brother] Julius in
mathematics?'" she says with a chuckle. She knew that she was a far
better math student than
Julius.
The math comes in handy these days. With an income in the
mid six figures,
Loroupe is surely among the highest paid Kenyan women. She
owns homes in Kapsait and Nakuru, and not too long ago she
made her way through the textbook
Principles of
Accounting. "It's good to be wise as a woman," she says.
"You never know who will marry you and want you to
stay at home. If you have property, they will respect
you."
Still, not everyone in Kenya is pleased with her challenge
to tradition. Recently she was criticized for bypassing the
Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur. "She never runs for
Kenya," says Peter Njenga of Nairobi's
Daily Nation,
the country's biggest newspaper. "I think she is just
money-oriented."
That certainly is not true.
Loroupe may value the independence that money buys, but she
is extremely generous. She sends many children from her
region to boarding school, paying for their tuition, board,
books and clothing. "Always there is somebody
you can support," she says. A young man from her village
is in a Bombay hospital awaiting an operation for brain
cancer on Nov. 3.
Loroupe is paying for his travel and treatment and even for
a relative to accompany him.
"That is what the money is for," she says simply.
And that, no matter how fast she runs, shows what kind of
woman
Loroupe wants to
be.
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Loroupe talks with CNN/SI's Phil Jones about her strange training program
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