Beverly Hills Maasai (21 page)

“Run, Samuel! Run fast!”

I stood right beneath the big twenty-mile clock so I could keep one eye on the time and the other on the racers. The clock was just coming up to the 1:46:00 mark, and the first runners were in view … but there
were only two of them now. Off to the side was a motorcycle carrying a cameraman. As they got closer the spectators reacted with cheers and applause.

The two runners were moving quickly, fluidly, easily. One was following the second so closely that it looked as if they were connected. They passed us as the clock ticked off 1:46:15.

I turned and looked back down the road, hoping beyond hope to see Samuel in third place. That wasn’t reasonable, and I knew that. He’d been two and a half minutes behind at the fifteen-mile mark, and he hadn’t kicked it into top gear until over a mile after that.

There was a stretch of open pavement and then a single runner. He was probably the runner who had been with the front runners through the fifteen-mile mark. And then, after another stretch of open pavement, was the pack. I couldn’t tell how many runners were in that group, but it didn’t look as big as it had.

“He might have hit the wall,” Dakota said.

“He wouldn’t hit any walls,” I scoffed. “He isn’t blind.”

“The wall isn’t a real wall,” he said. “It’s an
imaginary
wall.”

“Like that explains it.”

“It’s a phenomenon marathon runners experience around the eighteenth or nineteenth mile,” he explained. “They’re running well and then—
bang—
they can’t go any farther.”

“There he is!” Olivia screamed.

I caught sight of him. He was well behind the pack but definitely within striking distance! If he’d hit any
wall he’d broken right through it! He was moving quickly. It looked as though he was still gaining on the runners in front of him

A wave of applause overwhelmed us as the third runner came past: 1:46:45. He’d gained thirty seconds on the leaders since the fifteen-mile mark.

The applause faded for just a few seconds, and then a second wave of cheering started up. The pack was closing in, and Samuel was closing in on them! He was so close that he was almost part of the pack!

There was a wave of applause, screaming, yelling, cheering as the crowd standing around us responded to their approach. It was clearly louder and wilder than the cheering for the leaders.

The first member of the pack ran past us and the clock: 1:47:10. Almost immediately the next runner, and then two or three more, and then another cluster of five or six, and then—

“Hello, Alexandria! Hello, Olivia! Hello, Alexandria’s mother!” Samuel yelled as he ran by, waving and smiling!

The crowd started cheering even more loudly, and then Samuel started blowing kisses! The crowd erupted, went totally wild, and surged out onto the boulevard as he passed!

“What a story!” Dakota exclaimed.

We drove along in the golf cart, right beside Samuel. He was now leading the pack, moving at an incredible pace, pulling them along with him and gaining on the leaders. They’d passed mile twenty-one, then twenty-two, and twenty-three, and twenty-four. They were less than thirty seconds behind the two leaders, but they had less than two miles to catch them. Samuel was now in fourth place—and fourth place was good for $75,000! That was almost enough to pay for everything—a well, airfare home, plus enough to buy back the cows they’d sold.

Part of me wanted to just yell that Samuel should take it easy, that he didn’t have to win, but I knew I couldn’t slow him down even if I wanted to. And who knew? Maybe he could win! That would mean enough
money to buy ten wells and enough cows to make the three of them just about the richest Maasai in Africa!

All along the route the crowd was getting larger, deeper, and louder! The cheers were almost deafening. And as the crowd continued to grow, the boundary that separated spectators from runners, maintained only by that little rope, was becoming more blurred. Repeatedly Dakota had to slow down or steer around people who should have been on the sidewalk but were out on the road. He kept yelling into his walkie-talkie, demanding that more security, more police officers, and more officials come down to the lines to hold back the crowd. It wasn’t working. The route for the runners—and the motorcycles and golf carts—was becoming narrower and narrower. If they didn’t get the crowd back, I didn’t know how the mass of runners taking up the rear would ever squeeze by.

I wondered how Nebala and Koyati were doing. We’d abandoned them to stay with Samuel.

