The World’s Greatest Accidental (Altitudinous) Talent Sieve
Sugar, some sugar,” he says. I must have looked confused. “You know, sugar. I appreciate.”
We were standing, the runner and I, in Iten, Kenya, on a dirt track in Kamariny Stadium. But to call Kamariny a stadium is to elevate a sandlot to a cathedral. On one side is a wooden bleacher painted sky blue and crooked as rotten teeth. On the other side is a sheer cliff four thousand feet above the Rift Valley floor and eight thousand feet above sea level. Dozens of runners circle the track in interval sessions, as a sheep wanders over the escarpment to graze on the infield.
The runner I’m speaking with is twenty-four-year-old Evans Kiplagat, and he wants me to buy him sugar. Earlier that Thursday morning, Kiplagat loped six miles to the track, then ran a hard workout. In a few minutes, he’ll embark on the six-mile trip home. If I don’t buy him food, he’ll return hungry to the wooden shed that a local man lets him use on his shamba—a subsistence farming plot.
Kiplagat’s parents did not own the shamba on which they lived, so when they both died of illnesses in 2001 he couldn’t remain on the land. He is thankful for his current room, “but food is a problem,” he says. Most Tuesdays and Thursdays, Kiplagat jogs to the track and latches on to a training group that includes an athlete like Geoffrey Mutai, a Boston and New York City marathon champion, or Saif Saaeed Shaheen (formerly Stephen Cherono), the world record holder in the 3,000-meter steeplechase who was raised and trains in Kenya but was paid to switch his citizenship to Qatar. After the workout, Kiplagat will log more miles, walking among his friends’ homes to see if anyone has leftover ugali, the doughy cornmeal that rural Kenyans eat every day of the week. If he scrounges up enough food, he’ll go for another six miles in the evening. For Kiplagat, every day is a two-a-day, if not a three-a-day, and that doesn’t count running six miles each way as transportation to and from the track on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
It is the schedule of a man who burns to run, whose passion is to compete on the highest stage, and to stand atop the podium and weep at his national anthem. Except, that’s not who Kiplagat is.
“If you could get a job in the military, would you stop training?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“What about a job with the police?”
“Yes. Any job,” he says.
Kiplagat would prefer to have a job that would allow him to continue training, but he is content to stop running tomorrow if someone offers him a decent living. He started training in 2007 after walloping his high school friends in a small race. Last year, Kiplagat ran 29:30 in a hilly 10K road race in Kenya, an outstanding time relative to most of the world, but not one that makes him stand out from the Kamariny Stadium crowd. So he’ll keep trying to borrow enough money to travel to Kenyan cities for races so that he can post a time that will attract an agent.
There are Evans Kiplagats all over Kamariny—about one hundred runners were training at the track the day I was there—striding right alongside world champions. Sporadically, an unfamiliar man will wander onto the track and right away try to keep pace with Olympians. If he holds up, perhaps he’ll come back. If not, he’ll slink back to the shamba. It’s a microcosm of the overall training scene in Kenya: there are few training secrets here—some top runners don’t even have coaches—but there are hordes of runners willing to train multiple times a day, as full-time athletes. In the United States, a top college distance runner usually has to put off making a living for a few years in order to chase a dream. “In Kenya, it’s just the opposite,” says Ibrahim Kinuthia, a former international runner and now a coach in Kenya. There is no career or grad school to delay, and thus no opportunity cost for most rural Kenyans to take a crack at training with the elites.* Given Kenya’s annual per capita income of $800, according to the World Bank, the potential payoff for running success is greater, relatively speaking, than even an NBA contract is for an inner-city American boy. Winning a single major marathon brings a six-figure payday. Even earning a few thousand dollars in smaller road races in America and Europe is a relative windfall for most rural Kenyans. Successful runners quickly become one-man or one-woman economies. In Eldoret, the major city near Iten and Kamariny Stadium, Moses Kiptanui, the former steeplechase world record holder, owns a dairy farming business. He also owns the trucks that transport the milk, and the building in town with the supermarket that sells the milk. The result of these economic incentives is an army of aspiring runners who undertake training plans fit for Olympians, with many falling by the wayside, and those who survive becoming professionals.
