The Beginning

There are runners who chase personal bests, and runners who chase silence.
Connie didn’t start running for either. She started because she couldn’t switch off.

When she describes herself, she says it plainly and without apology:

Not metaphorical energy. Actual, relentless, physical restlessness. The kind that keeps you awake for 72 hours without noticing. The kind that fills a room before you walk into it. The kind that makes you the unofficial coordinator of school events even when you intentionally sit at the back.

She laughs and says,

For most of her life, she didn’t know what to do with all that energy. And the one thing she couldn’t do — the thing that kept slipping through her fingers — was sleep. “A good night for me used to be four hours. Four. And that was a good day.”

Running didn’t arrive to save her. It arrived by accident.

Like many of us, Connie’s running story begins in the strange stillness of COVID.

Her family made a makeshift gym in the house — skipping ropes, mat workouts, improvised weights. It wasn’t enough. “I had so much energy I felt like I was going to burst.”

One day she stepped outside and attempted a short run. Two kilometers. She came back breathless, sweating, stunned.

And triumphant.

“I told everyone I’d run a marathon. Anyone who cared to listen — ‘Imagine, non-stop!’”

She kept at it. 5 km. 10 km. The day she ran 15 km felt monumental. But something else was happening quietly in the background. After every run, her thoughts slowed. Just a little. Enough to notice.

It was the first time in years she felt her mind arrive at the same pace as her body.

Her first official race was the Nairobi City Marathon, the very first edition. She registered for the half without overthinking it — “I just clicked the link and said, why not?” — and only realised what she had committed to when she collected her bib. The race took her a little over three hours, but she remembers enjoying the entire stretch, from the anxious shuffle at the start to the moment she spotted the finish arch.

“The medal meant everything to me. I didn’t care about the time — I’d covered 21 km, and that was huge.”

After that, she kept going. Parklands Dusk-to-Dawn was next, and she still laughs about it.

“I lasted four hours on my feet! Four full hours.”

She returned to Nairobi City, added Stanchart to her calendar, travelled for Kili, and entered a handful of smaller local races whenever she felt like she needed something to look forward to. These events weren’t random anymore; they became part of her weekly structure, a rhythm she didn’t fully have before.

But even with all those races under her belt, nothing prepared her for the idea that came to her when she turned 42.

“I don’t know what came over me,” she says, “but I told myself I’m turning 42, so let me run 42.”

It was bold, slightly reckless, and exactly the kind of decision she tends to make when she’s determined to test herself.

When Connie turned 42, she quietly decided she would run 42 km. She hadn’t trained for it, hadn’t told anyone, and certainly hadn’t asked for permission. It was a private challenge she set for herself, the kind she knew she might abandon if too many people weighed in.

The night before the race, her husband finally discovered the truth.

“I hid my bib until the night before,” she says. “My husband looked at the red bib and asked, ‘Did you make a mistake?’”

She hadn’t. She smiled, confirmed it was intentional, and went to bed knowing she would show up at the full marathon start line the next morning.

She began the race with a simple mindset: try. No expectations, no strategy, just the stubbornness that often carries her through difficult things. The marathon itself was rough. Her legs stopped cooperating toward the end, and her GPS malfunctioned, recording less than what she had actually run. She felt her body threatening to give way, but she kept moving. When she finally crossed the finish, supported on either side by kind strangers, she stayed upright long enough to receive her medal.

She thought the medal would be the highlight of that day, but the finish line handed her something else entirely — an introduction to the coach who would reshape her running.

As she tried to steady herself at the finish, a friend with her recognised the exhaustion on her face and immediately asked if she had trained. She hadn’t, of course, and he knew it before she even answered. Without hesitation, he pointed her toward Coach Dedan.

Their first conversation was brief and direct — exactly the type of honesty she responds to. Dedan looked at her numbers, listened to the story of the untrained marathon, and delivered his verdict without softening it.

“Never attempt a 42 again,” he told her. “Not yet.”

She laughs about it now and calls that moment “the day I was relegated.” But she agreed with him, signed up for training immediately, and stepped — unknowingly — into a season that would change the one part of her life she had never been able to manage: her restless mind.

What happened next surprised her. The shift wasn’t gradual. It was immediate. One week earlier she had been lying in bed with racing thoughts, sleeping four hours at most and waking up already buzzing. The week she began training with Dedan, everything flipped.

“There should be a medal for jumping from four hours to nine. I’m serious,” she says. And she means it. The structure, the regular fatigue, the accountability — all of it created a kind of mental quiet she had never known. She built an evening routine around it: jazz music, dim lights, and the slow exhale that signalled her brain was finally ready to rest.

Her explanation is simple.

She had never learned how to wind down before. Now she does. And once her sleep settled, the rest of her life began settling with it — her rhythm at home, her patience at work, her ability to move through difficult weeks without spiralling.

Running didn’t reinvent Connie. It clarified her. It didn’t tame her high energy; it gave it direction. It didn’t mute her mind; it taught it how to breathe. The woman who once could stay awake for 72 hours now sleeps nine. The woman who once rushed through everything now understands pacing — on the road, at work, in her home.

And near the end of our conversation, she says something quietly powerful. Not boastfully. Just truthfully.

Maybe that’s the lesson she leaves the rest of us with: the courage to become someone we are proud to look at. The courage to cheer for ourselves — loudly, openly, and without apology.

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