His exhausted eyes and wobbly limp say it all. It’s been a long, hard day, and I expect he would rather be resting than having dinner with strangers. He had just attempted a half-marathon world record in Portugal, but came up short with a 59:15 clocking — still the 7th-fastest time in history. He sits down beside me and tells me he is very tired but happy to be with us. I can’t resist; I have to find out the secret to his success. He comes to life and eagerly responds with five simple words: “First you must win yourself. Of course you must train hard, but after that, everything is easy. If you come to my country, you will see.”
Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie may be the greatest distance runner this planet has ever seen, with 26 world records to his name. He also knows what defeat feels like, having come up short many times in world-record attempts and championship finals — at last year’s Olympics, for instance, he finished 6th in the 10,000m behind two of his younger countrymen. But he always bounces back: A month after Beijing, he broke the marathon world record in Berlin with a time of 2:03:59. So, 7 months after his motivational tips, I decided to go to his country and see what I could learn.
At 5:30 a.m. I’m abruptly awakened by the hustle and bustle of a typical morning in Addis Ababa: barking dogs, the banging of construction, locals conversing either in the local language of Amharic or one of Ethiopia’s 84 other dialects. I climb out of bed and mentally prepare myself for another training day at nearly 3,000 meters (10,000 feet), where I’m sucking wind on easy runs that feel like a threshold workout and my heart rate is 20 beats per minute faster than normal. First, I head to the breakfast table for the usual: porridge made with full milk and butter (“Athletes must have the extra fat for energy,” they tell us), along with very strong coffee (grounds included) or tea loaded with several spoonfuls of sugar — carbohydrate loading at its simplest.
There are a dozen athletes in our group, representing various nationalities and having some of the best running credentials in the world, including Ethiopian native Maryam Jamal, the reigning world champion over 1500m who now represents Bahrain; England’s European champion Mo Farah; Swedish Olympic finalist Mustafa Mohammed; and Lidia Chojecka, a sub-4-minute 1500m runner from Poland. We’ve all come to experience one of the most vibrant running cultures in the world, in the hope that by doing what the Ethiopians do, we can also float around the track in world-best times. We are here to eat, sleep, and breathe running.
In addition to the mix of foreign athletes, we’re joined by a local guide, hired to be our pacemaker and to show us around the trails. Omeno is a marathoner with a best time of 2:15 — a mark that only one Canadian beat last year — but is a dime-a-dozen in Ethiopia. He’s around 35 years old, he thinks, but he’s not exactly sure of his age. This is actually quite common in Ethiopia, since birth records are scarce in some areas, but no one seems to care. Age is how you feel, and if you feel you can run fast, then why retire? Every morning, the tall and extremely lean Omeno travels about 90 minutes to arrive at our guest house by 6 a.m. to meet us for training.
After breakfast, we hop in the van for the very bumpy, death-defying drive through the city, weaving in and out of cars, herds of cattle, groups of people walking to work, and the occasional brave cyclist. Every few minutes our driver Tariku reassuringly yells back, “Just crazy people, no problem,” as we clutch our seats in fear. Finally, we leave the city behind and arrive in an area called Zindafa, where athletes go to train. Here there is a renowned 16K loop, which sits at an altitude of 2,700 meters. This is where the who’s who of Ethiopian athletes run their way to the top. While training there, we cross paths with at least 100 local runners.
Despite the punishing altitude, the 16K loop probably has faster course records than many world-class races. During my first week in the thin air, I struggle around the loop in a taxing 80 minutes. By the third week, the best I can do is 72 minutes. I’m proud of myself until one of the local young female athletes, who can’t even get a spot on the Ethiopian national team, tells me she ran it in 66 minutes a week earlier. I am even more humbled when I hear that Meseret Defar, the former world record holder for 5000m, runs the loop in 62 minutes.
We train, eat lunch, take a nap, then train again in the afternoon, eat dinner, and go to bed early. Our days are on repeat for 3 weeks: wake up, eat, run, eat, afternoon nap, snack, run, eat, and sleep again.
Ethiopia is full of hidden endurance running talent just waiting for the opportunity to make it. This rocky 16K circuit is their proving ground, where they can see how they measure up to some of the best in the world. “They see their fellow countrymen like [Olympic champions] Tirunesh Dibaba and Kenenisa Bekele become superstars, and they see what is possible,” says Kassahun Yilma, a local sports journalist. Maryam says she grew up watching Gebrselassie run around their village and was inspired by his achievements. “Life was not easy growing up in our small village,” she says, “but I saw that running was a way to have a better life.” She and her husband and coach Tareq now have houses in Ethiopia, Switzerland, and Bahrain, and are building a luxury hotel in Addis.
In addition to his wife, Tareq has coached many top African athletes, among them Kenyan-born 800m runner Yusuf Kamel, a silver medalist at the World Indoor Championships with a best time of 1:42.79. Athletes from East Africa — Kenya and Ethiopia in particular — have dominated distance running to an unprecedented degree in recent decades, leaving observers searching for an explanation. To Tareq, the answer is simple: The common denominator among Kenyan and Ethiopian athletes is their will to win and their willingness to train incredibly hard. “What I’ve seen with other athletes compared to those in Ethiopia or Kenya is that they can’t accept only running in their life. They must do other things, and this makes them tired,” he says. “Athletics comes number one for African athletes; there is nothing else. They train very hard and sleep the rest of the day to recover. There is no second job or social time. They are very disciplined and work very hard, because they realize this is what it takes to be the best in the world, and this is what their rivals are doing.”