Interestingly, a system that thrives on the hard work of many is fueled by an abiding belief in natural talent. The Kenyan coaches and runners I spoke with almost uniformly said that it was never too late to begin training. If one has talent, they said, then one just needs to start training hard and elite status will come swiftly.
A number of Kenya’s most luminous running stars have succeeded precisely because they did not assume it was too late. In a hotel in Nairobi I met Paul Tergat, former marathon world record holder and the greatest cross-country runner in history, who told me that he played volleyball in high school and didn’t start running until “between nineteen and twenty, when I started the military. There I met a number of great runners I used to read about, like Moses Tanui and Richard Chelimo. So I trained, and by twenty-one I realized I had the talent.” And by twenty-five he had won the first of five consecutive world cross-country championships.
The similarity to Jamaican sprinting—or to Canadian hockey, or to Brazilian soccer—is that there is a large number of athletes put in the top of the funnel, and a smaller number who display talent and survive the rigorous training and come out the bottom as world beaters.
While some of Kenya’s best runners have entered the game very late, for scores of others, training starts very early in life, before they even know it.
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Kenya is particularly harrowing for Yannis Pitsiladis, the University of Glasgow biologist whose passion is collecting the DNA of elite athletes. Given his fear of flying, he drives all over Kenya. Navigating the pocked roads of rural Kenya is like guiding a marble through the game Labyrinth. (Eventually, you’re going to lose.) And yet, for a decade, Pitsiladis has returned to Kenya over and over. As expected from the Kalenjin running hotbed, he and his colleagues have found that individuals with genes that indicate Nilotic ancestry are vastly overrepresented among elite athletes. But, as in Jamaica, the findings that have most affected him are cultural, not genetic.
Pitsiladis’s work has shown that international-level runners from Kenya are most often of the Kalenjin tribe, most often from poor, rural areas, and very likely to have had to run to school growing up. In one study Pitsiladis conducted with colleagues, 81 percent of 404 Kenyan professional runners had to run or walk a considerable distance to and from primary school as children. Kenyan kids who rely on their feet to get to and from school have 30 percent higher aerobic capacities on average than their peers. World-class athletes were also more likely than lesser athletes to have had to run or walk six miles or more to school. Pitsiladis talks fondly of one ten-year-old boy who was such a proficient runner that he took off at a six-minute-mile pace during a test of his aerobic capacity on a dirt track.
When I visited Kenya, running up and down the red dust hills of Iten, the epicenter of Kalenjin training, occasionally kids would join by my side, excitedly chirping their favorite English phrase: “How are you! How are you!” On my last run in Iten, a boy who looked about five years old tagged along as I trudged up a long hill. The boy was in ragged sandals and carrying a loaf of bread under one arm. He followed for a few minutes and then slunk under a wooden fence, tugging his loaf of bread behind him, and disappeared. It struck me that there is no such thing as a casual jogger in Kenya, only those who run for transportation, those who are killing themselves in training, and those who are not running at all.
After that run, I mentioned the bread boy to Harun Ngatia, a physiotherapist who treats Kenyan pros. “When the boy grows up,” he said, “all he will know is running.” His words reminded me of a late-1990s mock charity drive declared on a now-defunct online track-and-field message board: Help Americans compete in distance running by donating school buses to Kenyan children.
And it isn’t just Kenya. Pitsiladis and a research team found a similar pattern in the world’s second distance running superpower, Ethiopia. As in Kenya, Ethiopian runners tend to come from a traditionally pastoralist ethnic group—the Oromo—and they are also much more likely to have had to run to school than nonrunners, and professional Ethiopian marathon runners are more likely to have had to run long distances to school than professional Ethiopian 5K and 10K runners. Meanwhile, analysis of the mitochondrial DNA of Ethiopian and Kenyan runners shows that their maternal lines are not especially closely related. So there is no single, genetic supertribe of runners that is contiguous from Ethiopia to Kenya. (Ethiopians tend to have more chunks of mitochondrial DNA found in Europeans, possibly reflective of Ethiopia as the original point of migration for all humans outside of Africa.)
