Older runners defy age in Kenya’s central highlands
Members of a self-funded athletics club in Meru are proving that competition does not end with age. Meru County, Kenya – Every Monday, Wednesday and
Members of a self-funded athletics club in Meru are proving that competition does not end with age. Meru County, Kenya – Every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday, Wanjiru Kamau heads out from her home in Mikumbune village in South Imenti Constituency to run five kilometres (3.2 miles). She is 82 years old. The red-earthed roads of Meru County, in Kenya’s central highlands, roughly 314 kilometres from Nairobi, have become something close to a second home since a friend connected her to a local athletics group in 2017. “At first, people laughed at me, saying what I was doing was foolish,” Wanjiru says. “Since I began exercising and drinking water, my blood pressure is now normal, and I no longer get muscle spasms.” The group’s chairman, Stephen Michubu Linguya, welcomed her personally. She has not looked back since, though she has had to contend with the laughter that followed her out the door. Wanjiru is not alone. She is one of 80 members of the Meru chapter of Masters Athletics Kenya, a national network gathering athletes aged between 60 and 100. She trains alongside people younger than herself, without complaint and without fanfare, in a county increasingly associated with world-class athletic achievement. Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge and Faith Kipyegon, two of the greatest distance runners in history, represent the pinnacle of the country’s athletics and have made Kenya synonymous with running excellence. In Meru, a group of older men and women, none of them employed and none of them subsidised for transport, are making a case that running does not belong only to the young.
Building a movement in Meru The Meru chapter was founded in 2015 by Stephen Michubu Linguya, a married father of two from Muriri in Tigania East Constituency. He had been watching his neighbours age badly, chronic illness settling into bodies that had stopped moving, and alcohol becoming a consolation for too many. The diseases he saw were, in many cases, the predictable consequence of sedentary later life: high blood pressure, diabetes and the slow accumulation of conditions that medicine names but often cannot treat cheaply or easily. He began looking for older people who had once loved to run. “When we formed this group, we looked for older adults who used to love running before age became a challenge, so that even their children and younger generations could follow in their footsteps and transform their lives,” Michubu says. The group trains three days a week. Members make their own way to the training ground, which sits anywhere between 10 and 50 kilometres (6.2 and 9.3 miles) from home, with fare paid from their own pockets. The team uses central fields where they can and walks to training when walking is the only affordable option. There is no sponsorship, no institutional support and no salary. What there is, members say, is each other. Running against age and distance James Mworia, 73, is from Uruku in South Imenti Constituency. He is married with four children. In 2019, he travelled to Tunisia to compete in the African Masters Athletics competition and came home with two silver medals. For a man who pays his own way to training from a Meru village, the journey itself was an achievement.
The BriefWire