Older runners defy age in Kenya’s central highlands

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).

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.

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.

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.