No one has conducted a study of the running economy of untrained Ethiopian children, as the Danish scientists did in Kenya, so it is unknown how the Oromo compare with the Kalenjin in that respect, but it is clear that these two groups both embrace running as a way of life. “You have all these kids running,” says Pitsiladis, “and then a boy or girl sees that they can run faster than the others. You absolutely must have the right genes. You must choose your parents correctly, but you have thousands of kids running and the cream rises to the top. After ten years of work, I have to say that this is a socioeconomic phenomenon.”
When I asked Ethiopian icon Derartu Tulu—Olympic 10K gold medalist in 1992 and 2000—if any of her two biological or four adopted kids like to run with her, she replied: “No, they say they get tired when I take them training with me. They don’t like to run. . . . I think it is because they go to school by car.” Says Moses Kiptanui, the Kenyan former steeplechase world record holder, of his children: “A vehicle came and took them to school . . . they like to do easier sports.”
“How many of the top Kenyan runners have sons or daughters who are excelling at running?” Pitsiladis asks, rhetorically, after noting that there are plenty of Kenyan siblings and cousins who excel. “Almost none. Why? Because their father or mother becomes a world champion, has incredible resources, and the child never has to run to school again.”
Still, it would be an unfair stereotype to suggest that all great Kenyan athletes ran to school, as there are conspicuous exceptions, like Paul Tergat, the greatest cross country runner in history. “I think the majority of us are running to school barefoot,” Tergat says. “But my school was very close. I could walk to school.” And the same goes for Wilson Kipketer, one of the greatest middle-distance runners of all time, whose school was next door to his home. Both men were world record holders, so, clearly, running to school is not a necessary trait of a world record holder. Nor is it sufficient. A few of the Kenyan children that Pitsiladis has tested who run miles to school nonetheless have pedestrian aerobic capacities, reminiscent of the low responders in the HERITAGE Family Study. “It’s a small number,” he says, “but there are some.” Not to mention that millions of Kenyan children across the country travel to school on foot, and yet the Kalenjin still stand apart in their running success.
Pitsiladis believes adamantly that in addition to the large number of running kids, there is another essential component to Kenyan running success. It is exactly what the Rift Valley ledges that are home to both the Kalenjin in Kenya and the Oromo in Ethiopia share: altitude. “You must live at altitude,” Pitsiladis says. “Some have said that the best way is to live high and train low. The Kenyans live high and train higher.”
“If it’s just the altitude, where are the runners from Nepal?” Brother Colm O’Connell asked, while sitting in his home in Iten, as 800-meter world record holder David Rudisha sank into the couch.* In the backyard is “the gym,” a single metal pole dipped in cement at both ends so it resembles a barbell.
At the very least, the altitude along the Rift Valley rim—where mosquitoes are scarce—likely prevented Kenyan runners who live there from the distance running disadvantage of genetically lowered hemoglobin, which occurs in people with ancestry in malaria danger zones.
But O’Connell’s question is intriguing, and has been asked rhetorically for years about the Kenyan running phenomenon. Altitude is known to increase red blood cells in athletes who move from sea level to the mountains, so why, then, aren’t runners coming down from the Andes and the Himalayas and smoking the rest of the world, as the Ethiopians and Kenyans have done?
The “Nepali runners” question, though, is actually irrelevant to the Kenyan and Ethiopian running phenomena, and not only because the Himalayan climate does not foster a narrow body type. One clear point of science is that the genetic means by which people in different altitudinous regions of the world have adapted to life at low oxygen are completely distinct. In each of the planet’s three major civilizations that have resided at high altitude for thousands of years, the same problem of survival is met with different biological solutions.
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By the late nineteenth century, scientists figured they understood altitude adaptation. They had studied native Bolivians, living in the Andes at higher than thirteen thousand feet. At that altitude, there are only around 60 percent as many oxygen molecules in each breath of air as at sea level. In order to compensate for the scarce oxygen, Andeans have profuse portions of red blood cells and, within them, oxygen-carrying hemoglobin.
