Will Run for Food

Based in the Bronx, some of the most successful athletes you've never heard of live to run away with your club money

By Graham Rayman

Tuesday, December 16th 2008 at 12:39pm

In the final seconds of the five-mile New York Road Runners Team Championships in Central Park this August, a 33-year-old Kenyan named Evance Rotich made one last kick and nipped an Ethiopian named Girma Tola at the wire.

Winning with a time of 23:29, Rotich had run a scorching 4:42 per mile—a pace that would not only kill most people, but also turned out to be the second-fastest time in the history of the event. Tola finished just two seconds back, but his coach said later that Tola was actually "taking it easy."

Other runners from Africa, many of them Tola's teammates who run for the Westchester Track Club, took most of the other top places. In fact, the only non-African in the first 11 places was John Henwood, a man who has raced for his native New Zealand in the Olympic Games. He finished ninth.

It may have been only a club meet in Central Park, but your garden-variety Manhattan health nut who runs on