Unity is scarcer than talent
In a country full of gifted runners, the hard part is not finding athletes but getting them to work together. Raw ability is plentiful; the cooperation that lets it grow is what runs short.
Performance
Out of Thin Air: Running Wisdom and Magic from Above the Clouds in Ethiopia
Worldwide · 2020s
10 ideas
Buy on AmazonFifteen months training with Ethiopian runners shows group formation, terrain, aspiration, trust, spiritual ideas, rest, and a running economy from inside the community.
Nobody trains alone here
Among these runners, running alone is treated with suspicion, and every session is done in a group. Runners feed off one another's energy and improve together, which turns individual effort into a shared one.
Start slow, embrace the slowness
Even runners capable of world-class marathons begin training runs at a jogging pace and only gradually speed up. The slow opening is not wasted time but a deliberate part of the work.
Pointless movement steals recovery
Running laps is seen as unnecessary movement that goes nowhere and gets in the way of recovering. Effort that does not move you forward is treated as a cost to rest, not as extra training.
Places carry trainable powers
Runners choose particular places for their terrain, temperature, air and surfaces, and use those forces to enrich their training. A place's value is at once physical, like thin high-altitude air, cultural, like being the ground where famous runners trained, and spiritual, a belief that its energy passes into the runner.
Training is more art than science
Running knowledge here is built through bodily experience, mixed with magic and mysticism, and lab-based sport science is viewed with scepticism. The author concludes that coaching athletes is more art than science.
Hard terrain as natural doping
Zigzagging playfully through forest on uneven ground is called the local form of doping. In the author's view, the runners are right in a metaphorical sense: the forest both builds strength and serves as a rejuvenating, reflective space where they think about their path as athletes.
Fitness comes and goes unbidden
Runners speak of 'condition', a mysterious and fickle state of readiness that arrives and leaves without warning. Treating form as something that cannot be fully controlled shapes how athletes read their own bodies and outcomes, even to the point of seeing results as decided by God.
Running is not one thing
There are many running cultures, each with its own logic about pace, eating, terrain and company. Talking about running as if everyone everywhere does it the same way is an unhelpful starting point.
Running as a way to change lives
The same training groups hold everyone from night watchmen hoping running will transform their lives to world-class marathoners. That hope is what makes early-hour hill sessions and punishing terrain make sense to the people doing them.