On the first day of the summer term, during the lull between the NCAA and U.S. championships, a tour group gathers at Hayward Field's northern gates. The guide is too busy giving the spiel about this being the best place in the world to run—showing off the plaques dedicated to its heroes—to notice a tiny black man in a yellow shirt gliding across Agate Street. Out of the dozen prospective students, only a tall blond kid sporting his high school cross-country T-shirt catches sight of the runner who has already won more NCAA titles than Steve Prefontaine. The blond kid puts his hand on his mother's shoulder, and together they watch Edward Cheserek disappear down the block.
A week ago, in front of more than 11,000 fans, Cheserek twice unrolled his fearsome kick on the orange track inside those gates and put to rest any questions about whether he or his teammate Eric Jenkins was king of the NCAA.
Now, in the lobby of the Bowerman Building, Cheserek, 21, bumps into a recreational runner perhaps 20 years his senior. They launch into a conversation that is unintelligible to everyone else in the lobby, including Andy Powell, distance coach at Oregon. Behind a table, Powell waits to consult with his star, knowing that the older runner, a university IT specialist, is from Tanzania. Toward the end of the conversation, Cheserek turns to his coach and shakes his head. “I'm losing my Swahili,” he laments.
Despite having spent virtually the entirety of his five years in the U.S. in the public eye, Cheserek has remained an enigma. Some of this is intentional; he is usually flanked by his teammates when he speaks to the media. And so his life has been regarded as a fairy tale—stories written about him can be boiled down to “impoverished Kenyan makes good in America”—and little is known about the complicated young man who is one of the most exciting talents in his sport.
“He does care what people think about him,” Parker Stinson, a former teammate, says, “but he knows he can't control it. It's like, If people are gonna hate me, like me, whatever, I might as well get what I want and keep winning titles.”
Today, Cheserek seems tired from his hot midday workout. He slowly climbs the bleachers of Hayward's West Grandstand and takes a seat. His long sophomore season is finally behind him, and his focus, for now, is on his summer classes. In a deep, elegantly accented voice, the business major explains why he'll be wearing Oregon colors for two more years. “You never know when it'll happen,” he says, “but one day I'll have to stop running, and I'll need a degree to survive in this life.”
The fourth of seven siblings, Cheserek is the only member of his family to leave Kenya. Back home, one older brother is an engineer, the other in the military; his older sister is a teacher, his younger siblings are finishing their educations. All of them have given running a shot, but only Cheserek displayed the kind of transcendent talent and resiliency it takes to win races in the Great Rift Valley.
“My dad was a sportsman, too,” he says. “He used to run, a long time ago. You know how people get to this point with running? I think he just had to stop. Everyone in my family tried running. My oldest brother hurt himself and had to stop. My older sister stopped running in college. I could keep going…”
When asked how he deals with the pressure of staying healthy for the long haul, he laughs and says that he trusts his coaches completely.
“Health & Injuries…you?”
“Sometimes I try to act like I'm not an athlete,” he says. “Like I'm not trying to win everything. That I'm just a normal person, when I'm just walking around. When I go into class I just rock my normal stuff—my jeans. Not any running shoes around. And I'm happy.”
Pressure has been there since well before Edward Cheserek landed at JFK Airport in the summer of 2010. As a freshman in high school in Kenya, the 16-year-old frequently missed classes in order to help his struggling family look after their farm. A missionary group called Stadi za Maisha identified him as a candidate for a scholarship to St. Benedict's Prep in New Jersey, having sponsored their first Kenyan student the previous year. For Cheserek, the demanding application process culminated in an epic 60-mile run from his hometown of Kapker to Kapcherop High School in Elgeyo Marakwet County to make it to the screening exam on time. The roads were washed out, driving was impossible; if he hadn't run, he might still be in Kenya.
St. Benedict's, a boys-only Catholic school in Newark, reportedly knew nothing of Cheserek's prowess, even though he'd won Kenyan junior national titles in the steeplechase and the 5,000 and 10,000 meters the previous year and was a member the Marakwet tribe, a subset of the Kalenjin tribe, the source of arguably the greatest distance runners on the planet.
