Running with the Kenyans by Adharanand Finn: review When the men's Olympic marathon is run in London in four months" time, chances are the winner will be a Kenyan. The holder of the title is Kenyan; the world record holder is Kenyan; last year, 66 of the world's 100 fastest marathons were run by Kenyans. "Few things from Africa," a coach observes in this heartfelt, fish-out-of-water story, "generate such genuine awe, fear and unreserved respect, as a Kenyan runner on the start line of a marathon." As a boy, Adharanand Finn was a fairly awesome runner, until life got in the way, leaving him at the age of 36 with a nagging sense of talent unfulfilled. "I just don't want to look back and regret that I never gave myself a chance to see what I could do," he writes. At this point, most men would buy a new car; instead, Finn packs up his family (including three small children) and moves for six months to Iten, a ramshackle town in Kenya - "collapsed wooden market stalls, carts pulled by donkeys" - where one in four people is a full-time athlete, to train with the Kenyans and uncover the secret of their success. At first Finn thinks the trick is running barefoot, which forces you to tread lightly, skipping efficiently over the ground. But Kenyans themselves want to wear big, thick trainers; they tell him the secret is ugali, the sticky maize dough they spoon up at every meal. Then there's the altitude, the culture of running, the simple approach to training ("run, eat, sleep": Kenyan athletes can sleep for 16 hours a day), the hunger to succeed - the list goes on. No wonder Finn lags behind even the slowest Kenyan women. Finn's name is part Galway, part hippy - Adharanand means "eternal bliss" in Sanskrit - and there is a strong hippy vibe to his tale, as much inner journey as journalistic investigation. The voice in his head that taunts him on long runs is not asking "Why can't I beat these Kenyans?" but "What's the hurry?" Yet if other characters, like the British Olympics hopeful who trails behind 300 Kenyans, or the cycling coach determined to replicate Kenyan running success on bikes, might have made for more dramatic books, they could not have produced a more insightful one. His very lack of compulsion makes Finn a calm, humorous presence. In unobtrusively beautiful prose, he evokes the will to run at the heart of Kenyan life. In the end, there is no secret. It was too complex and too simple for that. It was everything, and nothing. Such a conclusion could be a disappointment, instead it feels like a triumph. In a year when the commercialism of sport will be an overwhelming, hectic presence, Finn quietly reminds us why running, "this primal urge" that every child feels, is as mysteriously human as anything we do.