Running for His Life
Ten years ago, before he came to Texas and established himself as a world-class marathoner, Gilbert Tuhabonye cheated death at the hands of tribal warriors by running for his life. Now he wants you to run for yours.
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Go to a running trail in any big city in Texas, and you will see them working toward this feeling: the grimacer, the puffer, the hacker, the wheezer; the stiff-armed and the backward-leaning; the torso-barely-moving and the stumpy-legs-moving-fast; the potato on sticks, the pear-shaped, the ham-thighed; the loping underachiever and the determined overstepper; the elbows swiveling, the shoulders hunched, the whole body moving as if underwater. They are all bound together by this transforming passion and perhaps also by the fact that they look less silly if they run in numbers. They are, most of them, loners: mild-mannered, nervous, self-conscious, preoccupied with their bodies. They long to get better and faster, to raise their personal bests, even when at a certain point that becomes physically impossible (such logic does not concern the runner, who is high on the opiate of self-improvement). Their feet splay to the sides, their arms flail. They are desperate.
And in Austin, at least, they hang on Gilbert's every word. He coaches at RunTex, where he is one of twenty instructors—"the Michael Jordan" of the bunch, says the store's owner, Paul Carrozza. Some of Gilbert's students (he has about a hundred at any one time) are competitive runners, people who, say, have qualified for the Boston Marathon and want to set a personal record. They're fanatics, obsessed with every half-second, every curve of the trail, every ache and pain. They aspire to the elite. Lisa Spenner, 28, is one of these, a former triathlete who, after training with Gilbert for the Motorola Marathon, missed qualifying for the American Olympic trials by only 51 seconds. Most of Gilbert's students are athletic types, late bloomers who run regularly but perhaps unwisely in local races like the Capitol 10K. They don't aspire to the elite; they just want to run faster. Then there are the ones who just want to get some exercise with the enthusiastic African man. They aspire to look good.
Gilbert's methods are pretty simple, really. One of the pleasant paradoxes of running is that the more machinelike you get, the freer you feel. As he says, it's all about form: how the arms move (economically, if possible) and the feet land (heel to toe). His workouts are intense—sprinting around the track, speeding up hills, springing up and down on a bench—all to improve the basic mechanics of movement. He pushes his students hard and yells at them melodramatically as he trots alongside ("Knees up! Knees up! Knees up! I want to see you in the air!"). When, after eight successive sprints around the track or three inexorable ascents up a steep hill or a series of 100-yard dashes on a single breath of air, they feel like they're about to die, they look at Gilbert's scars. How bad, really, could it be? "He gets people to believe in themselves," says Spenner. "He treats everyone like they're amazing." Sometimes they watch him as he motors like a quiet machine, his head barely bobbing, his arms swinging in perfect time, his feet making quiet patting sounds, and then they try it themselves. At the end of a workout they're breathing hard, bent over, walking slowly, wet with sweat, exhausted. They are in agony. They are happy. They are better.
"Most elite runners think it's all about them," says Carrozza. "Gilbert is so giving, so willing to coach others." If Gilbert is their savior, they are his saviors too—or at least they help answer the question that has haunted him for a decade now: Why me? "Eventually, I realized I had to help people," he says, "coaching them, telling them my story, telling what happened. When I help people, I feel good."
THE KIBIMBA MASSACRE WAS THE beginning of a bloody civil war in which there were mass killings fueled by revenge on both sides. Six months later, a plane carrying the president of Rwanda and the new leader of Burundi was shot down, leading to the genocide in Rwanda of 800,000 Tutsis over a period of one hundred days; there hadn't been such an efficient killing machine since the Holocaust. Burundi was lucky—the Hutus weren't as organized there, and the Tutsis controlled the army. A mere 200,000, mostly Hutus, would die throughout the rest of the nineties.
Gilbert spent three months in the hospital, recovering not only from the burns but from the savage beating he had received. He was now a witness, for God and Tutsi, and he told his story to anyone who visited. His right leg was so badly burned that his knee was stuck at a 90-degree angle. The doctor said it would take six months to heal. Frustrated, Gilbert got on a bike and forcibly unstuck it. "The blood came through; I could sleep again. If I hadn't done it, I could have been crippled." While in the hospital, he got a scholarship offer from Tulane University, in New Orleans. Gilbert wasn't healed enough yet to accept it, but he used it as motivation to run again. The biking led to walking, which led to jogging, which finally led to running a year after he had been left to die. In 1995 he ran the 400 meters at a competition in Kenya and later that year ran for Burundi in the World University Games in Japan. He went to the University of Burundi for a year and was training for the 1996 Olympics when he was sent to an Olympic training center in Georgia, one of many such facilities established by the International Olympic Committee for athletes of developing nations. He ended up as an alternate on the team but stayed in Georgia, taking English classes at La Grange College.
