A favourite spot at the Kerio View Hotel. The bottom of the valley has some of the sweetest fruit I have ever tasted — mangos and bananas with intense, concentrated flavours. Photo/FILE
Kerio View Hotel, one of the best kept secrets of the North Rift region, sits on the edge of the Kerio Valley on a steeply sloping piece of land.
It is rendered more stunning by the unassuming approach – you can easily miss the turn a kilometre before Iten town just at the police station.
The narrow road opens up to a manicured grass lawn with a number of wood and glass buildings, ski-chalet style.
The thing that strikes you is the view — the four thousand foot drop into the Kerio Valley, the green bottom of the valley, and the pale blue lines of hills in the distance.
It gives you a sense of scale that you rarely experience in the city, hemmed in as you are by fences and too-close-together buildings.
It feels like you are in a vast theatre, hearing big gusts of wind whoosh past and watching the play of light on the land as the hills on the opposite escarpment, blue and distant in the morning, turn green and move closer as the sun moves through the sky; and, when the sun is low in the late afternoon, there is a penumbral shadow cast in the valley, giving the appearance of a premature dusk.
The hotel has many places to sit on its lawn to take in the view, and the valley-facing walls of the buildings are made entirely of glass, merging the outside and inside.
They cut the glass onsite, as I was fortunate to find out when the wind slammed my balcony door shut one evening, shattering the glass.
Iten mornings are chilly, if not downright cold, and it is a struggle getting out of bed.
But once you are up you are greeted by cotton ball clouds drifting over the valley below, giving the eerie and disconnected feeling that you are floating above the earth.
There are a few people at breakfast at this hour, mostly international athletes and their coaches, who have come to see if it is indeed the fabled altitude that gives Kenyan runners their dominance.
The Iten-Tambach Town Council is becoming aware of the unique position it occupies, and held a Sports, Culture and Tourism Day last year that will become an annual event.
The result has been than there are people now savvy to the opportunities tourists coming in will bring.
Alex Kipkosgei, a coach and former runner who recently retired after 10 years in the sport, creates programmes for recreational runners of all levels from those just starting out to experienced ones aiming to kick it up a notch.
The prospect of training among elite athletes who send shudders through the spines of professional runners throughout the world may seem daunting, even downright intimidating, but I have found them to be most open and encouraging of anyone attempting their sport.
They know that no one started out at the top; more often than not, they recall the first painful attempts they made at running, weighing 10 or 15 kilos more than they do now, and being left far behind by the groups of runners they were training with.
They also recognise that the success of the professional circuit is pegged on millions of recreational runners — as one professional athletic manager puts it, “The elite athletes are the cherry and the other runners are the cake that the cherry sits on.”
I got a glimpse of the truth of this statement when attending the London Marathon and taking a detour to the Marathon Expo.
The Expo is not covered in the press, which photographs elite runners posing on the landmark Tower Bridge, looks at last year’s champion versus the new challenger, follows celebrities running for a cause, and, that year, gushed over four Maasai Morans from Tanzania running to raise money for a water project in their village.
The story at the expo was the story of the Everyman and the economy of running.
Over 100,000 people apply to run the London Marathon every year and about one-third are accepted.
The expo is where they pick up their bib numbers and T-shirts and all the global sports brands showcase their merchandise.
And this scene is repeated in all the major marathons of the world — in New York, Boston, Toyko, Beijing, Berlin and Chicago.
While it is the elite athletes that will dominate the press coverage, it is the chance to interact directly with their individual clients that brings the Nikes of this world to these events.
Now that the fear is out of the way, the important thing is to get the body moving.
According to Alex, a runner who is starting out should aim for 20 minutes a day, even if they are walking part of the time.
“The mistake most people make is pushing themselves too hard in the beginning,” he says.
They wear themselves out, strain muscles and lose heart.
“The first two miles are the hardest miles you will run,” says Runners World, which is virtually the runners’ bible.
So start slowly, stretching then jogging through roads that take you through some of Kenya’s finest scenery: Shimmering gold fields of wheat and cool dark forests, all under cerulean blue skies. As the initial pain dissipates, focus shifts to the surroundings; the crisp, clear air seems to open up the lungs and enables you to push yourself farther.
For those looking for more of a challenge, a turn at Kamariny ground for speedwork training is in order.
Speedwork does exactly what its name suggests — builds speed.
