In a two-part series in the New York Times entitled Man vs Marathon, Jeré Longman took a thorough look at Yannis Pitsiladis’s project to accelerate the process that will, almost certainly, lead to a human being running the arbitrary distance of 26.2 miles in two hours. In the article, Pitsiladis, a sports psychologist, says that the most likely candidate to achieve this feat would be an Ethiopian or Kenyan with a hard, rural upbringing, and that the best way for them to run that fast for that long would be to minimise the amount of weight on their feet, probably by running barefoot or with merely “a film that covers the bottom of the foot”.
I read the first article while I was staying at a rural training camp in Gondar, Ethiopia, where I am doing anthropological fieldwork with aspiring young Ethiopian runners. They happen to fit Pitsiladis’s model: they come from remote rural areas and spent much of their childhood and adolescence running barefoot or in cheap plastic sandals. I read the second sitting at the side of a field in nearby Debre Tabor with some of the young distance runners from the camp, waiting for the start of the Cultural Sports Games, where people from the nine different states in Ethiopia came together to compete in horse riding, gena (resembling hockey with rough-hewn wooden sticks and fewer rules) and tigel, a form of Ethiopian wrestling. We were sitting at the side of the field for the second time that day, having been told at the proposed start time of 9am that people didn’t feel like it quite yet and we should come back at 3pm. At 3.30pm, there was still no sign of any action. The runners had put on traditional Amhara clothing for the occasion and didn’t seem concerned. “This is cultural sport, Mike. This is the good life, no one is in a hurry.” And running, I ask. Is that the good life too? “Sort of,” I’m told. “But running is always about condition, every day worrying about condition, condition, condition.”
This seems to be a good time to ask them about the possibility of a two-hour marathon one day; is there a way for them to work even harder, to go even faster? “Two hours in the marathon?” my friend Telahun* replies, before relaying the question for the others. “Yikabadal,” they murmur together: “This is heavy …” Telahun thinks for a while then adds, respectfully: “Maybe for Kenenisa (Bekele, world record holder at 5,000m and 10,000m) he says, “but the Kenenisa of six or seven years ago.” He then asks the question that Pitsiladis’s research seems to have missed: “Why is this man so obsessed with that anyway? Aren’t we running fast enough already?”
I tell them that the project is looking for $ 30m (£24m) of investment, and they raise their eyebrows. Running clubs in Ethiopia pay modest salaries to their athletes of around $ 100 a month. “So he’ll start a club with good salaries?” Telahun asks. I’m not so sure about that, I tell them. The irony is that the sub-two hour project is focusing on cutting-edge science to shave the remaining 177 seconds off the marathon world record. The project epitomises modernity’s project to keep pushing forwards, and to accelerate at all costs. And yet the life that Pitsiladis demands of his subjects is the opposite of this. His ideal candidate should avoid footwear at all costs. They should live off the land. Preferably they should live a life that enables them to practise discomfort, and they should have to walk long distances as well as run hard. On our way back from a training session the other day, we waited for an auto rickshaw to give us a ride back to the camp. A middle-aged woman pushed in front of us in the queue, eyeing our tracksuits and saying: “You’re sportsmen, you can go on foot!’ No doubt Pitsiladis would agree.
When I asked my sub-agent friend Gebre about Pitsiladis’s project, he told me that he thought it might be possible, but that you’d need to have a special training camp focused exclusively on that goal. “You’d have to lock them in,” he told me, “and only let them out to fly to races. And after the race they’d need to be straight back on the plane and back to the training camp.” He explained that most runners who run fast marathons and win good prize money want to enjoy life in the city a little bit. “They’ll buy a car, and drive back to Bekoji [the small town where much of Pitsiladis’s reseach is based], and then it’s finished for the two-hour marathon for them,” he told me.
Is there really anything wrong with these young men wanting to live their lives? One of the main problems with marketing distance running is that coverage fails to bring out the personalities of the athletes. Forcing an even more Spartan approach to training is hardly likely to solve this problem. Having become good friends with some Ethiopian marathon runners over the past year, this is a real shame for the sport.
My worry is that the obsession with the two-hour marathon will lead to races where a phalanx of identically dressed pacemakers attempt to escort one exceptionally talented athlete to a world record. Yet the most exciting marathons in recent years, have been the duals, the tactical victories and the upsets; Wanjiru vs Kebede in Chicago 2010, Stephen Kiprotich’s Olympic title in 2012 or Meb Keflezighi’s 2014 Boston win. Also, given the problems with performance-enhancing drugs both Kenya and Ethiopia are currently facing, now may not be the time to obsess over the watch. The athletes in Gondar were sceptical about the possibility until I mentioned drugs. “Well, yeah, with doping of course it’s possible,” they said, “with doping you can run like a car.”
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