Long read: The Ethiopian running secret

Michael Crawley is an award-winning author and social anthropologist based at Durham University, UK. He is also the author of “To the Limit: The Meaning of Endurance from Mexico to the Himalayas” (2024).

Geoff Burns is a sports physiologist for the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee and a faculty member at the University of Michigan’s School of Kinesiology.

Together, Messrs Crawley & Burns have written a terrific piece on how modern science and data collection and technical analysis does NOT win marathons. The authors show that Ethiopia’s marathon winners are propelled towards success by something else. So, what is that something else? The article answers the question in a way which goes a long way towards explaining India’s lack of success at the Olympics. At the core of success in marathon running is “trust and co-operation”.

“In 2025, athletes from Ethiopia and the nearby East African nations of Kenya, Uganda, Eritrea and Tanzania filled 69 and 74 of the top-100 spots in the World Athletics marathon rankings for men and women, respectively. This is an extraordinary level of dominance, with few parallels in global sport. In these countries, distance running expertise is seen as something that is intuitive, learnt from others, honed through experience, and deeply dependent upon a group training dynamic. Increasingly, though, this approach goes against the grain of cutting-edge sports science, which advocates the monitoring of an ever-increasing number of physiological variables and individualised, precisely engineered training.”

The authors first lay out the very scientific Western methods of marathon training: “In Western sports science, endurance training is now viewed and prescribed as an energetic, metabolic stress. Metabolism itself is simply energy transfer: the chemical energy in our foods gets converted into electrical energy inside our cells, which then ultimately gets converted to mechanical energy in the contractions of our muscles. The rate and efficiency of these processes is the intensity of our exercise and training. Certain rates are relatively unstressful (ie, you could hold a conversation while maintaing them), higher rates are stressful but sustainable….

The aforementioned molecule, lactate, is simply the product of breaking apart sugar in the muscle, glucose specifically, for rapid energy in the cells. The rate that it appears and disappears in the blood is a tight proxy for the internal rate of energy combustion in the cells, and its stability – accumulation, or lack thereof – reveals the sustainability of that rate of energy flux, revealing whether the athlete’s body is fundamentally in control or out of control. More and more athletes are relying on this biomarker, along with heart rate – a more established but sometimes less reliable marker of physiological strain – to guide the precise speeds and intensities at which they perform their individual training. It’s not uncommon for elite distance runners to pause every few reps in a session to take a blood sample to calibrate their paces…

This approach to training, often referred to as the ‘Norwegian Method’…can be seen more agnostically and simply as an engineering approach. Each athlete has very precise intensities at which they should train to get the most out of the session without compromising the ability to do the next session…It requires frequent measurement of heart rate and blood lactate. …And the frequent measurements of internal strain against external stress themselves serve as a constant, controlled feedback loop for the athlete and coach. If the athlete is continuously doing their intervals to control their blood lactate at 3.2 mmol/L, and the speeds that elicit this level go from 3:07/km down to 3:05/km down to 3:03/km, the success of the prescription is obvious.”

Then the authors explain the Ethiopian approach which is remarkably different: “…control and precision are exactly at odds with the Ethiopian valuation and management of their energy. A tailored, individualised management of physical energy is necessarily non-social, while in Ethiopia, the important properties of energy are that it is understood to be a limited substance that must be carefully monitored and protected. It is understood to be a ‘transbodily’ substance – that is, it can flow between people, as well as between people and their environments.

While monitoring technologies such as GPS watches are now widely available in Ethiopia, they are used selectively, and seen as inappropriate for some kinds of running. On the eucalyptus-forested slopes of the Entoto Mountains, which reach an altitude of 3,200 m at Mount Entoto, the precise quantification of speed and distance is seen as a distraction. Rather, the emphasis is on creating zigzagging routes through the forest, using the uneven ground and slow pace to enable the legs to recover. Some runners are seen as better at creating routes, so are sought out to lead. The sessions are different every time and rarely follow the forest trails.

The rejection of technologies of quantification was especially clear on one particular run, where the athletes were told by the coach to cover between 17-18 km in an hour and 20 minutes. Bogale, who was put in charge of leading, was given a Garmin watch, and the runners set off on a particularly meandering route, often turning 180 degrees around trees, and at one point having to use tree roots to pull themselves up a slope. After running into a deep hollow and disturbing (to some of the runners’ evident glee) some hyenas, one of the other runners shouted to Bogale to speed up, or we wouldn’t ‘have enough kilometres’ on returning. He refused, saying that with this kind of training the important thing was to ‘go up and down’. Here, the intuitive and creative approach to exploring the forest rendered the GPS device – and the coach’s authority – superfluous. When the athletes returned to the clearing at the end of the run, the coach was told that the watch was not working”

The Western approach the authors say relies on the individual runner operating by himself as a solo participant. The Ethiopian approach sees marathon running as a team sport: “In Ethiopia, it is the ability to run in a way that protects your own and others’ energy that is seen as the primary skill of an endurance athlete. In this instance, doing this well was often seen to require the rejection of quantified data rather than its embrace. Rather than seeing energy as contained within the individual body, and the athlete as a system of inputs and outputs, Ethiopian athletes see the process of expending and monitoring energy as a collective responsibility. Because the total amount of energy is seen as limited, for one athlete to gain within this system necessarily involves another athlete losing something. For this reason, there is a complex ethics of training in Ethiopia, which ensures that energy is shared as evenly as possible.

Among Ethiopian athletes, running alone is seen as deeply antisocial in the same way that eating alone is. Running together is an important way to ensure that people control themselves and avoid ‘burning up’, as they put it, by training too hard. Similarly, it is important that food is shared equally between athletes, and if people fail to do their ‘duty’ as a pacemaker, they are often required to redress this energetic imbalance by ‘sponsoring’ bread or bananas for the rest of the athletes.”

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