Born in Mogadishu in Somalia, he has not once, but twice escaped civil war to seek a new life in the Netherlands.

The first time he fled war he was just six years old. Then, age 15, after a three-year spell at a strict Islamic school in Syria, and a few years back in Somali, he escaped again, ending up this time in a rural Dutch community where he was “the only black guy in the village”.

Despite his difficult start in life, Nageeye says his experiences living in such different countries and cultures were not all bad.

“People think my story is very sad,” he says. “But I always think about what would have happened to me if I had stayed in Somalia. I saw the life there, so I always appreciate when I can be safe and do my thing. I don’t have to worry, I have freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of thinking.

The world is struggling

“In the Netherlands, it’s one of the best countries in the world, yet you see so many people complaining, and you think, come on, half the world are struggling, they don’t have what you have, so be thankful.”

Until he was 18, Nageeye, who was a serious soccer player, had never done any formal running. He was just trying to stay in shape during the off season one summer when a friend of his Dutch guardians suggested he run a 5K race.

Despite having no idea how to pace himself, he won. After the race, when the announcer asked him which club he ran for, he gave the name of his football club, which caused some confusion.

Clearly immensely talented, he decided to race again and was soon winning bigger races. Then he decided to start training. Less than six months after first running a 5K in his football kit to stay fit, he won the junior national cross country title and signed a professional contract with Asics, and joined the Dutch management company Global Sports.

Training with the best

It just so happens that Global Sports is the same company that manages Eliud Kipchoge in Kenya, and today Nageeye is part of the same training camp in Kaptagat, training alongside not only the marathon world record holder, but also the half marathon world record holder, Geoffrey Kamworor. 

Living in the Global Sports camp in Kenya has led to a steady improvement in his times.

When he first joined in 2015, he had a best marathon time of 2hrs 11mins – a time that made him “by far” the slowest runner in the camp. But now, after running 2:06 last year, he says he has just about earned the respect of the other athletes.

Interviewing him for my podcast, The Way of the Runner, I ask him what is best piece of advice the great Eliud Kipchoge has ever given him.

“Before, in training, I was looking at the watch all the time,” he says. “I mean, some days you feel OK, and think you’re running 3mins 10secs per km [5mins 05secs per mile], then you look at your watch and you see that it’s 2:56 [4:44 per mile] and then you get nervous and you’re like: ‘It’s too fast, I won’t be able to finish.’ And then you slow down.

“So Eliud saw that a couple of times and he said: ‘Why are you looking at your watch? Just run with your feeling.’

“And since then I never look at my watch on a run. I just start it, and then that’s it. And then you run in freedom.”

A cloud over Kenyan athletes

This sort of pace can feel almost unbelievably fast to some of us, and unfortunately today all these stories of wonder and awe about Kenyan runners are now slightly coloured by the dark cloud of drugs.

In the last few years a large number of athletes from the country have been sanctioned for doping violations. I ask Nageeye why he thinks this is, and what can be done about it.

His first point is that there needs to be more testing in the region. He says there are so many athletes and so few testers that even someone who can run 2:08 or 2:09 for the marathon and win big city races in Europe, may only be tested once a year. But also, he says that in Kenya a key problem is that there is not enough shame associated with doping, both from the wider society and also within the running community.

“In Holland,” he says, “a person [caught doping] will feel ashamed. Your teammates, your colleagues, even your own family will be really disappointed in you. But here in Kenya they don’t think that much about it.

“Society is not aware of it. So when a Kenyan or Ethiopian is caught doping, they can disappear. They can peacefully have other jobs, keep their own money. Nobody will harass them.”

He says that since the primary motive for most people running in Kenya is to lift themselves out of poverty, until they see banned athletes losing their farms, losing their cars and having to pay back their winnings, some people will think it’s worth the risk.

Training solo

Since the coronavirus pandemic, Nageeye has had to move into a rented house in the nearby city of Eldoret, after the government shut down all the training camps as part of the country’s lockdown measures. While he says life in the camp can often be “really boring”, he says he misses his training companions.

“Normally there is this rhythm to training,” he says. “You don’t have to think. You just wake up, you go running, come back, relax in the camp. But now you have to do it all alone, so you have to get up and think, how long should I go? How fast?

“With the group, sometimes you feel a little bit tired or lazy, but then you just follow the group and somewhere along the way you feel OK again.”

He says that for the Kenyans, who have got used to training all their lives in big groups, getting out and training alone is especially difficult. So perhaps that’s one tiny glimmer of hope for the rest of the world’s marathon runners to cling on to during this ongoing crisis?

“Definitely,” he says. “For real, they will struggle.” 

