review by George Brose
I've relied heavily on others, especially Paul O'Shea to review the literature of running for this blog, but this one belongs to me. Sorry, Paul. A few weeks ago in my local library, I found Out of Thin Air, Running Wisdom and Magic from Above the Clouds in Ethiopia published by Bloomsbury Sport, London in 2020, 262 pages, by Michael Crawley.
What intrigued me from the get go are Michael Crawley's credentials, a Phd. in cultural anthropology who spent 15 months in Ethiopia living with some top flight Ethiopian runners in their world not the tourist world, not the missionary world, not the business world but with them everyday, eating, drinking, sleeping, learning passable Amharic, and running with them on their terms. Crawley is a legit 2:20 marathoner from Scotland. What more could a reader ask in the way of credibility from an author? Imagine reading a running book written by Margaret Mead.
I learned history from the early days of Abebe Bikila and his training partner Wami Biratu who was minutes better than Bikila before they went to Rome in 1960. Biratu unfortunately got sick just before the Games and could not compete. Otherwise we may have been looking at him as the first African to win a gold medal in the Olympics. Biratu alive and in his 90's still runs regularly and is highly respected in his country. They were first trained by a Swedish military attache in Addis Ababa Onni Niskanen. What Niskanen imparted to them has since been taken and adapted to the Ethiopian way of doing things. And believe me the Ethiopians do things quite differently when it comes to distance training although fartlek has been retained in their cornucopia.
How big is running in Ethiopia? Over 5,000 serious runners live in Addis Ababa. This is the peak of the pyramid as there is an interlaced network of clubs around the country, especially in the higher elevations. The primary source of runners is farm kids hoping to get out of that way of life to make a score on the international stage and secure enough money to establish themselves and their families in a more comfortable existence. Addis is located at about 2200 meters of elevation about 7200 feet, but clubs can be found at 10,000 feet. And some of the good runners go to those altitudes to train. In Addis, long runs begin at 7200 feet and work their way up to 9000 feet. The men and women like to run in the early morning. Getting up at 3:00 or 4:00AM is not considered extravagant. And a second workout is normally expected each day.
Those clubs in the rural areas have the goal of sending their best to Addis to hook up with an agent and a coach who can get them invites to international events. A prize of $5,000.00 can take a person a long way on the road to self sufficiency. But many of those 5000 runners in town are working one and two jobs to make ends meet hoping for that elusive payday. As well they may receive a small stipend from their club. The government is supportive of all this as the runners bring money back into the economy with their international running. They cannot run outside the country without a national federation permission that can control the issuing of passports. If they fail at their endeavors and do not produce, their future is back to the farms or the meager existence in the city. So incentive is way up there
Training is another thing that can be seen through Crawley's eyes as an experienced runner. The Ethiopians run together, they literally try to stay in step with each other running often in single files on one of several 'trails' outside the capital. Most clubs have a bus that takes them to a trail head and leaves them off to start their run. It then picks them up at the end of the run and distributes water and other drinks along the way. A leader is assigned and the others follow single file. Leaders are changed along the way. The leader often is looking back to see that others are staying in step and clicking his fingers to give the beat to the followers to encourage them. They run in ziz zags through the eucalyptus forests that have been planted on the formerly barren hills outside the city. I remember once seeing Tanzanian runners running this way in step and thought how peculiar this seemed. Running in America is much more of an individual thing and solo training is often what one needs to do when the work schedule and family schedules are demanding. If you get together once a week with a club that is about all one can do. In Ethiopia, running alone is hardly an option. One of the motivations is that hyenas are sometimes found along those trails in the forest and being alone gives a pack of hyenas a serious advantage in the survival game. The various drinks made from local grains and the 'juicing' that some of the more successful runners take is well covered by Crawley and it is always on a personal level rather than a series of formulaic descriptions. You could go through this book and construct a very westernized structured description of everything, but Crawley leaves that to the reader if the reader so pleases. For me the most difficult part of reading this very enjoyable book was keeping up with the characters because of the Amharic names of people and remembering who was who. Was this a runner, a coach, an ascending runner, a descending runner? Sometimes I would have to retrace my steps in the book to stay on track. It was a book I did not want to finish too quickly.
Last night watching the World Championships women's 5000 meters race the book became very clear to me how the Ethiopian women applied all the principles explained in Out of Thin Air. The three Ethiopian women Segay, Seyaum, and Giday ran as a team, taking turns between themselves leading their pack, even if there was another runner at the front. They seemed to be constantly in communication with each other. Chebet, the Kenyan managed to squeeze into 2nd place at the tape, but if the race had been scored as a cross country match, the Ethiopians would have prevailed. Unexplainable was the loss by Sifan Hassan, also an Ethiopian, who has followed a very different path and still had enormous success on the world stage. More questions still to be answered. George Brose
