North Hollywood Runner Finally Finds His Roots

His coach says he runs with the grace of a gazelle and he hails from a nation that has produced world-record distance runners such as Kip Keino, Ben Jipcho, Henry Rono, Moses Kiptanui and Daniel Komen.

Truth be told, Kenyan-born Paul Muite (say Moy-Tay) of North Hollywood High had to be coaxed into giving up basketball to concentrate on running.

“I had to hound him to get him to come out for cross-country as a junior,” Husky Coach Gary Smith said. “He ran track as a sophomore, but he still considered himself a basketball player. I finally convinced him that his future was in running. I told him, ‘We all have to take advantage of the body we are born with and you have the body of a runner.’ ”

Anyone who watches the 5-foot-11, 135-pound Muite seemingly float above the ground during the City Section cross-country preliminaries at Pierce College today will see what Smith was talking about. Yet it took time to convince Muite, a student in North Hollywood’s highly-gifted magnet program.

After finishing eighth in the City cross-country championships last year, Muite still considered himself a basketball player. But after being the third point guard on the Husky junior varsity last season, he turned his attention to running.

In track, he lowered his best in the 1,600 meters from 4 minutes 38.10 seconds as a sophomore to 4:24.81 and placed fourth in the City championships in May.

In cross-country, he has run 15:36 over the three-mile course at Pierce--46 seconds faster than last year--and is expected to be a contender in the City final Nov. 23.

“I was into basketball when I came [to North Hollywood],” Muite said. “But after I sat a lot on [the junior varsity], I thought I’d focus on running.”

The connection to running would seem natural to many because Muite spent the first seven years of his life in Kenya, a nation of 29-million people that has produced more world-class distance runners than any other country in the last 25 years.

But Muite lived in the bustling metropolis of Nairobi, not the rural highlands of the Great Rift Valley from which so many of Kenya’s runners have emerged.

“Soccer was the sport I was most interested in when I came [to the United States],” he said. “I really didn’t know much about all the great runners from Kenya.”

He does now.