The amount of oxygen in the blood is determined by two factors: how much hemoglobin one has and its “oxygen saturation,” or how much oxygen that hemoglobin is carrying. Because there is so little oxygen in their air, many of the hemoglobin molecules in the blood of the Andean highlanders rush through the body without a full load of oxygen—like roller coaster cars with few passengers. But the Andeans make up for it by having many more cars. This is not necessarily good from an athletic standpoint. Andeans have so much hemoglobin that their blood can become viscous and unable to circulate well, and some Andeans develop chronic mountain sickness.
Nineteenth-century scientists also saw that Europeans who traveled from sea level to altitude responded the same way, by producing more hemoglobin. So the book on altitude adaptation was closed for almost a century—until the 1970s, when Nepal and Tibet began to open to foreigners.
Cynthia Beall, an anthropology professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, started visiting to study Tibetans and Nepalese Sherpas who can live as high as eighteen thousand feet. To her surprise, Beall found that Tibetans had normal, sea-level hemoglobin values, and low oxygen saturation, lower than people at sea level. Few roller coaster cars, and many of them weren’t full.
Most Tibetans have a special version of a gene, EPAS1, that acts as a gauge, sensing the available oxygen and regulating the production of red blood cells so that the blood does not become dangerously thick. But it also means Tibetans don’t have the increase in oxygen-carrying hemoglobin that Andeans do. “So, how exactly are they surviving here?” Beall asked herself. “The oxygen in their blood seems very low, but they’re somehow delivering enough to function normally.”
Eventually, Beall determined that Tibetans survive by having extremely high levels of nitric oxide in their blood. Nitric oxide cues blood vessels in the lungs to relax and widen for blood flow. “The Tibetans have 240 times as much nitric oxide in the blood as we do,” Beall says. “That’s more than in people at sea level who have sepsis,” a life-threatening medical condition. So Tibetans adapted by having very high blood flow in their lungs, and they also breathe deeper and faster than native lowlanders, as if they’re in a constant state of hyperventilation. “They’re spending more energy doing that,” Beall says.
In 1995, Beall and a team moved on to the remaining population in the world that has lived at high altitude for thousands of years: Ethiopians, and specifically the Amhara ethnic group living at 11,600 feet along the Rift Valley. Yet again, she found an altitude biology unique in the world. The Amhara people had normal, sea-level allotments of hemoglobin and normal, sea-level oxygen saturation. The same number of roller coaster cars as sea-level natives and nearly all of them were filled, just as in sea-level natives. “If we didn’t know we were at altitude, I would’ve said we were looking at sea-level people,” Beall says. It’s not entirely clear how the Amhara pull this trick off. But Beall has preliminary data on Amhara Ethiopians that shows they move oxygen unusually rapidly from the tiny air sacs in their lungs into their blood.
New Zealand’s Peter Snell, former mile world record holder turned medical researcher, theorized that enhanced transfer of oxygen from the lungs to the blood might be an advantage for people with altitude ancestry when they came to run at sea level. “It’s possible,” Beall says of that prospect. She once raised it in a paper, but she’s adamant that nobody really knows. Plus, she saw the enhanced oxygen diffusion in her Amhara data, and most of the top Ethiopian runners are Oromo. An Oromo man holds the world records in the 5K and 10K, and an Oromo woman holds the women’s 5K record. (Scientists tracked the Oromo man, Kenenisa Bekele, over two runs at 6:30-per-mile pace, one at just under five thousand feet, and one above ten thousand feet. Astoundingly, his average heart rate only increased from 139 beats per minute to 141 on the higher run.)
Unlike the Amhara, who have been at altitude for thousands of years, Beall says that the pastoralist Oromo moved up from sea level just five hundred years ago. A foreigner would not distinguish Amhara and Oromo people on sight, but in terms of their altitude response, Beall would never confuse them.