“It's unbelievable how the Lord brought Edward to Newark,” his high school coach, Marty Hannon, says. “I have no idea, except that the Lord provides.”
A basketball powerhouse—the Cleveland Cavaliers' J.R. Smith is the latest Gray Bee to make a name for himself in the NBA—St. Benedict's had had limited success as a track and field program until Cheserek arrived.
“What a lousy business model,” Hannon jokes about the school where he's taught math for 16 years. “It costs about $20,000 to educate a kid. Tuition is $9,000 or $10,000. Of that, virtually all the kids are on some kind of financial aid. Eighty to 90 percent of the kids are African-American or Hispanic. Many of them only have one parent at home—a mother who works until eight, nine, 10 at night.”
Approximately 10 percent of the student body lives in a residence hall on campus. The majority are kids who are escaping unsafe living situations in Newark, but a handful of others, like Cheserek, have crossed the globe in pursuit of an American education. For the Kenyan, who had spent the entirety of his life living in a mud hut, the change of locale was dramatic, but not uncomfortable. “It is a boarding school,” says former high school teammate Darien Edwards, who ran with Cheserek on many relays. “There are other students going through the same thing you're going through.”
Cheserek also found much-needed support in the assistant track coach at St. Benedict's, Chelule Ngetich, who is also Kenyan. “From the beginning,” Cheserek says, “Chelule would have me over and his family would feed me Kenyan food. We have a very close relationship.” During summer vacations, Cheserek lived with Ngetich. In return, the teenager looked after his coach's young children, helped out with chores, and for all intents and purposes, became part of the family.
Almost immediately after arriving in the States, Cheserek suffered a stress fracture and missed the first month of his sophomore cross country season. He managed to stay healthy after that, despite a demanding race calendar that sometimes saw him stepping to the line four times a weekend, not to mention a training environment that offered few of the low-impact options he now has in Eugene. “The track at St. Benedict's is 200 meters,” Cheserek says, “but it's not shaped like a real track. It's only three lanes. The corners are too tight. Sometimes after workouts I'd feel it in my hamstrings, in my feet.”
In 2010 and 2011, distance running fans in New Jersey were treated to a series of memorable duels between Cheserek and twins Jim and Joe Rosa, the current Stanford standouts who back then were seniors at West Windsor-Plainsboro High School, located in an affluent community about an hour southwest of Newark.
“It wasn't like now, where I think he's unbeatable,” Jim Rosa says. “I always knew when I raced him that it was going to be incredibly tough. In cross country he always used to surge up the hills. And I would hang back a little going up and then catch him going down. We'd just keep making surges back and forth the whole time. In track he would make really big moves at unexpected times. He would open up miles in times I would run for the four-by-four. It was a little demoralizing.”
Later that year, Joe Rosa squared off against Cheserek in the mile at indoor nationals, when they were both anchoring their respective DMR teams. “I got the baton like 10 seconds before him,” Rosa recalls, “and we were out pretty quickly, and all of a sudden we hear the announcer saying that Edward Cheserek is right on our heels. It was a testament to how competitive he was, that he could catch up to some of the better runners in the country like that. But of course he had gone out way too hard, and we dropped him on the last lap.”
High school teammate Edwards—who once got into a tiff with Cheserek for telling him “not to run crazy” before a big race—marvels at how patient and under control his former training partner has become at Oregon. “That was one of the biggest things we wanted to change for him,” he says. “Edward finally understands what his strengths are. I love watching him.”
“If you read some websites now,” Jim Rosa says, “it's like, ‘Ches is bad for the sport, he just sits and kicks.’ I get mad when I read that. The kind of guy he is, he's trying to maximize points for the team. I don't think people understand just how team-focused he is.”
Not surprisingly, his coaches describe him as the ideal athlete—humble, yet fiercely dedicated to his teammates. “Every year,” Hannon says, “he chose to run the DMR at Penn Relays, to give his teammates a shot at winning. He never won an individual race at the Penn Relays. That's how much grace and unselfishness he had.”
“No ego,” adds Oregon head coach Robert Johnson. “He's always so willing to help.”
