Running the Kenyan way

THERE IS MAGIC for distance runners in the Rift Valley of Kenya. Antigonish’s Eric Gillis hopes to find some.
 
Gillis leaves Tuesday for the hills of western Kenya. His destination is Iten, a town of 4,000, where he and fellow Olympian and training partner Reid Coolsaet of Ontario will train for two months.
 
It is much more than an African adventure.
 
Both runners are after the tantalizing Canadian marathon record of 2:10:08 that Jerome Drayton set in Japan in 1975. It is one of the oldest running records in Canada.
 
Iten sits on a plateau at 2,400 metres. Great names from running’s past and present — Ibrahim Hussein, Peter Rono, David Rudisha — are from the Iten area and many more have trained on its hundreds of winding dirt trails on the way to world and Olympic championships.
 
Gillis and Coolsaet, two of the three Canadian male marathoners to compete in the London Olympics in August, will train at a high-altitude centre founded in 1999 by runner Lornah Kiplagat and husband Pieter Langerhorst.
 
The centre operates year-round and can house dozens of athletes at a time. They could be runners, cyclists or triathletes, and could be professionals or just amateurs looking to get into better shape.
 
Gillis and Coolsaet live and train in Guelph, Ont. Coolsaet has been to Iten for the past two winters, but Gillis, with only four career marathons on his resume, will be a rookie.
 
“I’ve got a good feel for the place just from hearing the stories,” said Gillis, 32. “There will be some other Europeans there, mostly runners, and I’ll be training a little bit with them and a little bit with the local Kenyan runners. There can be up to 50, 60 Kenyan runners show up to practices. They’ve got one dirt track in town and you’ll see a lot of local guys doing workouts there.”
 
Coolsaet ran 2:10:55 at the Toronto Waterfront Marathon in October 2011 to qualify for the Olympics. Gillis, a St. Francis Xavier grad who switched to running marathons two years after competing in the 2008 Olympics in the 10,000 metres, ran 2:11:28 in the same race to achieve the Olympic qualifying standard by one second.
 
Both had Drayton’s record in mind when they hit the starting line in London. But the race was run in a 30-degree swelter and Gillis clocked in at 2:16, placing 22nd, with Coolsaet battling nausea and dizziness on the way to a 2:16:29 time and 27th place.
 
“The big thing for me is being out of the winter in Canada,” said Gillis, who will have to leave his wife and daughter behind to make the journey.
 
“I can train in the winter, but it’s tougher when you’re specific with your spring racing plans. Getting good footing is crucial when you’re slugging out a lot of mileage and trying to run fast workouts at a good pace.”
 
Both runners are fit, as one would expect from Olympic marathoners. But the eight weeks in Africa is at the peak time for their winter training and should leave them in career-best fitness coming out of the experience.
 
“We will be getting the most fit in the two months we’re there,” Gillis said.
 
“Those are our two biggest months of training leading up to a marathon.”
 
Gillis has trained three times in Flagstaff, Ariz., which is at 2,100 metres. Those visits were for a month.
 
“But I’ve never done a marathon preparation at altitude, so that will be different,” he said. “It will be a little tougher to recover being at that altitude because of the thin air, the lack of oxygen, you just need a little more downtime to do the next workout and feel good.”
 
Gillis and Coolsaet plan to exit Africa in early March and run a half-marathon in Amsterdam on March 10. Coolsaet is expected to make a run at Drayton’s record in Rotterdam in mid-April while Gillis has something in mind but isn’t ready to announce his intentions.
 
He said Drayton’s record may not fall this spring, but the two will chase it through 2013 and beyond.
 
“It’s definitely our goal over the next couple marathons,” Gillis said. “We will have that in our sights for sure and thinking about that in practice and thinking about the pacing that it takes to break 2:10.”
 
Gillis is still debating whether to run in the world championships in Moscow in August. He may skip the worlds and go back to the Toronto marathon in October.