Beall tested Oromo people living at about the altitude of Denver, “so you wouldn’t expect to see much,” she says, in terms of elevated hemoglobin. “But they already had more than a gram of hemoglobin more than the Amhara at a comparable altitude.” And the hemoglobin was packed with oxygen. “Their hemoglobin level was definitely higher than you would expect from a random group of lowlanders,” she says. Whereas the Amhara had low hemoglobin even at high altitudes, the Oromo had high hemoglobin even at moderate altitudes.
For one, these differences emphasize the diversity of physiology between peoples who have lived at altitude for different spans of history, and for whom evolution has landed on novel genetic solutions. Himalayans and Amhara Ethiopians are thought to have lived at altitude for thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of years, and Andeans for a shorter span, which may explain why Andeans are not yet fully adapted to their extraordinarily high homeland—and why they greatly elevate hemoglobin, just as lowlanders who go to altitude. (Like the Oromo, Kenya’s Kalenjin are relatively new altitude dwellers, having settled at altitude no more than two thousand years ago.)
As for Beall’s data from the Oromo—the ethnic group of the majority of top Ethiopian runners—they smack of altitude responders. The Oromo she tested increased their hemoglobin markedly even at altitudes below a mile high. And not only do different ethnic groups respond biologically to altitude in unique ways, there is also tremendous variation among individuals from the same ethnic group.
In 2003, a team of scientists from Norway and Texas exposed athletes to 9,200 feet of altitude for one day and looked at changes in the levels of the hormone EPO—which spurs the body to produce red blood cells. (Cheating endurance athletes inject EPO in an effort to force their bodies to produce more red blood cells.) The variation ranged from an athlete whose EPO levels declined, to another whose levels increased more than 400 percent.
In separate work on runners who trained for a month at altitude, those whose supply of red blood cells increased 8 percent on average improved their 5K time by thirty-seven seconds upon returning to sea level, whereas those who had no increase in red blood cells did slightly worse than they had previously in the 5K when they returned to sea level. As with other forms of training—and all manner of medicine—altitude training is most effective if tailored to each athlete’s unique physiology.
The idea of individualized responses to altitude rings true to Bob Larsen, who coached Americans Deena Kastor and Meb Keflezighi—winners, respectively, of a bronze and a silver medal in the 2004 Olympic marathon. “We have some evidence that some people have to be there for a long time,” Larsen says. “It really took Deena about two years of being at altitude. Meb was quick. He was a little flat his second week at altitude, but after about six weeks he set the American record [in the 10K].”
Even with individual variation in altitude response, there seems to be a rough “sweet spot” for training, an altitude where red blood cell production increases, but not too much. Where the air is thin, but not too thin. Andeans and Himalayans live far above it. Anecdotally, the sweet spot is around six to nine thousand feet, high enough to cause physiological changes, but not so high that the air is too thin for hard training.
As it happens, the ridges of the Rift Valley in Ethiopia and Kenya are plumb in the sweet spot. The foremost training bases in Kenya: Eldoret, 6,890 feet. Iten: 7,545 feet. Kapsabet: 6,395 feet. Kaptagat: 7,870 feet. Nyahururu: 7,215 feet. The major training cities in Ethiopia, Addis Ababa and Bekoji, both have running sites around 8,000 to 9,000 feet. In the United States, pro endurance athletes hunting for the sweet spot train in Mammoth Lakes, California: 7,880 feet. Or Flagstaff, Arizona: 7,000 feet.
Preferable to moving to altitude to train is being born there. Altitude natives who are born and go through childhood at elevation tend to have proportionally larger lungs than sea-level natives, and large lungs have large surface areas that permit more oxygen to pass from the lungs into the blood. This cannot be the result of altitude ancestry that has altered genes over generations, because it occurs not only in natives of the Himalayas, but also among American children who do not have altitude ancestry but who grow up high in the Rockies. Once childhood is gone, though, so too is the chance for this adaptation. It is not genetic, but neither is it alterable after adolescence.