“Can you radio back and tell me where Nebala and Koyati are?” I asked Dakota.

“Sure … hold on.” He barked a couple of questions into his walkie-talkie, one of which was about my Maasai.

A burst of answers came back. They were now over a mile back and falling farther and farther off the pace. Koyati had practically broken down. He had “hit the wall” and was still struggling but moving very slowly.

Nebala had also slowed down to be with him. One of the reports said that he was actually “helping” him move forward, which meant, according to Dakota,
that both runners were now officially disqualified from the race for “receiving assistance.” Even if they did manage to get to the end they wouldn’t officially have completed it.

That was sad but expected, and besides, even if they did finish it wasn’t like they would be fast enough to qualify for any prize money. I could just picture them running, Nebala helping to keep Koyati up, with each step getting closer to the finish but farther from the front as more and more runners passed them by. But none of that mattered. All that mattered was Samuel.

He was now well clear of the pack—which had thinned to less than ten runners—and hot on the tail of the third-place runner. Up ahead of that runner were the two leaders. For the first time on this long straightaway section I could actually see Samuel
and
the leaders! Maybe winning wasn’t impossible. If you had seen them then you would have had to believe it was possible. Seeing was believing. But first, he had to move up into third place.

“Can you get ahead of the front runners so we can be waiting at the twenty-five-mile mark?” I asked Dakota.

“Sure,” he replied. “And then we want to get to the finish line. It’s important to be there when the first runners cross the line.”

“Do you think he has a chance to catch them?” I asked.

“I’m through making predictions. None of what he’s done is possible.”

He pushed down on the pedal of the little cart, and we picked up speed. Repeatedly he sounded the horn
and steered around spectators who were spilling out and onto the road.

“Get off the road!” he yelled as he almost mowed down a group who had surged forward to have a look at the runners.

Then I realized that they were looking not forward at the leaders but back toward Samuel. As we closed in and caught up with the two leaders, I saw that the crowd seemed remarkably uninterested in them and were just waiting for Samuel to pass. The roar of the crowd was coming from
behind
us now.

Dakota pulled in right underneath the twenty-five-mile clock, and we all climbed out of the cart. My mother instantly pulled out her camera and started to take pictures. She snapped some shots as the first two runners raced toward us and then past. People cheered as they passed, but it was almost like they were doing it out of politeness. I looked at the clock: 2:05:03.

I turned to look back for Samuel. There he was, not far behind the third-place runner. He was charging along the straightaway and he was gaining, and gaining quickly. The crowd started cheering, screaming at the top of their lungs. Samuel was going to pass him and take over third place! The crowd could see what was going to happen, but the runner in front of Samuel had no idea.

Then he looked over his shoulder and saw Samuel. He seemed startled and then started running faster—much faster. He started to pull away from Samuel, quickly opening up some pavement between them. Samuel reacted and began to run faster too, closing
the gap as quickly as it had opened. The crowd was practically going insane!

The runner looked over his left shoulder as Samuel came up on his right side. Samuel pulled even and got a half step ahead before the other runner realized where he was and accelerated even more. The two men were now matching each other, side by side, stride by stride. They were practically sprinting along—and they slammed into a man who had stepped out of the crowd! All three of them went tumbling head over heels, rolling and skidding along the pavement!

The whole crowd, every single person, seemed to stop cheering all at once. There was silence, and then a loud, collective gasp.

The three men were in a heap, and there was a mess of arms and legs and body parts all tangled together. They rolled away from one another and became three separate men again. The other runner, his left leg all scraped and bleeding, staggered to his feet and started to run. Samuel got to his knees. He looked shocked, surprised, hurt … He looked as though he was in pain.

“Samuel!” I screamed. “Get up!”

He snapped back to reality. He got to his feet and practically fell over again, stumbling as he tried to run! He took a step forward, but when he tried to put down the second foot it collapsed under him and he fell to the pavement! The entire crowd fell completely
silent again, holding their breath, waiting, watching, in shock.

