In a Running Family, Someone Had to Be First

Each morning around 5, the girl felt her parents shaking her awake.

“Time for your run.”

Leaving the family’s mud house, Mary Chepkemboi ran in her bare feet and a frock along red dirt roads in the Nandi District, past the rolling fields of tea and maize, coming home to milk the cows and prepare breakfast, then running off again, this time to school.

Eventually, Chepkemboi took her place among the first generation of elite female Kenyan runners. By the mid-1980s, she became an African champion. She also inspired a younger brother, Bernard Lagat, who earned two Olympic medals for Kenya, became a United States citizen in 2004, won the 2007 world championship at 1,500 meters and 5,000 meters, and established himself as a favorite for the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.

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