No scientist contends that altitude alone forges tireless runners or that it is impossible to become a great distance runner without altitude training. But some, like Pitsiladis, say that it’s simply far less likely. A helpful combination, perhaps, is to have sea-level ancestry—so that hemoglobin can elevate quickly upon training at altitude—but to be born at altitude, in order to develop larger lung surface area, and then to live and train in the sweet spot. This is exactly the story of legions of Kalenjin Kenyans and Oromo Ethiopians.
Coincidentally, or maybe not, Shalane Flanagan, the fastest current American female marathoner—and daughter of a former marathon world record holder—was born and spent part of her childhood in the foothills of the Rockies, in Boulder, Colorado, above a mile high. Ryan Hall, the fastest current male American marathon runner, was raised in Big Bear Lake, California: seven thousand feet, and up.
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Drive north toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, to the point where the black asphalt disappears beneath a wash of brown rock and dirt, and you will be in Truchas, New Mexico, at eight thousand feet.
Not long before the road vanishes, on the left just past a cattle gate, is a low-slung adobe house with a yellow school bus in the yard. The bus hasn’t moved in decades. In the alfalfa field out back, eighty-five-year-old Presiliano Sandoval is working in the heat. His fingers, which haven’t been parallel since before the school bus worked, are curled around the wooden handle of a shovel.
In the adobe house, Presiliano raised the greatest American athlete no one remembers. Even now, Anthony Sandoval lives just an hour’s drive to the southwest, in Los Alamos. Anthony was one of six children, but Presiliano could tell that he was different. Presiliano remembers Anthony, at eight years old, was content to walk alone in the winter into the mountains with a hammer and wedge to split frost-hardened piñon trees.
By the summer of sixth grade, three times a week Anthony was taking his father’s cows several miles into the mountains so they could graze. “It was never less than two hours of walking,” with sporadic running mixed in, Anthony says. He had always been a good runner, but when he returned from that summer, he was by far the fastest boy in school.
Presiliano yearned for his son to get an education that Truchas could not provide, so he enrolled him at Los Alamos High School an hour away, where Anthony was surrounded by the sons and daughters of the physicists and nuclear engineers who worked at Los Alamos National Lab, birthplace of the atomic bomb. The locale was so secretive during World War II that babies born in Los Alamos had “P.O. Box 1663” listed as the city of record on their birth certificates.
At the start of Sandoval’s freshman year, a friend suggested he go out for cross country. “I said, ‘What’s cross country?’” Sandoval recalls. “But I went out that year, and ended up second in the state. And then I never lost another race after that in high school.” In his junior year, Sandoval ran farther than 12.5 miles in 60 minutes, setting the under-twenty world record for a one-hour run. In 1972, his senior year, then 5'6" and 98 pounds, Sandoval won the junior national championships in cross-country.
The Sandovals had no phone in the adobe home in Truchas, but reams of recruiting letters were mailed straight to Los Alamos High School. The boy whose aunts and uncles had been shepherds and uranium miners would go to Stanford. In Palo Alto, Sandoval excelled in class, earning admission to med school while training sixty to seventy miles a week.
At the Pac-8 championships in 1976, his senior year of college, Sandoval won the 10K, just ahead of three Kenyans running for Washington State, one of whom would later set the world record. And then, off his college track training, Sandoval jumped into the 1976 Olympic marathon trials. He finished fourth, one minute and one spot off the Olympic team. So away he went to med school, figuring he would have other chances at the Olympics, when he could actually train for the marathon distance.
But Sandoval was insatiably interested in serving people and in medicine, so he pursued cardiology, a study-intensive specialty that did not accommodate marathon training. Still, Sandoval’s ability was evident. In 1979, immersed in his medical studies, Sandoval managed just thirty-five miles per week of training. It was enough for him to run a 2:14 marathon, an utterly preposterous result given what was essentially a jogger’s training regimen. (A baseball fan might think of this as akin to a guy who takes batting practice in his local beer league and then hits .300 against major league pitchers.)
