What Iten is known for

Iten is a highland town in Kenya’s Rift Valley, about 2,400 metres above sea level, in the country of the Keiyo (Elgeyo), a Kalenjin farming people who lived there before the explorer Joseph Thomson named a rock Hill Ten in 1883, the source of the town’s name. Iten is known today as a global capital of distance running, home to a school that trained Olympic and world champions and to a training centre that a champion runner’s own prize money built.

A school, then a teacher with no coaching background

In 1961 Irish missionaries, the Patrician Brothers, founded St Patrick’s High School in Iten. Peter Foster set up its athletics programme, and in July 1976 Brother Colm O’Connell, an Irish geography teacher with no formal coaching background, arrived expecting to stay three months and took over the training instead. His athletes did the winning: 25 of them became world champions and four won Olympic gold medals.

A Kenyan runner's investment

Lornah Kiplagat, a Kenyan runner, began building the High Altitude Training Centre in Iten in 1999; she put several hundred thousand dollars of her own prize money into it, and Kipchoge Keino unveiled it in November 2000. It first housed up to 40 runners and was built to give young Kenyan women athletes room, board and race travel. The centre now has more than 70 beds, a 25 metre pool and tartan and dirt tracks, and says over 800 athletes train in Iten.

Growth, and its costs

One hotel that opened in 2002 with only a few rooms can now host 50 guests, and new lodges keep opening around the town. The 2019 census counted 12,630 people in Iten’s urban core, though Wikipedia gives 42,312 for the town. When Kamariny Stadium closed for an upgrade in 2016, more than 2,000 Iten athletes lost their track for six years.

Not just a gene

A 2022 study in the journal PLoS One concluded that genetic predisposition does not mean predestination. Iten’s record rests on a school, coaching and the Kalenjin athletes themselves, not on biology alone.