The first thing you notice about Joseph Sitienei is that he is happy, laughing or smiling all the time. So it is a safe bet that to say that if your daily commute was to actually run, on foot, the 12 or 13 miles from home to work every day, you would spend most of the day just trying to catch your breath.

But if you were "the fastest man in town," running the challenging distance at a Superman pace of about six minutes a mile, you would always arrive on time and Joseph, who laughs away his dazzling string of victories from around the globe with a humble gentleness, is never late.

Sure, it sounds like an "April's Fool's Day" story, but, so help me, it's the truth. There is a delightful guy washing cars at Capital Toyota who is also one of the greatest distance runners in the world.

Last weekend the ever-polite Sitienei won the half-marathon in the Covenant Health Knoxville Marathon by burning the hilly 13.1-mile course in one hour, 10 minutes and 40 seconds. Soon he will go to the Music City event in Nashville and in between, he works in the "new car get ready" at the car dealership. And, yes, he can wash a car very fast, too.

In a delightful episode of "See that guy over there?," I found out the other day that gentle Joseph is actually from Eldoret, Kenya, and that, yes indeed, he is also a member of the fabled Kalenjin tribe that consistently produces the fastest and most famous distance runners in the world.

The tribe, well-documented for its command of worldwide racing meets, is from the Western Highlands part of Kenya, from the Rift Valley, and, at 34, Joseph has already competed all over Europe and the United States.

As it goes, sometimes he wins races and other times he is "a pace setter" for his fellow countrymen, but there is always one constant; he is indisputably one of the fastest human beings on the face of the earth.

To put it in blunt perspective, he can run forever at a speed faster than most of us can run even 100 yards. He's finished fourth in the Boston Marathon. He's won the Peachtree Road Race (that 10-kilometer event is, to him, a "sprint") and, once in Belgium before a crowd of 25,000 people, he won the IAAF World Championships. Then he did it again in France.

He's run mostly in Europe, in France and the Netherlands, but as his circuitous path has somehow wound to Chattanooga, where he stayed often with fellow runner Steve Wilson, he is now active on the spring circuit. Steve, the sales manager for Capital Toyota's used cars, is a longtime runner and ran his first half-marathon in Knoxville this weekend.

The two are fast friends; when Joseph was worried early Sunday morning that morning coffee might disrupt his effort because he couldn't get his customary tea, Steve helped him laugh away the worry and, as Steve tells it, "before we'd gone the first mile Joseph and a friend he knew from Kenya were already out of sight.

"I got in with the pack at the front of the race and thought we were flying, but Joseph was yacking excitedly with his Kenyan friend at the start and - zoom - they were gone. It was unbelievable but they were also talking and laughing the whole time - I don't know when they breathe!"

True, Joseph is a delightful talker. Yesterday he patiently answered an endless amount of questions, ranging from starting beginning runners ("Just short distances at first") to the type of meals he eats to fuel his race-car lean body ("Chicken and rice, vegetables and fruit.")

If you ask about the other great Kenyan runners of today, he rattles the names of his many friends who have risen from devastating poverty (50 percent) to a level that dominates the world's distance events.

In Kenya the runners, who run hundreds of miles every week, often train at 6,000 feet in the mountains, learning to control their oxygen intake. Then, according to the world's scientists who have studied the Kalenjin tribe, a mixture of complicated genetics and steely determination is why the gentle Kenyans are the most respected distance competitors in the world.

Joseph just laughs about it, agreeing in his very British way of speaking that Kenyans are "very fast" but that he greatly enjoys American runners like Knoxville's Eric Bell and Eric Platt, who finished second and third. respectively, on Sunday about two minutes and four minutes behind Sitienei.

"Runners are very friendly and I enjoyed them very much. Geoffrey Kiprotich (the fellow Kenyan who won the full marathon Sunday in 2:22.32) is a longtime friend so I paced him for the first half of the race," said Joseph.

Did the two talk during the whole race like Steve said? "Sure, we talked about many things. It was a fun thing to do."

So there you have it. A guy who washes Toyotas on Lee Highway with such a merry heart just happens to be "the fastest man in town," a world-class runner who most would never recognize or even guess has been a world champion on several occasions. I mean, who would have ever guessed it?