The series of fast laps on the track, with a rest in between intervals, achieves results you cannot hope for by doing regular, even-paced runs alone.
It is some of the most difficult training you will do but it pays off, resulting in huge chunks of time shaved off from races.
Kamariny ground, once a prestigious agricultural showground from colonial times, has fallen into disrepair and disuse, a shame since it sits on the edge of the escarpment overlooking the Kerio Valley and has the potential to be one of the most visually arresting stadiums anywhere.
It is hoped some of the money the government is allocating to sports will be used to rehabilitate this amazing site.
A post-run rest can be taken at the very edge of the cliff where there are soft patches of grass that invite you to sit and take off your shoes.
For those looking for even more of a challenge, hillwork at Keiyo Forest should do the trick.
The forest is a few kilometres from the town on the road to Kapsowar and has a deceptively gentle looking hill.
Running up 10 or 12 times will be sure to create a burn in your thigh muscles that you have never felt before.
The close, dark forest also has trails for regular jogs.
And if that hill at Keiyo Forest doesn’t faze you, you can do the mother of them all: the Keiyo escarpment itself — 4,000 feet, 20 kilometres, in a series of dizzying hairpin curves.
This is a challenge for even the most hardcore of athletes, and any hill on a course after this will seem like flat stretches. The key is adopting the strategy of elite athletes — pushing your body in training so that race day is a breeze.
An invigorating swim and a session at the sauna followed by a restorative massage at Lorna Kiplagat’s High Altitude Training Centre is the best way to end a rigorous training session.
The centre also has a well equipped gym, for those interested in supplementing running with weight training.
The canter is located near the turn for the Kerio View Hotel and prides itself in bringing new services and facilities to the athletes in Iten.
If all the day’s training does not wear you out, sending you to bed at early hours, there is a recreation room at the hotel where you can shoot pool and catch the game.
While training can be confined to mornings, afternoons can be set aside for visiting the numerous interesting sites in the area.
Chebloch Gorge, at the bottom of the valley, is a 50-foot crack in the earth that holds the Kerio River on its long northward journey to Lake Turkana.
The sharp, deep gorge reminds me of the structure of the earth as put forth in disaster movies, most recently 2012; the earth, this solid, stable ground beneath our feet, is actually a molten core with plates that have cooled to form this seemingly solid surface and it can be pulled apart at anytime, as happened during the formation of the valley itself.
Boys fish down the gorge, a little way downriver from a sandbank with huge crocodiles basking in the sun. Their catch, small whiskered catfish, is delicious when fried.
The bottom of the valley also has some of the sweetest fruit I have ever tasted – mangos and bananas with intense, concentrated flavours.
I believe it has something to do with the long dry spell concentrating the sugar content of the fruit.
The adjoining Kapnarok Park and Rimoi Reserve are also located in the valley and are home to herds of elephants that follow ancient paths to look for saltlicks, flattening fences and manmade structures in their way, and stirring up huge clouds of dust that can be seen from great distances.
Lake Kapnarok can be seen as a shimmering jewel from the escarpment above.
There are several waterfalls that plunge down from the forests at the edge of the cliff and you can trek to where the pristine waters pool at the bottom of the valley.
Tambach town, about 10 kilometres down the road from Iten, is home to Tambach High School, where retired President Moi used to teach in the 1950s before he entered politics.
His house is still there, a small colonial structure, giving a glimpse of the man before he became who he is today.
The highlight for me was the drive along the Tugen Hills from Kabarnet to Tenges, down through Fluorspar, up to Nyaru and back to Iten.
The Tugen Hills separate the Kerio Valley from the Rift Valley.
Driving along the spine of the hills, the land falls away sharply on each side, with forest patches opening up to reveal the vast, rectangular depression of the Rift Valley on one side and the narrower, v-shaped Kerio Valley on the other.
On the Rift Valley side, you can see Lake Baringo and Lake Bogoria at the bottom and Laikipia on the other side.
There is a point on the road where you can see both valleys, and the sense of awe is indescribable.
If time allows, the spa at Lake Bogoria — warm healing mineral waters flowing to the lake that have been diverted into a pool — should not be missed.
Tugen Hills are also the site of some of the most significant prehistoric findings — a continuous successive record of animal fossils from 16 million years ago up to recent times, imbuing the place with a sense of history.
Back in Iten, time slows, cellphone and laptop are abandoned, and a return to the city seems further and further away.
