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Running for His Life

Once left for dead, a coach now teaches others to endure.

By Michael Hall

From Reader's Digest

A Son of God

He was on fire. It was 3 a.m., and most of his classmates were dead -- beaten and burned alive by kids and grownups they'd known most of their lives. Smoldering bodies lay all around him in the small room. He had used some of them to keep from being hit by the fiery branches tossed in by the mob outside. For hours he had heard them laughing, singing, clapping, taunting. Waving their machetes, the Hutus had herded more than a hundred Tutsi teenagers and teachers from the Kibimba school in Burundi into the room before sunset. A couple dozen were still alive, moaning in pain, dreaming of death. "There weren't that many of us left," he says. "A guy said, 'I don't want to die like a dog.' He jumped from a window. They cut him to pieces. Then they started a fire on the roof. After a while, it started falling on me, and I held up my right arm as it came down, trying to pull bodies over me. My back and arm were on fire -- it hurt so bad. I decided to kill myself by diving from a pile of bodies onto my head. I tried twice, but it didn't work. Then I heard a voice. It said, 'You don't want to die. Don't do that.' Outside, we could hear Hutus giving up and leaving. I heard one say, 'Before we go, let's make sure everyone is dead.' Three came inside. One put a spear through a guy's heart. I heard the voice say, 'Get out.' There was a body next to me, burned down to the bones. I grabbed a bone -- it was hot in my hands -- and used it to break the bar on the window. I wanted to kill myself. I wanted to be identifiable. I wanted my parents to know me. I didn't want to be all burned up, like everyone else. I was jumping to let them kill me." He jumped. Somehow, amid the uproar of genocide, at least for a few seconds, no one saw him. His back was on fire, his legs were smoking, and his feet were raw with pain. He ran. If you could call it running. "Gilbert! Gilbert!" Almost a decade later, on a warm, clear day in March 2003, Gilbert Tuhabonye crossed the finish line of a 10,000-meter race in Austin, Texas. Hundreds of people clapped, and many called his name. He had finished ahead of some 14,000 runners, but not all of them. "Coach, you're awesome," one woman yelled. "I love you. You're No. 1, Gilbert!" In fact, he was No. 3 in a race he'd won the previous year and was favored to win again this time. Disappointing as it was, Gilbert's third-place finish couldn't change one thing: More than 8,000 miles from home, he is an Austin celebrity, the most popular running coach in a town of rabid runners. The governor seeks him out. Kids ask for his autograph. Rich white women pay him to order them to run laps. His students at the Gilbert's Gazelles running club see him as a savior, optimistic when he has every right to be withdrawn and angry. A man on a mission: to show the world what one man -- set on fire and left to die a decade ago -- can do. A man with a last name (pronounced "Too-ha-bon-yay") almost too good to be true. It means "a son of God." "In Burundi," Gilbert explains, "your last name has to have meaning. When I was born, it was a difficult time. It was right after the war. There had been a big drought, crickets attacked the crops -- and then my mother broke her ankle. When I was born, she said, 'This is not my son. This is a son of God.' " In the living room of his Austin apartment, Gilbert is beating on an imaginary drum, playing along with a CD of Burundian music. His pretty wife, Triphine, plays with their daughter, Emma. At home, the couple speak mostly Kirundi, their native tongue, though they try to speak English around their little girl. The apartment is cluttered with Emma's toys. On the walls are the flag of Burundi and photos of Gilbert running; a Bible sits on a table. The next song comes on, from the '60s, called "Yes, I Love Micombero," about a Tutsi president from back then. "If you say [Micombero's] name in front of a Hutu," Gilbert says, "he will kill you." He pretends to play some of the other instruments. "In Burundi, the music is good and the climate is beautiful. If there was peace, I'd go there to train. It's paradise." Gilbert was born in Burundi in 1974. His Tutsi parents were farmers, raising corn, potatoes, peas and beans. As a boy, he ran everywhere. Most of all, he loved to chase the family's cows. In seventh grade, he went to a boarding school in Kibimba, about 150 miles from home. Of the thousand or so students, about 60 percent were Hutus. The rest were Tutsis.

"Tonight Is the Night"