I ran out to where he had fallen. My mother and Olivia and Dakota were right behind me. I reached out to offer him my hand and—

“Don’t touch him!” Dakota yelled. “If you offer him assistance he’s disqualified!”

I drew back my hand. “Samuel, are you all right?” I asked, although obviously he wasn’t.

“Foot … foot,” he said. He had rolled over to sit on the pavement, and he was clutching his left ankle with both hands.

“Let me see it,” my mother said. “Move your hands away.”

Reluctantly he removed his hands. I didn’t need to wait for my mother’s opinion. His ankle was already starting to swell.

“It’s sprained,” my mother said. “Badly sprained.”

“That’s it … the race is over … He can’t run an—”

“No!” Samuel yelled. “Not over … not over.”

He struggled to his feet—or more correctly, his foot. He held the injured foot off the ground.

“You can’t go any farther,” my mother said.

“There’s no point in going any farther,” Dakota said. “Your race is over.”

As if to prove the truth of his words, the pack of runners—eight or nine of them—ran around us.

“You can’t possibly catch them. You can’t win on one leg,” Dakota said. “Let me call for a stretcher so you can have your ankle—”

Samuel shook his head vigorously. “Run.”

“But you can’t win.”

Samuel shrugged. “Run.”

He took a step on his bad foot and grimaced in pain but hopped forward onto his good foot. He took another short step and then hopped onto his good foot.

“This is insane!” Dakota said. “There are liability issues! I’ve got to stop him before …”

His words were drowned out by the crowd. They began to clap and cheer and scream. All of them, even those who had been sitting on the curb, were now on their feet cheering. We stood there and watched as Samuel limped forward. He wasn’t able to move any faster than a slow, painful-looking walk, more a hop than anything resembling a run. But he was moving, and as he moved the crowd reaction rippled forward with him. It was unbelievable, much louder than anything I’d ever heard before.

I put my mouth close to Dakota’s ear so I could be heard. “If you try to take him out of race the crowd will kill you.”

He nodded his head. “I won’t do that … but not because of the crowd. He deserves to try to finish. We need to stay close to watch him.”

“Can I stay with him? Can I run beside him?”

“Normally we can’t allow a non-participant on the course … but … but just go … Be with him.”

“Thank you so much!” I trotted forward on my heels. There was no need to take them off to keep up with him.

I ran to his side. He turned his head slightly to face me.

“Samuel, I’m going to stay with you.”

He tried to smile through gritted teeth. He kept on moving. Each time he put that foot down I could see his body react as the pain radiated up his leg. I could almost feel the pain myself. I had to fight the urge to help him.

The crowd continued to roar its approval, and I got the feeling that they were helping him to keep moving forward.

Four runners—two on one side and two on the other—swooshed past us. I couldn’t help counting—he was now somewhere between fifteenth and twentieth. If somehow nobody else passed he’d still win some—Oh, that was just stupid.

I looked back at the course. There were another dozen runners visible along the long, straight section of pavement. All of them would pass in the next thirty seconds, and probably another dozen after that, and another dozen, until he ended up in five hundredth place. But I knew he couldn’t stop. He was Maasai. He couldn’t win, but he wouldn’t quit.

We passed the twenty-six-mile mark. I didn’t even want to look at the clock, but I couldn’t stop myself: 3:02:25. The winner had completed the race almost an hour ago. Hundreds of runners had finished. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. I’d lost track some time back of the runners whizzing past us.

I’d seen most of those runners twice. Once when they’d passed us and a second time after they’d finished
and had come back to cheer us on. Hundreds of runners had walked or run back and cheered just as loudly as the spectators. The roar of the crowd had continued to grow. There were race cameras trained on us, but also the local television stations had heard and had sent their cameras. Along with them were the thousands of people with their own cameras. We’d had enough shots taken of us in the last hour to make a supermodel jealous. I just wished I’d worn something different, and all this walking and running had done absolutely nothing for my makeup. I had sweated … perspired …
glowed
more than I would have liked.

Of course it wasn’t me they were interested in. If I’d just walked away nobody would have been taking
any
pictures of me.