Gilbert's Gazelles

Wellness and Fitness ServicesUnited States2-10 Employees

Gilbert's Gazelles is the premier training group in central Texas for runners and triathletes. Founded in 2002 by NCAA Champion, Olympic torch-bearer and world-renowned motivational speaker Gilbert Tuhabonye, more than 5,000 runners have been trained under our guidance. 

Gilbert Tuhabonye was born on November 22, 1974, in the southern county of Songa in Burundi, a small mountainous country in east central Africa.

His love of running was forged early. He ran to the valley's edge to get water for his family. He ran to school, five miles away, and he loved to race his friends. His favorite thing to do was to chase his family's cows. 

While attending the school in Kibimba, Gilbert began running competitively. Running barefoot, he won an 8K race while only a freshman. As a sophomore, he met a man who taught him how to change his running technique by getting his knees up and holding his arms correctly. The coach encouraged him to work hard and try for the Olympics. Gilbert became national champion in the 400 and 800 meters as an 11th grader. As a senior, Gilbert was already an extraordinary runner whose goal was to get a scholarship to an American school, get an education and return home to Burundi.

Fate had another plan for Gilbert.

On October 21, 1993, the centuries-old war between the Tutsi and Hutu tribes erupted in horrific reality one afternoon as Gilbert and his classmates were in school. The Hutu classmates at the Kibimba school, their parents, some teachers and other Hutu tribesmen, forced more than a hundred Tutsi children and teachers into a room where they beat and burned them to death. After nine hours of being buried by the corpses of his beloved friends, and himself on fire, Gilbert used the charred bone of one of his classmates to break through a window. He jumped free of the burning building and ran into the night, on charred feet, surviving one of the most horrible massacres in the long Tutsi-Hutu war.

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