For all their praise, one quickly sees where the coaches diverge: Johnson has mentored more than his fair share of world-class talent at Oregon, whereas Hannon appreciates the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity Cheserek offered him. “You could argue that he is the best high school distance runner ever,” he says. “In 16 years of coaching, I've never seen anyone that could compare.”
Hannon's enthusiasm seems excessive with Cheserek's high school PRs. After all, Cheserek didn't break 4:00 in the mile, and a sub-14:00 5,000 meters just doesn't have the same cache. But if you consider the young runner's zeal for competition, as evidenced by his simply unheard-of splits in relays (more than once, he opened the mile of a DMR with a 54-second quarter, bringing his team from way back into immediate contention) and the quality of his two victories at Foot Locker, the best ever assertion begins to look more reasonable.
Few were prepared, however, for just how dominant he has been over his first two years at Oregon. With eight national titles and counting, there is a growing air of inevitability around Cheserek. The tag of best ever seems likely to follow him until he makes his professional debut in 2017 and tests himself in a world-class field.
If that debut looks anything like his freshman year at Oregon, nobody should bet against the diminutive Duck. For those with short memories, think back to the lead-up to Cheserek's first NCAA cross-country title, when the 5-foot-6 freshman scored a massive upset over Texas Tech's Kennedy Kithuka, who is five years older. Slowed by mud and wind, Cheserek lost ground to Kithuka from about 5k to 7k and thought the race was lost. Then, buoyed by an unexpected tailwind, he pounced and defeated the older runner by 18 seconds, joining Bob Kennedy as the only teens to win the title in their first NCAA cross country championship races.
The signs were there from early in the 2013 cross-country season, but it took a while for his teammates to buy into the hype. “I didn't think he was all that good,” Stinson confesses.
Stinson was expecting to be the No. 1 guy on Oregon's cross country team in 2013. “I was coming off the best summer training of my life,” he remembers. “In the first tempo workout that we did, I had to go five miles, which was one more than the rest of the team. And on the fourth mile, Edward gets to the front, and I didn't know it at the time, that this was his move—he starts doing the thing.”
The thing is Cheserek's only visible flaw as a runner: that moment at the end of a hard race when his form falls apart and his arms begin to do an increasingly wild shimmy. It happened most memorably when Arizona's Lawi Lalang narrowly outkicked him in the NCAA outdoor 5,000 meters last year on his way to breaking a 35-year-old meet record.
“The paddles are coming out,” says Eric Jenkins, the two-time NCAA champion who recently signed with Nike. “That's what we call it—because it looks like he's swimming.”
“People have different forms when they're running all out,” Cheserek says, without embarrassment. “We're working on fixing it. It's getting better, but if it works, it works.”
“So anyway,” Stinson says, “Ed was still a little overweight from the summer, and I had another mile to go, and I'd led this whole workout for him, and we're on, like, Amazon Trail, and he's running probably a 52-second quarter. And he's like, looking back to see where I am. And I'm like, What an a--hole. I try to go with him and I can't catch him. And this is a freaking tempo, and I have to keep going. After the workout, back at Bowerman, he goes, ‘What's up, Bro? You die?’ And right then and there I was like, I don't think I like this guy at all.”
Now only 122 pounds—8 pounds lighter than his racing weight at St. Benedict's—Cheserek tells the story of his first college cross-country season a little differently. “When I came to Oregon,” he says, “I tried not to put pressure on myself. ‘I'm still a freshman,’ I would remind myself. ‘I'm still learning how to race. Just listen to what Coach Powell has to say.’ He would hold me back in the workouts and tell me, ‘Never lead the workout, never lead the race.’”
“Later that season,” Stinson continues, “I remember this one workout in particular, mile repeats, which Edward closed in something like a 4:18 mile. I knew how good that really was, and I never talk to Coach Powell about stuff like this, but when I was cooling down, I went over to him and was just like, ‘Man, I don't understand how I'm supposed to be able to do these things that I want to do, but I can't even keep up with Edward.’”
Stinson, who notched his first sub-28:00 10,000 meters this spring and now runs for Saucony, attempts to explain why this one workout changed so much for him.
