East African masters runners

At Tammi's marathon last week there were a number of very fit Italian runners who looked to be well into their late 40s/early50s and beyond.  At the 20 mile mark where I watched impressed with their fitness and hopeful about the future of my own running, many were on pace to run in the 2:40s/2:50s.

With all the prominence of the region's distance champions, we rarely hear about East African masters runners, the Kenyan and Ethiopian equivalents of the men and women in their late-40s and up who grace weekend morning road races with lissome bodies and, often, intimidatingly fast times.  So I was surprised to come accross this article (linked at letsrun.com) from a Kenyan newspaper.  At 54, Francis Kimeli Kimei is aiming to run a 1:15 half marathon.

It seems pretty clear why masters running might be a first-world phenomenon.  The current life expectancy for a Kenyan male is about 59 years, and most people in the country work in agriculture.  By most accounts, running provides a way out of poverty for young people and there is an "up-or-out" mentality in the sport.  Either you make it to a level where you can win significant prize money for yourself, or quit. 

It's this mentality, I believe, that is part of the reason behind Kenyan dominance.  The poverty of the place means that it's foolish to think of your running career as lasting longer than ten years tops (Kenyan running is like the NFL in that regard, and the way the Kenyans train, just as punishing physically).  Mere hobby running is a laughable idea when you have to do hard agricultural labor just to survive.  For whatever reasons (more likely historical and cultural than genetic), the Kenyans have a long tradition of excelling in distance running, and because they're not so strong in other sports like soccer, this tradition means that running attracts the best athletic talent, unlike in the U.S. where people like this blogger who were too slow or too uncoordinated or not sports-minded enough to play real sports like football, basketball, and baseball bring our gangly knees and elbows to a spot on the cross-country team. 

Imagine what U.S. distance running would be if track were the prestige sport, if you had all the talented athletes going out for cross-country rather than football and basketball--or, nowadays, soccer.  In about ten years or so, we'll see that the mainstreaming of soccer will have been a boon for American distance running.  Among mainstream sports that lots of kids play, including the talented ones, soccer is the closest to running.  It builds endurance and gets kids used to running a lot, but on top of that, it  demands and builds those supplementary athletic skills that distance runners lack: agility, speed, and strength.  Middle distance star Andrew Wheating, who played soccer until his junior year of high school when he switched to cross country, represents the vanguard of what I predict will be a trend in the makeup of runners' athletic resumes.

Of course, the problem is that even as soccer expands the pool of potential distance runners to include actual talented athlets, it does not expand the pool enough.  Soccer in the U.S., one suspects, is a suburban sport that draws mainly (though not exclusively) on affluent whites.  The same city kids who fall prey to the obesity epidemic will for some of the same reasons never be runners.  There's not enough space in the inner city, at least not enough space that one can move safely through.  For a huge part of the American population, there are structural barriers to participation in running, and this is to the detriment of the sport.  Running simply does not attract the best talent.