• For the full podcast interview with Abid Nageeye.

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The post Just run with your feeling appeared first on Fast Running.

I was just settling down on Wednesday night to watch my football team, Liverpool, in their biggest match for 10 years, when news came through on my phone that former Olympic champion Asbel Kiprop had been reportedly busted for using EPO.

Next came the barrage on Twitter and Facebook (I dared not look on the letsrun.com message boards) … “and we thought they were just genetically faster”, “and they say the secret is ugali”, “Kenya should be banned from all international competitions”.

I don’t remember all this associated guilt by nationality when Nigel Levine failed a drugs test a few months ago. Nobody looked at Callum Hawkins or Katarina Johnson-Thompson any differently as a result, and why should they? They didn’t train with Levine, they probably didn’t know him, they may never even have spoken to him. Not all Americans are considered dopers because of Justin Gatlin either.

But that is the leap that is instantly taken after a doping violation in Kenya: hey, look, the myth has been busted, they’re all doping, Kenyan dominance was a sham all along.

I spent six months living in training camps with the top Kenyan athletes in 2011 while researching my book Running with the Kenyans. They don’t all live in the same house, or follow the same training routine or share the same coaches, doctors and physios.

Just like Hawkins, Johnson-Thompson and the rest of the British athletes, and like the rest of the world, Kenya is a diverse and complex place, where some people and groups will bend and break the rules in an effort to be successful, and others will try to make it through talent and honest graft.

When you spend time there, you see that some training camps welcome you in to drink tea and train with them, they hide nothing, while others operate behind closed doors. Some coaches arouse local suspicions, some doctors are said to be behind the problems. On the other side of the coin, some athletes and coaches are held in high esteem and are seen as beyond reproach by their running community.

Photo: Project Africa Athletics

The fact that the big-name Kenyans caught or reportedly caught doping – Matthew Kisorio, Rita Jeptoo, Jemima Sumgong, Asbel Kiprop – all have connections to the same management group should be more significant than the fact they’re all Kenyan.

It’s dangerous to look too closely at the reasons why we see Kenya – and in fact any developing country – differently, why we treat it and the athletes there as one homogeneous block. It’s the same thing that leads people to see the world cross-country championships as boring because it’s “a procession of east Africans” (a phrase I’ve read many times). In the good old days, it was a procession of Europeans, but nobody complained then.

RELATED: Wisdom from Africa: celebrating more than a race win

The problem with defending Kenyans like this is that you get accused of denying or apologising for doping. I’m not doing that. Doping in Kenya undoubtedly exists, and there is evidence that it is widespread. The figure usually quoted is 40 offences between 2011 and 2016 – about eight a year.

Even one is too many, of course, though it is worth noting that Kenya has many hundreds of athletes competing in IAAF events each year. Percentage-wise, the number doping is similar to other nations that don’t provoke any collective condemnation.

One key distinction between Kenya and the west is the poor testing facilities and procedures there. For a few years, Kenya was ruled non-compliant by the world anti-doping agency WADA, although since 2016 it has been compliant. And then, of course, you have the huge incentives to win – in Kenya running is a way out of poverty – and the fierce competition to even get into races, that may encourage some to turn to drugs. It all adds up to a big ball of suspicion.

But what can the clean athletes do about all that other than campaign for more testing? In fact, this is something they have done. In 2015 Kenyan athletes including former marathon world record holder Wilson Kipsang barricaded themselves inside the national federation’s offices for two days demanding more be done to tackle doping.

For some people, the poor testing regime in Kenya, combined with their stellar results, is reason enough to accuse everyone of doping.

Yet Kiprop was caught in an out-of-competition test. Rio Olympic marathon winner Jemima Sumgong was caught in an out-of-competition test. Is that a contradiction? Is the testing happening or not? It is both, and there is no contradiction … once you stop talking about “Kenyans” as a single entity, then both things can exist at once: some athletes can be doping and getting away with it because testing is lax, and some athletes can be caught because testing is happening. And some athletes can be training hard and not doping.

When you hear that former Olympic 1500m champion Asbel Kiprop has failed a drugs test, it is sad and a shame, and it may arouse your suspicions of everyone, but it doesn’t instantly prove that Eliud Kipchoge and co are only winning all those marathons because they too are doping.

Don’t add one and one together and get two thousand doping Kenyans. That’s not good maths, and, in my opinion, it’s not fair.

Adharanand Finn is the author of ‘The Way of the Runner’ and ‘Running with the Kenyans’. You can find him on Twitter here.

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The post ‘Don’t add one and one together and get two thousand doping Kenyans’ appeared first on Fast Running.