In 1980, with the Olympics again approaching and still deep in med school, Sandoval carved out a few months of rigorous training. It was enough. At mile 23 of the Olympic Trials in Buffalo, he simply ran away. He finished in 2:10:19, a U.S. Olympic Trials record that stood for twenty-seven years. “Tony was, at that point, probably the fastest runner in the world,” says Frank Shorter, the last American man to win gold in the Olympic marathon.
But it was the year of the Moscow Olympic Games, and President Jimmy Carter decreed that the U.S. would lead sixty-four countries in an Olympic boycott to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Sandoval, like 465 other American athletes, was forced to stay home.
As he embarked on his career as a cardiologist, Sandoval began a pattern that would last more than a decade: he would try, but struggle, to ramp up his training each time the Olympics approached. In 1984, he finished sixth at the trials. In 1988, in the middle of a cardiology fellowship, he finished twenty-seventh.
As the 1992 Olympic Trials approached, Sandoval, by then thirty-seven, realized it would be his last shot. Finally, he took time off to train, and was in phenomenal shape. On a warm, windy day in Columbus, Ohio, he felt effortless through the opening miles. “I was in heaven,” Sandoval says. “I was thinking, ‘This is my fifth Olympic Trials, and this is going to be a good day.’” And it was, until he planted his foot to make a turn at the bottom of a hill around mile eight and felt pain shoot down the back of his leg. “I figured it was my calf, so I stopped to massage it,” Sandoval says. “I was watching the time. I was in such good shape, I figured I could give the leaders about two minutes and still make the team.” By mile 13, his leg was swelling and he could hardly walk. He hobbled off the course. “I knew it was over then,” Sandoval says, quietly, “that I’d never go to the Olympics.” He had run five miles on a ruptured Achilles tendon.
Today, in an office across the street from his high school track, Sandoval is one of just a few cardiologists serving all of rural northern New Mexico. In his home, Sandoval still has the blue velour USA outfit he would have worn at the 1980 Olympics. “It just hurts when you start thinking about it,” Sandoval says. “I never got to run as hard as I can.” His voice halts when he mentions how proud his six children—all college athletes—would have been to see Dad’s medal. “I think sometimes he wishes he’d taken more time off from medicine to train,” says Sandoval’s wife, Mary.
Even now, Sandoval is thin enough to hide behind a parking meter, and by 6:30 A.M. most mornings he is skimming along forest switchbacks in the nearby Jemez Mountains. There is no wasted movement in his stride. His arms are carried high and tight. He seems barely to come off the ground, sweeping over the soil as lightly as a water bug flitting across a pond. He refers to some of the trees and rock outcrops along the trails as “old friends.”
David Martin, former head of USA Track and Field’s physiological testing program, studied Sandoval back when he was competing. “Anthony was a physiological specimen to be reckoned with,” Martin says. “He had long legs, a huge heart, huge lungs, and a small torso. I tested him at my lab in Atlanta, and boy could he move oxygen. I don’t want to say Anthony is a genetic freak, but he’s unusual, because even as he got older his body size remained diminutive and his heart size increased.”
Martin pauses, and considers Sandoval in his entirety. His quiet toughness. His lithe body. His huge aerobic capacity. His rural youth at eight thousand feet, and his childhood of running and walking for transportation. He clearly had physiological gifts, but he also had a unique crucible in which to discover and develop them.
“You know what he is?” Martin asks, awaking excitedly from a pensive moment. “He’s a Kenyan, that’s what he is! He’s an American Kenyan.”
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Eldoret is a bustling city of 250,000 near the heart of the Kalenjin training region in Kenya. The occasional donkey cart jockeys with cars for right of way as they navigate the rutted roads. The rush in the street is frantic. Shoppers hustle in and out of ground-level stores or the eateries above them. Narrow alleys are stuffed with hole-in-the-wall shops. Here you can buy Nike running shoes that were brand-new fifteen years ago but are still unworn, because Kenyan professional runners will sell the shoes they receive from sponsor companies to resellers as soon as they get them. In one alcove, a man furtively peddles Kenyan national team gear out of a backpack.
