The first rule of Maasai Club is, you do talk about Maasai Club.

The actor Edward Norton (American History X, Fight Club) plans to run this year's ING New York City Marathon with a team including three Maasai warriors(!)to raise money for the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust, an outfit dedicated to protecting the Maasai's tribal homeland in east Africa.

(Photo, from left: Samson Parashina, Edward Norton, Parashi Ntanin, Andrew Wolff, Martin Sunte, Luca Belpietro. Courtesy Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust.)

So how does a celebrity like Edward Norton go from Hollywood to the New York City Marathon... via Africa? And what's it like, training with the Maasai? (Do they do Yasso 800s?) We asked him, in an e-mail interview.

Runner's World: People run marathons for all sorts of charities, most notably those linked with diseases such as cancer. How did you wind up running to raise funds for the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust? 
Edward Norton: I’ve been involved with MWCT for nearly 10 years. I helped start the U.S. nonprofit that supports MWCT’s work and I’m the president of the Board now.  It’s an effort that I’ve been very personally involved with at all levels. We had previously raised money through dinner party events but this year we wanted to step it up a bit, reach a little higher in terms of the level of funding we try to raise and introduce the work to a wider community. And just as important, we wanted to try to do it in a way that could involve our Maasai friends and partners actively in the effort over here.  The marathon seemed like a very organic way to involve them.