The Hutu and Tutsi tribes have been rivals for centuries. But only in the past two generations have things gotten brutal, in Burundi and nearby Rwanda. In Burundi, the aristocratic Tutsis ruled over the working-class Hutus for more than 500 years. The tribes coexisted in relative peace until the Europeans came. Burundi and Rwanda were incorporated into German East Africa in the 1890s; Belgium took over after World War I. Says Gilbert, "The Germans made the differences between Tutsi and Hutu into law: Divide and govern." Burundi became independent in 1962, with Tutsis controlling the army and the government. Just before and after independence, ethnic violence flared. In 1972 an attempted coup led to the slaughter of some 150,000 Hutus; many Tutsis were killed, too, including three of Gilbert's uncles. As a freshman at the Kibimba school, Gilbert won an 8K race running barefoot. The next year, a coach told him that if he worked hard, he could make the Olympics. By his senior year, in 1993, his goal was to get a scholarship to an American college, get an education and return home. It seemed possible. Burundi appeared to have turned a corner: The latest Tutsi dictator had called the first-ever presidential election. Not surprisingly, a Hutu won. Four months later, though, Tutsi soldiers assassinated him. On the morning of the massacre, Gilbert says, he turned on the radio and heard nothing. "I thought the battery was dead," he says. "I went to class. A friend said the president was dead. There weren't many Hutus around, but I saw one, my teammate. He showed me a machete, ran it along his throat, and said, 'Tonight is the night I'm gonna cut your neck.' I said, 'Why?' He said, 'Because you guys killed our president.' I thought he was joking. By ten, a mob had gathered at the school -- Hutus with machetes. They took away a Tutsi professor and said, 'We're gonna kill all these Tutsis.' " "Around noon, we went to the principal to ask for help, and he told us, 'You killed the president, and you have to die.' Everywhere we looked, there was a Hutu with a machete, a bow and arrow, or a spear. All of a sudden, a woman took a spear and threw it into the crowd. And they attacked us -- cutting people, their ears and noses, so they'd know who was a Tutsi. "I was so scared. They took us to a gas station owned by a Hutu, a guy I knew. When we got there, they took our clothes. All I had on was underwear and a shirt. "There were more than a hundred people in a room this big." Gilbert points to the kitchen wall on the far side of his 40-by-25-foot living room. "Just after I got in, they poured gasoline in through the windows. I got it on my shirt, so I took it off. Then they threw in branches that were on fire." Gilbert caught fire, and decided to let them kill him. He went through the window. "As soon as I landed, I couldn't see clearly," he says. "I just started moving and got around the corner. I heard someone shout, 'Gilbert is coming!' All of a sudden I fell into a ditch filled with rainwater. It put out the fire on my back. I heard this one guy coming, and he fell into the ditch. I was leaning against the side, and he had a spear in one hand and a machete in the other. I killed him." Gilbert pauses. He puts one hand on his chin and the other on the back of his head, jerking and twisting hard, as if breaking someone's neck. "I got up again," he continues. "I was so thirsty, so dehydrated. I started toward the hospital, about a half-mile away. Every step hurt. I could barely stand up. My feet, I could see, were like meat. My right leg was so bad I could see the bone." Still, he kept running. It was all about form -- the years on the track, keeping his knees up and his arms back, pushing himself when he thought he was going to die. He stumbled into the hospital. "When my mother came to the hospital, she said, 'If it wasn't for God, you are dead.' " But what about the others? Surely they were also children of God. Why weren't they spared? "That's the thing I didn't understand. Afterward, I asked myself, 'Why me? Why did I survive?' "

Into Another World

Why do people run? That is, why do thousands get up early on Sunday morning and put their knees and ankles and hearts and lungs through the hell of 10,000 meters on asphalt? For those who stick with it and are lucky, they tap into another world: the state of physical and mental grace they reach when they're cruising, when their blood is racing through every vein. And in Austin, those who long to get better, to raise their personal bests, even when at some point they know it's impossible, hang on Gilbert's every word. Some of his students are fanatics, obsessed with each half-second, each curve of the track, each ache and pain. Most just want to run faster. Gilbert's methods are simple. It's all about form: how the arms move (economically, if possible) and the feet land (heel to toe). He pushes his students hard. When they feel like they're about to die, they look at Gilbert's scars -- the burns that continue along his right arm, bubbling the skin like large patches of candle wax, and then to his right leg, which gets darker along the sides of his calf, where the flames ate down to the bone. Whatever they feel, how bad, really, could it be? "He gets people to believe in themselves," says Lisa Spenner, one of the fanatics. "He treats everyone like they're amazing." If Gilbert is their savior, they are his saviors too -- or at least they help answer the question haunting 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." Gilbert spent three months in the hospital, his right leg so badly burned that the 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 biking led to walking. That led to jogging, which finally led to running a year after he had been left to die. In 1995 Gilbert ran for Burundi in the World University Games in Japan. In 1996, he won a track scholarship to Abilene Christian University, a small Texas school. He was an all-American all three years there, running the 800 and 1,500 meters, and the 8K and 10K. Then he moved to Austin. 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 a February marathon, when he finished in what he considered a disappointing 2:26. They train wrong, as Gilbert did for another race. They get tired. And, as unbelievable as it seems, they doubt themselves. "I've never seen a guy so easily psyched out," says John Conley, Gilbert's agent. "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 other runners. They race against themselves: to conquer their wills, to transcend their weaknesses, to beat back their nightmares. And while a runner can't actually beat himself, he can beat his time. Even years into running, he can get better. So Gilbert spent the spring and summer of 2003 trying to do that, racing men faster than he is, knowing it would make him better. Gilbert's students, of course, keep rooting for him, though sometimes they wonder, How much better can he get? After all, they see him as more than just a runner and a coach. He's a flesh-and-blood symbol, a real-life survivor, a true son of God, a man on a mission both infinitely greater than and remarkably similar to their own: the daily struggle to show what you're made of.

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