Gulliver is most often remembered as a skyscraping giant among the Lilliputians, but he also spent time as the puny guest of the Brobdingnagians, a race of titans “as tall as an ordinary spire steeple” with voices “many degrees louder than a speaking-trumpet.”
This year he has run in Berlin, Rotterdam, and Salt Lake City, but his base is a spare bedroom in the home of his agent, Bruce Meyer. Kahugu sleeps on a sofa bed and lives out of a gym bag containing his Adidas, his running shorts, some warm-up clothes, a Bible, a few Kenyan gospel tapes, and the good breakfast tea he can find only in Africa.
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“Hey Joseph!” he shouts at the five-foot, three-inch Kahugu. “Couldn’t you find any pants big enough?”
“The way he told me is, ‘We’re two marathoners trying to get better and we’re helping each other out,’” says Tom Bellos, a 35-year-old who’s trying to qualify for the U.S. Olympic trials after spending years recovering from a back injury suffered in the gulf war. “It gives me a great boost of confidence to run with him.”
Kenya’s first great distance runner was Kipchoge Keino, Kahugu’s boyhood hero. In the 1,500-meter run at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Keino showed his heels to Jim Ryun, the clean-cut, all-American world-record holder. We haven’t been able to keep up since. In the nine Olympics dating from that year, Kenyan men have won 14 gold medals in races of 800 meters or longer. American men have won two. Since the 1980s, when American road races started offering prize money, Kenyans have dominated those as well. At April’s Boston Marathon, six of the top seven finishers were from Kenya.
Kahugu started running when he was seven, speeding six miles to school each morning–barefoot, on gravel roads, gulping the thin air of his mountainous region–to avoid a caning for tardiness. Although he was school champion, he never dreamed of running professionally. In his early 20s he tried to join the Kenyan Army’s elite running team, but he was too small to be a soldier. Then a well-known Kenyan coach spotted Kahugu during a training run and recommended him to the athletic association, which sent him to a high-altitude training camp in the Himalayas. In 1996, Kahugu won his first big race, a marathon in Pune, India. Later that year he won the Dublin Marathon.
“I really think he wants to run Chicago,” says his training partner Bellos. “He wants to beat Khannouchi. My wife says to him, ‘Do you think you can beat him?’ He says, ‘Oh, I have to beat him before I retire.’”