Scientists have been trying to determine whether it’s nature or nurture that fuels East African dominance. In terms of nature, Kenyans and Ethiopians share a proximity to the Great Rift Valley, which runs north-south across East Africa for 5,000 kilometers at an altitude of 2,000 meters or higher. But even though most of Ethiopia’s altitude is good for endurance runners, the vast majority of Ethiopian runners come from a region called Arsi, which accounts for just 5% of the country’s population. A Danish study found that 3/4 of Ethiopia’s top marathoners traveled more than 5K to school on foot each day when they were young. This means that Ethiopian runners have an extra 10–15 years of easy aerobic endurance training compared to the average Western runner — and it also explains my inability to shake the young kids who casually fall in beside us on our runs through the countryside.
Altitude isn’t enough to explain the differences, though; after all, many Western runners have tried to match this so-called advantage by training at altitude. After spending 3 weeks as an “Ethiopian athlete,” I started to get a sense of how nurture might also play a role. For one thing, the competitive nature of the Ethiopians seems to be instilled from a young age. During training one day, I watched 2 boys, each about 3 years old, running alongside Mo Farah. Mo was cheering them on, and it soon became a race. As they got tired, the boys started pushing each other to the side to gain an advantage. “Ethiopians don’t like to lose; it’s in our blood to win,” Omeno told me, as we watched the young kids fighting for victory.
This competitive attitude has encouraged success — and those who achieve it are rewarded. “Each time Kenenisa [Bekele] or any Ethiopian athlete wins a major championship medal, they are rewarded with a piece of land from the Ethiopian government,” Tareq explained, as we drove past one of Bekele’s new construction sites. Even regular club athletes receive a salary from the government that is enough to live on, so they can focus on training to reach a higher level. Along with financial compensation, the great Ethiopian athletes are revered: At a small neighborhood barbecue that we attended with Maryam and Tareq’s family, Meseret Defar could barely sit down for all the fans asking for a picture or autograph.
But when I spoke to Defar, I realized she’s just a regular athlete. “How’s your training? Do you like our country?” she asks me. When I tell her I love it, but the altitude is tough, she reassures me that it’s difficult for her, too. “Don’t worry, training was so hard for me this morning that I got sick in the middle,” she says. “Sometimes the altitude is very difficult, but it will make you strong.”
I came to Ethiopia to watch and learn from the advice of my gracious, talented, and very fast hosts. Initially, though, I was skeptical about a lot of the advice I received, because it was so different to what we’re taught in Canada. The first thing I noticed was how different their warmup drills are from the Eastern European-influenced drills most Canadian athletes learn. If you watch any Ethiopian athlete warm up, you’ll likely see the exact same series of drills: first, an easy jog while hunched over, shaking your arms out as if your hands are asleep; then a series of arm swings; and finally, a series of what I’ll call “rock kicks” at different angles across the body, like you’re Axl Rose at a Guns N’ Roses concert.
Although unfamiliar, I have incorporated some of them into my own regimen. They provide a great chance to catch your breath after the typical Ethiopian warmup run, where you start jogging at a pedestrian pace and progressively accelerate until you’re running at your threshold pace for the last few minutes. They tell me this entire warmup is very important, so that the first interval of a workout or the start of a race doesn’t come as a shock to the body. Another major aspect of their training that I’ve adopted is short, fast hill repeats, with lots of rest (e.g., 6 x 15-second hills with 2:00 rest), which helps maintain speed and explosiveness throughout the year, even when doing a lot of endurance training.
Finally, on all my recovery runs, the Ethiopian athletes stressed the importance of running on soft ground in the forest to make sure you go slow enough to really recover. They don’t worry too much about their pace, but instead about “getting good oxygen” from the trees and “soft ground” for the body. It’s also a must to run single-file and weave in and out of the trees to teach your body to change directions and pace, like you would in a race. Another extremely important aspect of recovery, as Tareq mentioned, is plenty of sleep, which is what you’ll find all Ethiopian athletes doing when they aren’t running or eating. Tirunesh Dibaba claims when she is training hard, she’ll sleep up to 2 hours during the day and 9–10 hours at night. “Must you eat and rest well after training,” is a phrase I heard constantly.
Perhaps the hardest thing to emulate is the mindset I observed in many of the Ethiopian runners I met. They seem to have amnesia when it comes to bad workouts or races. Maryam is always saying things like, “Today my body is not good, but tomorrow, this does not matter.” This approach is particularly useful in a race, where you don’t worry about who has beaten you in the past or what other people’s best times are. For example, my Ethiopian friend Chengere Tolossa lost an epic battle in a 10K road race against a top Kenyan athlete, despite finishing in 28:48 on cobblestones. After the race, he just smiled and said, “Today, no good, next week I will win.” The following week, Chengere did just that, crossing the line in first place clocking 19:52 for a hilly 7K race, with his arms raised and a huge smile.
Training in Ethiopia was an eye-opening and life-changing experience for me. Like most of us, I need to race more like Chengere, without worrying about the established pecking order. I also need to take Gebrselassie’s advice to “win myself,” because it’s the attitude, rather than the altitude, that breeds success — that, and a lot of very hard training on the famous 16K loop.
Originally published in Canadian Running, May/June 2009. Hilary Stellingwerff is one of Canada’s top 1500m runners.
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