Book: GLOBAL by Sebastien Lorsbach

GLOBAL is Sebastien Lorsbach's photo book shot in Iten, Kenya, the small Rift Valley town that trains a striking share of the world's best distance runners. I wrote the book's foreword and worked as its proofreader and editor.

The interviews came from two voices that never actually spoke to each other: Agnes Jebet Ngetich, one of the sport's current world record holders, and Brother Colm O'Connell, the coach behind decades of Kenyan champions. Sophie Esteve and Sebastien conducted the interviews separately, and Natasha Drouhin transcribed them. My job was to edit the extracted text so the two accounts read like a real exchange, one answer picking up where the other had just left off, even though runner and coach never sat across from each other during the actual conversations.

The foreword sets the frame for the whole book: running in Iten as something inherited, owed to family, to place, to everyone who ran that same red ground first. It opens on the line I wrote to hold that idea in one image: "In the heights of Iten, running begins in the red."

GLOBAL was simultaneously released as a documentary film. I was lucky enough to attend the first-ever screening of the film in Iten, Kenya, inside a local theater. The book and film were published with the support of DISTANCE Athletics and Adidas Running, and can be purchased on DISTANCE’s website.