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UjENA FIT Club Running Interviews and articles with 100 Interesting People

Best Road Races and the UjENA FIT Club is speaking with 100 people who we feel have a lot to say about running, racing and fitness  We will give you background information as will as their insights into the future.  Be sure to post your feedback and comments.

Read All UjENA FIT Club Running Interviews

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The sport of Double Racing is about ready to Take Off!
Posted Thursday, February 19th, 2015
by Bob Anderson, publisher of Double Runner magazine (Photo Bob Anderson with world record holder Julius Koskei wearing the yellow... Read Interview
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2013 Ujena Fit Club Male Runner of the Year
Posted Monday, March 17th, 2014
The Chris Jones story is a running saga of epic proportions.  Don't try this at home! (Photo - Leadville 100... Read Interview
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Sharon Vos: Three in a Row
Posted Sunday, March 23rd, 2014
Aging ever so gracefully at age 59 and forging a career record that becomes ever more impressive, Sharon Vos is... Read Interview
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Julius Koskei: All In the Family
Posted Tuesday, November 5th, 2013
 By David Prokop Editor Best Road RacesJulius Koskei (pronounced Kos-kay), who set the current world record in the Double Road... Read Interview

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Julius Koskei: All In the Family
Tuesday, November 5th, 2013
Holder of the world record in the Double, Kenya’s Julius Koskei comes by his running ability naturally – it runs in the family.
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By David Prokop Editor Best Road Races

Julius Koskei (pronounced Kos-kay), who set the current world record in the Double Road Race™ on August 11 in Indianapolis, Ind., running the 10K in 29:48 and the 5K in 14:43 for an aggregate time of 44:31:09, has some special things going for him as a runner – aside from the fact he trains very hard and runs very fast!

The 5’5”, 130-pound distance star from Nyahururu, Kenya, located in the very center of the hotbed of Kenyan running, the Great Rift Valley, is a member of the Kalenjin tribe, which has produced more great runners by far than any other tribe in Kenya – Kip Keino, Ben Jipcho, Mike Boit, Henry Rono, Daniel Komen, Paul Tergat, Wilson Kipketer, Moses Kiptanui, Ezekiel Kimboi, Tegla Loroupe, Helen Kimaiyo, Peter Koech, Wesley Korir, Lorna Kiplagat, Wilson Kipsang … and not to forget, Julius’s older brother, James Koskei.

James, who’s now 44, retired from competition two years ago. He was fifth in the IAAF World Cross-Country Championships, short course (4K), in 1999, won the 5000 in the World Cup the next year, and while he never represented Kenya in the Olympics, he ran in the Golden League meets from 1997 to 2000. After his track career ended, he competed as a road racer in America from 2001 to 2007 – he finished fourth in the 2007 Boston Marathon.

This is Julius Koskei’s older brother! Putting it another way, it’s good to have as your running role model (not to mention trainer and mentor) an older brother who ran 27:50 for the 10,000 meters and 12:59 for the 5000 meters on the track!

While Julius has never quite matched his brother’s times on the track (they never raced each other, incidentally), he has run 28:12 for the 10,000 on the track, 28:17 on the road, and his best times in the 5000 are 13:17 (track), 13:36 (road). While he considers himself at his best between 10K and 10 miles, Julius has a personal best of 1:01:15 in the half-marathon, a time he ran in Philadelphia in 2011, and his marathon best is a none-too-shabby 2:10:15, which he ran in Frankfurt, Germany in 2008. 

Julius, who’s now 31, is married; he and his wife, Emily, have two sons, Roger, 8, and Eugene, 5, who would like to accompany daddy on some of his training runs, but they’re a mite too young at this point. Keep an eye out for them in years to come, however  – running, after all, is a family tradition.

Like his brother James (there are actually five brothers and four sisters in the family), Julius Koskei was raised on a farm. Each day he would run three miles to school and three miles back – it’s the usual story! Although Julius started racing in school, his times were modest. Meanwhile, James was excelling as a runner on the world stage.

However, after graduating from secondary school in 1998, Julius – who’s almost exactly the same height and weight as his brother – began to train very hard. James advised him on all aspects of running – how to train, how to run the races, etc. Today Julius admits that having an older brother so accomplished as a distance runner to train and mentor him was a big help.

It wasn’t long before his innate ability began to emerge, and in 2001 Julius was able to make the finals of the 5000 in the Kenyan national championships, running 13:50! It was his first big performance, he says. His breakthrough performance. Even his brother was impressed.

Kenya has such incredible depth in the distance races, the late Tom Sturak, running expert and a prominent agent for foreign runners, once said, “If you finish in the top 75 in the Kenyan Cross-Country Championships, you’re world class!” Julius Koskei had finished 10th in the 5000. He had arrived as a world-class runner!

He began competing in Europe, setting all of his track bests in the next couple of years. In 2003, after deciding he really wasn’t fast enough to win consistently on the track, he started concentrating on road racing. He first came to America in 2004, but he’s also competed in road races in Europe, South America, even India. Mainly, however, he concentrates on the U.S. He’s now been coming here for about 10 years – twice each year, in the spring and again in the fall (August to September). Usually he runs 12 road races in America each year – six during his spring visit, another six in the fall. The only races he runs in Kenya are just trial efforts to gauge how his training is going.