The next year, he accepted a track scholarship from Abilene Christian University, the small Church of Christ school in West Texas that has a storied running history. ACU has won 49 NCAA Division II track-and-field championships and has sent almost three dozen athletes to the Olympics, including the great Bobby Morrow, who, as a sophomore, won the 100-meter and 200-meter dashes and the 400-meter relay at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. ACU has recently been home to many African runners, and it was a perfect place for Gilbert, who studied agricultural business and starred for the team. He was an all-American all three years at ACU, running the 800 and 1,500 meters, the 8K and 10K, and the mile, and he was part of seven national championship teams, winning the 800 indoors in 1999. Coach Jon Murray says Gilbert was a natural team leader. "We called him the Ambassador," he recalls. "He was always making friends, always helping people."
Gilbert liked Abilene. "It gave me time to worship and think," he says. "No distractions." He told his story to church and school groups, and eventually a Burundian student from North Texas State University in Denton visited and wrote about him for her school paper. CNN did a story on him too. In 1999 he won an award given to courageous student athletes. He got to meet Bill Clinton and Muhammad Ali. In 2000 his girlfriend, Triph, whom he had met in the hospital, came to America and enrolled at ACU, and they were married soon after.
After graduation, Gilbert couldn't find work, so one of his professors called an old ACU roommate in Austin: Paul Carrozza, who invited Gilbert down to visit. Inspired by his story, Carrozza offered him a position—several, actually. He wouldn't just sell shoes; he would speak to kids as part of the Marathon Kids program, trying to get them to run. And he'd race. Carrozza, a former track star himself at ACU, would coach him. It was a long way from the killing fields of Burundi.
He's gone back only once—Christmas of 1999—and he learned a hard lesson: You can go home again, but you really shouldn't if you were a witness to genocide who's told your story on CNN. The local media found him, and relatives told him that Hutus were looking for him. Gilbert lay low and fled for good just after New Year's. "I'll never go back," he says. He doesn't trust the recent power-sharing arrangement that calls for a Tutsi and a Hutu to alternate as president every eighteen months. "If there's a Hutu in power," he says, "there's no Tutsi who could sleep at night." Gilbert was granted political asylum in the U.S. in 2001, and he's trying to get permanent residency.
WE'RE ACCUSTOMED TO AFRICAN AMERICAN athletes being superior, and we're accustomed to Africans, especially East Africans, being the best long-distance runners. Generally, they are. But they're human. They make mistakes. They get hypothermia, as Gilbert did in February at the Motorola Marathon in Austin, when he finished with a disappointing time of 2:26. They train wrong, as Gilbert did for the Capitol 10,000. They get tired. On a typical day, Gilbert is up at five, coaching at six, doing a morning run by seven-thirty, selling shoes all day, coaching after work, and then doing an evening run by seven; he runs an average of twenty miles a day. He tries to give time to Triph and Emma. He almost always falls short.
And, as unbelievable as it may seem to his students, sometimes he doubts himself. "I've never seen a guy so easily psyched out," says John Conley, Gilbert's agent. "Before a race, I tell him he's done the work; he knows the strategy; he's got the speed; he's got the strength. He just has to not let the negative talk in his head get to him. It's his Achilles' heel. He thinks, 'These guys are better than me,' and he puts himself in last place. If he could be like Ali and think, 'I'm the greatest,' he'd be unbeatable."
In truth, runners don't race to beat other runners. They race against themselves: to conquer their wills, to transcend their weaknesses, to beat back their nightmares. Of course, a runner will never actually beat himself; he'll never be good enough to do that. But he can get better. And so Gilbert has spent the spring and summer of this year trying to do just that, racing men who are faster than he is, knowing that this makes him better. In May he went to Indianapolis to run a half-marathon against a fast field and finished tenth, with a respectable time of 1:07:50. In June he ran the prestigious Grandma's Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota, at 2:23, but he'll need to get under 2:20 to make the Burundi Olympic team. Carrozza wants to push him even further and have him train with even faster runners. One problem, according to Carrozza, is that Gilbert has been running at slower paces with his students, essentially dumbing his body down. "He's got to refocus on himself," says Carrozza, "to balance the coaching with his training. But he doesn't have to give up coaching."
That will be a relief to the Gazelles and the spud-shaped obsessives on the running trails. Of course, they see Gilbert as more than just a good coach. He's a flesh-and-blood symbol, a real-life survivor, a true son of God, a man on a mission that's both infinitely greater than and remarkably similar to their own: the daily struggle to show what you're made of.
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