“It was one of the very few times in my career I was humbled,” he says. “I usually have some sort of rationalization in my head for why something didn't work out. But seeing Edward do that, and knowing I was in good shape and that I should be happy with how I was running, I just had to talk to Coach Powell about it. And he told me right then and there, ‘I thought Edward was gonna be pretty good, but I think he's gonna be better than Lawi Lalang. You can't worry about him, Parker.’”
Jenkins, whose surprising victory over Cheserek in the 3,000 meters at indoor NCAAs this past March led to more questions than it answered, is a little more guarded when he speaks about the dynamic between the two of them. “It's interesting, both good and bad,” he says, “knowing that the toughest guy to beat in the country is your training partner.”
“When Edward got here,” Stinson remembers, “he was just so quiet. So quiet. Eventually, once he started to relax, he was just one of the funniest guys you could imagine. You can't see it in his interviews. But when he's around us—I don't know how to explain it. He's a jokester. Over time I realized that I really liked him. And was surprised I did. But man, that first title…” Stinson shakes his head and laughs, “People are so quick to forget, with all this stuff about how all Edward does is sit and kick, what that cross-country race was like against Kennedy. He got broken, he was gone, but all of a sudden he was back up there. He's just a champion.”
Lazy reporters have persistently—and incorrectly—labeled Cheserek an “orphan.” When given the opportunity to set the record straight, he explains: “There was a kid at St. Benedict's a year ahead of me, and he was from an orphanage. Eventually he went back to Kenya and didn't come back to the States. But people misunderstood and got the two of us confused. Every time I see something in print about how I'm supposedly an orphan, I'm like, Who wrote this bulls---? It's bothered me a lot. That's why I don't like to do interviews.”
In America, where the track and field media have long struggled with how to handle East Africa's dominance of distance running, it's more than a little troubling that the narrative so many have settled on for Cheserek is the simplest possible cliche: one more African kid who had “absolutely nothing” when he materialized in New Jersey.
“I get the sense that he was actually kind of rich in Kenya,” Stinson says. “Not in terms of money, but in terms of family. On the road, every time we've roomed together, he's always on Skype talking to them about his races and school.”
As to why Cheserek has never corrected any of these journalists, consider the atmosphere he was thrust into just months after landing at JFK in 2010. “He was like a rockstar,” Hannon says.
“At meets in high school,” Jim Rosa says, “I remember kids going up to him, wanting pictures and autographs. And reporters trying to get close to him. That's got to be so weird—you've just arrived in this country and you're getting all this attention. I think about what that would be like—if someone were interviewing me in Spanish, how scared I'd be of saying something wrong.”
As soon as he began to make a name for himself, accusations about age cheating that plague any prep phenom from Kenya began to fly. On the LetsRun.com message board, there is an “OFFICAL [sic] Edward Cheserek Age Guessing Thread.” Another thread from 2011 asks, “What is the real Edward Cheserek story?” and goes on to state:
He was supposed to be an orphan—then he posts on his Facebook page asking for prayers for his sick father. Again supposed to be an orphan and this month he posts that he is headed back to Kenya to see his family. . .How does an orphan from Kenya just show up at the doorstep of a school in NJ anyway? Also if so much of his story is questionable have to start to question his age.
Every step of the way, rumor-mongers have ignored his youthful appearance, birth certificate, and other basic biographical facts in an effort to discredit his accomplishments. Cheserek's anger at having been the target of so much uninformed racism is understandable, especially when he talks about his father.
“My dad was a huge influence,” he says about the cattle and sheep farmer who raised him. “After I won a couple races in eighth grade, when I was still totally new to running and still thought of myself as a soccer player, he was like, ‘Edward, I think we should send you to a training camp.’ Like a weeklong summer camp. I had been getting lazy about running that summer, because helping my family was too much work—so when I got to the camp, I was like, ‘Just do this.’
“That next year, freshman year of high school, I ran like 31 minutes for the 10K, maybe 14:30 for the 5K, 9:09 for the steeple. I was 15 years old. Suddenly there was this opportunity to go to St. Benedict's and make it in the U.S. It all happened so fast. When my dad was getting sick, I tried to let him know what kind of times I was running over here in high school. I wanted him to know I had a future. I knew it then, that I could really do this.”
