Iten, Kenya

At 18, fresh off shredding my Achilles, I was nowhere near where I thought I’d be. No scholarship, no team jacket. Just me, trying to figure out if the dream was dead.

One night I landed on a VICE video — two Kiwi kids, just 16, had uprooted their lives and gone to Kenya. Iten. Where the world’s finest distance runners hail from. It wasn’t some dreamy montage, either. They got malaria, couldn’t hang in workouts, one of them even dropped a deuce mid-rep. And still, they kept going.

It spoke to me. Eager to avoid slogging through another Minneapolis winter, I bought a one-way ticket, stuffed my life into an Osprey bag, and took off.

7,800 feet, perched on the edge of the Great Rift Valley, Iten had one paved road, miles of red dirt trails, and a history that ran deep — from Kip Keino to David Rudisha. I learned real quick what hard actually means. Stopped to walk more times than I’d like to admit.

Eight thousand miles from home, I got sick, got hurt, trained with athletes whose talent I couldn’t touch. I figured out that altitude and alcohol don’t mix. Even narrowly dodged a terror attack in Nairobi.

But I met my heroes. And found my best friends. Left Iten different than I arrived — a Man of Oregon, ready to lace up for the world’s best collegiate distance program (sorry, Arkansas). The training worked. The dream wasn’t dead after all.

So, I wanted to capture what Iten gave me — the beauty, the smiles, the poetry in every stride. And yeah, a couple of me along the way.