The Sub2Hr project wants to use cutting-edge science to break the record. But what do Ethiopian athletes, its favoured candidates, think about the plan? I found out at a rural training camp in Gondar
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.”
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