Cheserek has only gone back to Kenya twice. The first visit was after his father, 61, passed away after a brief illness in the summer of 2011, when Cheserek was about to enter his junior year of high school.
“It was so hard to make myself return to the States that first time,” he says. “I remember talking to my older brother about it, and he was like, ‘This is how life is. Finish your school. Take care of your future.’ I was there for only three days.”
When asked if there is anyone in Eugene who offers him a connection to Kenya, Cheserek shakes his head and sighs at the question. “Man,” he says, “I've gotten used to America, so I don't have to worry any more about adjusting. I have my coaches, I have my teammates—we all just hang out.”
The message is clear, and a good reminder of what it feels like to be 21 years old and at ease on a college campus: I can take care of myself, thank you very much.
“When the time comes for me to turn professional,” he says, “I'd like to use the money to go and visit my family. But I would like to run for the United States.”
"Two years ago," Johnson says, "Everyone was asking, ‘Who's gonna be here to run with Mac Fleet?’ And now they're asking the same thing about Edward. I'll admit he makes it harder than most. But we look at it as just another incentive to recruit hard.”
Oregon has long been on Cheserek's radar. He first caught wind of the Hayward Field mythology when one of his neighbors in Kenya—who happened to be a professional runner—told him he had been invited to race in Eugene. “I was like, ‘What the heck is Eugene?’” Cheserek recalls. “And he told me, ‘It's the best place to run in the United States.’”
As the top recruit in the country, he entertained the possibility of going elsewhere, but in reality, it didn't take him long to start wearing his future colors. “At NXN in 2010, we showed him around,” Joe Rosa says. “It was fun for us—we had been there before—but he was in awe of all the cool stuff. Everything was so new for him. The meet is in Portland, of course, and at some point Edward bought a hat—an Oregon hat—and me and Jim were like, “Aww, man, you gotta come to Stanford. Edward, you're just wearing that hat for now, right? That's not a permanent thing?”
Turns out it was, and five years later, looking down at the track that holds so many stories, Cheserek doesn't hesitate to share his goals for the next two years and beyond: “I want my name to be up there with Prefontaine, Salazar—one of those famous names to come through this program.”
Some observers are puzzled as to why he wouldn't turn pro now and take guaranteed money instead of risking injury or an unexpected fall from the NCAA mountaintop. “If you look at pro golf,” Johnson counters, “players often turn pro when they're very young. Some are successful, others not so much. People who are successful go to college. Look at Jordan Spieth. Tiger Woods. They learned how to win at all levels.”
This kind of collegiate dominance brings to mind another fan favorite at Hayward Field: Nick Symmonds, who owned Division III track for four years while competing for Willamette University. There can be a real value in getting a feel for the finish line, as evidenced by Symmonds's six national titles in the 800 meters.
Cheserek's newfound patience on the track has also informed the way he looks at his upcoming career. “Bernard Lagat is 40 years old,” he points out, “and he still runs really, really fast. Look at Galen, and Mo—who's 32, but still running so fast. I want to set my career up like those guys. The style of the races that they win, it's basically what I've been doing here at Oregon.”
Having begun the arduous, uncertain process of gaining U.S. citizenship, he dreams of being able to compete for the U.S. Olympic team next summer but knows there are no guarantees. “If not,” he says, “I'll probably just focus on school instead of trying to make the team for Kenya next year.”
After all, he'll be 26 years old in 2020, and 30 in 2024, which means he'll have two Olympic cycles in his prime. And so, for the time being, he will tackle an even unlikelier accomplishment than winning a gold medal: winning the cross-country team title at Oregon. It's the only NCAA title—team or individual—that continues to elude him and his coaches. With the powerhouse squads of Colorado and Stanford in the way, this is, perhaps, the last chance to call Cheserek an underdog.
“A sport is a challenge,” he says. “We have to challenge each other. When we get back together as a team, we'll figure out how good we are. And then we'll try and do something special.”
