Allan Nicholas Mwangi arrives at this interview half an hour before time. He has a fitness watch on either of his hands. These watches are as much about his fitness and keeping time as they are about his health. By a casual observation, he is what many would call fit, judging from his gait, which is ramrod straight. He has never struggled with weight, and there was a time in his life when he thought that certain ailments were meant for people who don’t look like him. He admits it was either out of ignorance or arrogance.
Until late 2019, the software developer, who has just turned 39, never gave fitness a chance; he was after all, spindly and wiry, a metric he says, can be deceiving. “If doctors used their sight to fully examine and determine one’s health, we all could be dead by now.”
“I had what doctors called tachycardia,” he recalls. “My heart was racing even when I was seated. I remember the veins on my neck were bulging, and the people around me were pointing out that it was abnormal. The migraines felt like a thousand knives drilling my head.”
For a slender man weighing 64 kilogrammes, hypertension seemed unthinkable. “I thought lifestyle diseases belonged to people weighing 100 kilos and above,” he laughs. “So, when a hospital told me my cholesterol was high, I thought their machines were broken.”
The readings remained alarmingly high, even after he sought a second and a third medical opinion. He was put under medication to manage his condition. “They put me on four different drugs at once. One of them was to slow my heart down. Imagine your heart racing so hard that doctors have to give you medicine just to calm it.” These prescriptions were heavy-duty. Two of the tablets he took were combination drugs—meaning inside a single pill were two active ingredients lowering his pressure by almost 20 units. He checked into a hospital to treat migraines, only to learn that he had a close brush with death. “Men don’t go to hospitals often and I was not any different and maybe if I hadn’t seen a doctor that day, we wouldn’t be sitting here.”
His fitness journey crept in almost by accident. His colleagues at Kenyatta University nudged him into the campus gym during one of their lunch breaks. In hindsight, it served two purposes: it kept his diet in check and helped him work out, which, in the grand scheme of things, has been his Damascus moment. Like with everyone else, day one in the gym was also the day he thought about quitting the most. “I had pain in my glutes for a week. I couldn’t even sit properly.”
The idea of taking medication for the rest of his life made him very restless. This inspired his consistency in the gym. “Within three months of my lunchtime workouts, my cardiologist noticed something unusual: my heart rate had halved, from an average of 130 beats per minute to 70. I remember a doctor thinking that their machines were faulty. When they checked against my records, it was clear that exercise was doing the work of medicine.”
When Covid-19 struck, causing gyms to shut down, Allan panicked. What if he lost all the gains he had made in keeping his hypertension in check? He’d just become a parent and the thought of dying and missing out on his son’s milestones was quite unsettling.
“I bought running shoes at Sh300 at the market. I didn’t know about top-of-the-range running shoes. On the first day, I ran 13 kilometres from my house and back. How I avoided injuries, only God knows.”
Allan Nicholas Mwangi, a 39 year old Software Developer.
Photo credit: Pool
By 2021, his consistency was not only restoring his life to him but also rewriting his medical reports. His doctors started scaling down his medication slowly. In August 2023, he was ordered to stop taking drugs altogether. August being his birth month, he had doubled on his runs. He would run up to 30km a day on weekdays and more on weekends with just Sunday as his rest day.
It wasn’t all glory though; running presented its own paradox. The exertion often lowered his blood pressure so dramatically that combining it with medication became dangerous. “One day, I went for a refill and my BP was 93/64. The nurse thought I was playing games. She asked if I was buying the drugs for someone else.” He stopped medication, but a week later, his BP spiked to 151/113. “I had celebrated too soon. The doctor told me to resume medication, but only as needed.”
His blood pressure is what medicine calls an elevated category. Not normal but equally so, not dangerous. He is aware that running has been and is still his most important ‘treatment’ and very well knows what happens when he skips his runs. “On my rest days, the pressure shoots up. Even tapering before a race is risky. Most runners enjoy tapering. For me, it’s the worst period.” Allan points out that this is not medical advice and shouldn’t be taken as such. “Don’t abandon medicine just because someone else gave their story. Remember, it was medicine that brought me back at first. I have just been a little lucky to find something else that works.”
Allan the Great—as he is known in the fitness community—runs with a philosophy: “Bend, but don’t break. Push yourself, but stay just below the line.” He avoids punishing intervals and hill repeats, choosing instead steady mileage over explosive training. His endurance has grown. The first 13km run took him 42 breathless minutes. “When I stopped to take a break, I had someone ask me if I wanted to go to a hospital. I was heaving and running out of breath—literally. All factors held constant, he can do it in 30 minutes, comfortable enough to hold a coherent conversation or sing along to the music that carries him through all his runs.
His active lifestyle, though deeply personal, has transcended him. Together with a colleague, he co-founded Kidney Focus Kenya, a social media-based initiative raising awareness on lifestyle diseases. He runs on the slogan, fighting hypertension one kilometre at a time. Allan believes early prevention is key. “Hypertension doesn’t start the day you’re diagnosed. It’s been building for years,” he adds. “If I had started running even one year earlier, I wouldn’t be hypertensive today.”
He recommends walking for those who can’t run. “Walking has no pace pressure. Anybody can do it. Movement is what matters.”
At the time of going to press, Allan and his friends will have gone for their annual ‘run your age, run’. They put the pin on 42km for this year’s run.
When asked about his future in fitness, he becomes pensive but very precise, as with other things in his life, “I want to grow older but fitter, to play with my grandchildren one day, to climb stairs without asking for help. At 70, I want to be the grandfather who joins his grandchildren for a five-kilometre jog inside the estate. That’s the dream.”
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