Comments and Feedback
run Meet the Double Road Race world record holder from Kenya...he ran 44:31 at the Indy Double August 11.
Bob Anderson 11/5/13 5:39 pm
run Julius has confirmed he will be running the Pleasanton Double Dec 22...it is going to be a strong field. The women's world record holder Sarah will also be running...
Bob Anderson 11/7/13 2:20 pm
run Mybe next year i will be there too bob.
Elam Wangwero 11/8/13 4:11 am
run Mybe next year i will be there too bob.
Elam Wangwero 11/8/13 4:11 am
,,,,,

And that training? Julius typically runs 90-100 miles per week.  He’ll rest two weeks after returning home from the U.S., then it’s back to serious training. 

He explains that back home in Kenya he does speedwork twice a week, four other days are devoted to long runs, and on the seventh day he rests. His speedwork could consist of 200, 400 or 800 repeats, he might do longer repetitions such as 7 x 1 mile or 8 x 1 mile, 4:45 to 4:55 pace, or a fartlek workout where he alternates running two minutes hard and one minute slow.

A typical training week for him in Kenya might be:

Monday – 15 miles steady, not too fast.
Tuesday – Speedwork (maybe shorter repeats), 8 miles later in the day.
Wednesday – 20 miles easy.
Thursday – 15 miles steady.
Friday – Speedwork (perhaps longer repeats), 5 miles later in the day.
Saturday – A long run, depending on which race he’s preparing for, so this long run could be 23-25 miles, 15-20 miles, or 10-12 miles, if he’s preparing for a 5K or 10K.
Sunday – Rest.

Julius says there are far fewer paved roads in Kenya than in the U.S., so Kenyan runners, even those who specialize in road racing, train much more on dirt roads and grass than their American counterparts.

Talking to Julius, it’s clear he’s very dedicated to running, and running in turn has been very good to him and his family. The Kenyan farmboy who grew up to be a professional runner now owns a farm of his own, where he and his wife have cows, sheep, goats, and they grow corn and wheat (people help Emily with the farm when Julius is away racing in America). He also owns two rental houses in the city of Eldoret (population: three million!), where his brother and most of the aforementioned great Kalenjin runners live. James Koskei is a coach in Eldoret, and Julius still talks to him maybe twice a week.

Although he’s now 31, Julius has no intention of retiring from competitive running any time soon. “As long as my body is good, I will keep running, “ he says. He thinks he has 8-9 good years of racing left in his legs.

Larisa Mikhaylova, his agent in the United States, and a former international competitor for Russia in the 800 meters (her best time was 1:57:17 and she was ranked in the top 10 in the world in ’97, ’98 and ’99), works with 15 runners, male and female, who come from Kenya, Ethiopia, Morocco, Russia and the Ukraine.

Based in Hebron, Kt., near Cincinnati, where she runs her agency, LM Elite Running Club, she says of Julius, “He’s my best runner. Every time he comes over here, he’s been training very hard in Kenya. He’s won many races in the U.S.A. Many races.”

Julius amplifies on his agent’s statement, explaining that he’s won about half of the races that he’s run in America. In the other half he’s finished in the top three or four. Now you know why he’s a professional runner.

At Indianapolis, Julius not only obliterated the world record for the Double, he made the effort look relatively easy, and maybe it was, at least for him – as one Midwestern track observer, who had seen Julius run several times, said before the race, “This guy is legit!” That is, he’s very good!

Furthermore, it’s significant that Julius, a top-level road racer for almost a decade now, really enjoyed the Indianapolis Double – and it’s not just because he happened to win and set the world record.

“This is a very good race, I love it!” he said of the Double, emphasizing he likes the unique challenge. “When you finish the 10K and you have to recover, you know you still have 5K to run. When you run the 5K, that pain (of recovery) is gone. And when you finish (the 5K), you feel better than if you just ran one race. (The feeling of accomplishment) is almost like you ran a marathon.”

Not knowing exactly when he’d get a chance to run another Double, he said he was planning to tailor his training to be properly prepared whenever that opportunity comes. As he put it, in an interview about a week after the Indianapolis race, “When I go back to Kenya, I’m going to change my training – maybe do some workouts where I run a hard run, take a 20-30 minute rest, and then run again.”

The next Double Road Race™ on the schedule is in Manhattan, Kan., this coming Saturday, Nov. 9. Two Doubles have been held since Indianapolis and no one has come close to the record Julius set in Indianapolis. The question now is – will anyone be able to improve on Julius Koskei’s record in the Manhattan (Kan.) Double?  He won’t be in the race, of course – he’s back in Kenya now.

Whether anyone is able to better his record or not, it is his belief that the record is in line for substantial improvement in the future – and he hopes that he may play a significant role in this process himself.

Asked how fast he thinks he could run the Double if he was thoroughly and specifically prepared for the race, at the peak of fitness and running all out, he responded, “I think I could do 28:50 for the 10K and 14:10 for the 5K.”

Do the math – 28:50 and 14:10 adds up to 43 minutes flat! Again, the world record Julius set in Indianapolis is 44:31:09.

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