On a Saturday morning in October 2022, Emily Chepkor stood outside Lava Latte café in Westlands, Nairobi, and waited. She had posted on Instagram the week before: 8am, Saturday, if you want a running partner, I'll be there. Three other women showed up. Together, the four of them walked and ran — mostly walked — a loop through the neighbourhood.

That was how We Run Nairobi began.

Emily did not grow up as a runner. She started in her early twenties because an ex-boyfriend was training for an Ironman. "If you're training for an Ironman," she says, "this person just has no time — fitness is their life." So she picked the one sport she could do to spend more time with him.

Three weeks into running, she entered The First Lady's Half Marathon. He paced her through it. She finished in 1:56 — a sub-two for a first-timer. It was, as she freely acknowledges, deeply unfair.

She did not linger at the half-marathon distance. Standard Chartered was six months away. She signed up for the full.

Emily was 23, working full-time as an international human rights lawyer, navigating an active social life. The marathon required something different. She followed a Nike Running Club programme for six months — an unnaturally long build, she knows — and did not miss a single run.

"I had real reverence for the distance," she says.

She left clubs at midnight and ran at 4am. She operated on four hours of sleep when a 30k morning run was on the schedule. Her friends noticed mainly when she left the party early. When she crossed finish lines, they showed up with bottles, ready for the occasion that came after.

What changed was not visible. It was internal. Micro-decisions, made again and again, laid down a different kind of person.

Slowly by slowly, just build. You will get there.

"When you have to talk to yourself at 32k — 'just imagine this is just a 10k, this is just a 10k' — you learn to speak to yourself so efficiently. Whatever I'm doing in other areas of life, I have this innate confidence that slowly by slowly, you will get there."

Emily has now run 11 full marathons, including Boston — a qualifier. She ran a 3:23 in Vienna. Boston was her third World Major and her tenth race. Standing at the finish with her sister Lucy, she told herself, as she has after every single one, that she was done.

"You will not find me here again," she says. "Every single time."

Three weeks later, she is always already thinking about what she could do better.

Boston was also the beginning of something else. She had watched guide runners support blind athletes at the race and wanted a community angle to her own running. She emailed the Kenya Blind Service School back in Nairobi. It did not come together. She tried to recruit her friends. They did not believe she would run slow enough for them to keep up with her. She tried anyway. Nobody showed up.

So she announced to strangers on Instagram instead.

Anyone who follows her there will recognise the aesthetic immediately. She films her runs handheld — no selfie stick, no stabiliser, no crew. Just Emily, moving through a city at pace, camera in one hand, the route unfurling ahead. What comes through is not effort. It is ease. She looks like someone who has made a private peace with distance, and happens to be letting you watch. Your correspondent noticed it before he even knew who she was: the cadence, the breathing, the unhurried quality of it. "One can clearly tell that even if you're running a 10 or 12k, you're an experienced runner — without having to actually state it."

That first October morning, the group was four. The next Saturday, six. When the first fast runners appeared — a pair of boys who wanted to actually run — Emily was the only one who knew the route.

She solved this by running double. She shot ahead with the boys, told them where to turn, sprinted back to the women, coached them through the next junction, then shot forward again to catch the boys before they went wrong. Back and forth, the full length of the course, every Saturday.

"So from then, I was running double the distance of everyone," she says.

It went on like that until the group grew large enough for regulars to learn the route. She began assigning group leaders. Numbers climbed: 40, then 100, then 200, then 500. Today, on a good Saturday in Westlands, 600 people show up.

We Run Nairobi is free. There is no registration. If you wake up at 7am and you are in the neighbourhood, you can make the 7:30am start. Distances go up to 15k, but 5k walkers are as welcome as anyone. Afterwards, the group sits for breakfast somewhere aesthetic. That part, Emily insists, was always non-negotiable.

"It's a friendship walking date," she says. "You've come in your nice clothes. You sit at a nice place. You have slow breakfast with other people around you doing the same thing."

The model is not original — she borrowed it from park runs in London, from Nike's We Run Joburg, from the running club culture she found in every city she lived in abroad. What was new was bringing it to Nairobi, where running had meant elite distance runners at 4am, not a Saturday social with a café finish.

A TikTok recap video tipped the numbers from 40 to 500 almost overnight. The post-COVID running boom did the rest. Corporate partners now cover backend costs. The community pays nothing.

Emily's goal is for the club to become like a park run: consistent, unremarkable, always there. "Just your daily thing. What you do to stay consistent. What you do to see others."

The long-term vision is simpler still. "When someone googles 'things to do in Nairobi,'" she says, "I want us to show up right after the National Park and the National Museum."

Emily starts every Saturday run at the back of the pack. By the time she finishes, she has passed most of the group — and quietly tracked, over months and years, who is getting faster.

"I know the personal stories of so many people," Emily says. "When I see them now — running a 21k, when last year they came for a walk — that's a wonderful thing to see."

She is also the brand ambassador for On, which recently entered the Nairobi market. She uses the platform to advocate for three promising male runners from the club — not elite-level yet, she says carefully, but podium-capable with the right support and the right small European race to enter first.

Emily has four World Majors still to run. Boston was her third. Sydney is now a confirmed sixth major on the circuit.

"I'll finish the majors," she says. "And then that's the end."

She has said that before. The 23-year-old who left clubs at midnight to run at 4am is now the person who finishes her Saturday run and is at brunch with her lashes on by 11. Same discipline. Different finish line.