When Agnes Tirop was eleven, she was already as fast as athletes twice her age. “She loved running, and she shined,” her brother Martin told me. Tirop, who was born in 1995, was small-boned and delicate-featured, with cropped hair. Even as a child, she was self-possessed, with a singular focus on improving her speed. She grew up in the Kenyan village of Nandi, in the Great Rift Valley, a four-thousand-mile-long volcanic trench of steep escarpments, green hills, and soda lakes that is visible from space. She came from a big family. Her father, Vincent, had been a long-distance runner in his youth—as had her grandfather—but Vincent found it difficult to earn a living from the sport. Instead, each day he bought milk from local farmers and took it by bicycle to sell at the market in the city of Eldoret, twenty-nine miles away. The family waited, sometimes until midnight, for him to bring home food for them to eat. Despite having little money, Vincent saved five litres of milk every week for his children, so that they would have the nutrition they needed in order to train. “We were dirt poor,” Martin said. “We started running because of poverty.”
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BADDIE ISSUES
\"Wicked\" and \"Gladiator II.\"
LET'S MAKE A DEAL
\"Death Becomes Her\" and \"Burnout Paradise.\"
ANTI HEROES
\"The Franchise,\" on HBO.
FELLOW-TRAVELLERS
The surprisingly sunny origins of the Frankfurt School.
NOW YOU SEE ME
John Singer Sargent's strange, slippery portraits of an art dealer's family.
PARIS FRIEND - SHUANG XUETAO
Xiaoguo had a terror of thirst, so he kept a glass of water on the table beside his hospital bed. As soon as it was empty, he asked me to refill it. I wanted to warn him that this was unhealthy - guzzling water all night long puts pressure on the kidneys, and pissing that much couldn't be good for his injury. He was tall, though, so I decided his insides could probably cope.
WILD SIDE
Is Lake Tahoe's bear boom getting out of hand?
GETTING A GRIP
Robots learn to use their hands.
WITHHOLDING SEX FROM MY WIFE
In the wake of [the] election, progressive women, who are outraged over Donald Trump's victory at the ballot box, have taken to social media with public, vengeful vows of chastity. - The Free Press.
DEADLINE EXTENSION
Old age, reborn.