One day while I was in Eldoret, I sat in a garden behind a steel guard wall and had Kenyan tea—which has milk and sugar—with Claudio Berardelli, a young Italian who moved to Kenya and has become one of the world’s top coaches of distance runners. Berardelli was coauthor of a paper that was about to come out in the European Journal of Applied Physiology. The paper looked explicitly at running economy, comparing 2:08 European marathoners with 2:08 Kalenjin marathoners. Not surprisingly, the physiologies of the runners—their aerobic capacities and running economies—were very similar. The authors concluded, then, that superior running economy does not explain the dominance of Kalenjin marathoners over Europeans.
In reality, though, they did not ask a question that could provide such an answer. It is no surprise that 2:08 marathoners look physiologically similar no matter their nationality or ancestry. After all, they are all 2:08 marathoners. The question is whether there are many more people in one place who are capable of becoming 2:08 marathoners than in another or why 2:03 and 2:04 marathoners come only from Kenya and Ethiopia.
Berardelli’s opinion, outside of the paper, was very different from the conclusion in it: “I don’t believe that in Italy there is not somewhere another [Stefano] Baldini,” he says, referencing the Italian who won gold in the 2004 Olympic marathon. “And Italians are probably saying, ‘There is no need to look for him, because Kenyans always win.’ So they don’t find him.” But does he think there are as many potential Baldinis in Italy as in Kenya? “I think in Kenya maybe you will find ten Baldinis, and in Italy maybe you find two Baldinis. But come on guys, work on finding them!” So, then, Berardelli’s opinion is that gold-medal marathon potential is not exclusive to Kenya, but that it is more common there. “I think the Kenyan lifestyle probably fixed genetically some characteristics good for running,” he says.
And while a naturally narrow body type is crucial to running economy, economy can also be improved. There is no better example than the greatest female marathoner of all time, Britain’s Paula Radcliffe. Radcliffe entered her first races at nine, though she hadn’t begun real training. By seventeen, Radcliffe was a promising junior athlete, and Andrew M. Jones, a British physiologist, started working with her. Immediately, Jones saw that Radcliffe was gifted. There were outstanding athletes in her family—her great aunt Charlotte was an Olympic silver medalist swimmer—and she had a VO2max essentially as high as elite female athletes ever get, even though she was training less than thirty miles a week. “Clearly, she was exceptionally talented,” Jones wrote of Radcliffe. “However, this athletic potential was only achieved following ten further years of increasingly arduous training.”
Over those years, Radcliffe got taller, but stayed the same weight as she trained maniacally, often at altitude. Her VO2max did not improve at all—it was already at the top—but each year her running economy got incrementally better, presumably at least partly because her legs got longer while her weight did not increase. In 2003, eleven years after she was first tested, Radcliffe’s VO2max was no different from what it was when she was eighteen and training lightly, but her running economy had improved dramatically, and she shattered the women’s world marathon record in 2:15:25. Obviously, Radcliffe’s exceptional running economy was at least partly created by her training.*
Genetic science, even as it matures, is unlikely to provide anything resembling a complete answer to the questions behind Kenyan running prowess. Just as it is tough to find genes for height—even though we know they exist—it is extraordinarily difficult to pin down genes for even one physiological factor involved in running, let alone all of them. As Sir Roger Bannister, a world-renowned neurologist and the first man to break four minutes in the mile, once said: “The human body is centuries in advance of the physiologist, and can perform an integration of heart, lungs, and muscles which is too complex for the scientist to analyze.”
Additionally, the prevalence of gene variants differs to such an extent among ethnicities that geneticists use ethnically matched control subjects in their studies. So a Kalenjin genetic study uses Kalenjin runners and compares them with Kalenjin controls. Thus, genetic studies usually look for differences among members of an ethnic group, and usually say little about differences between ethnic groups. With the physiology of running far from fully understood, we should not hold our breath for genetic technology in itself to solve the Kenyan question, at least not anytime soon. We will have to look other places for insight, as did the Danish researchers who tested running economy in Kalenjin boys.
When I last spoke with Berardelli he had just begun to coach a group of Indian athletes who came to Kenya to train. On the face of it, they have incredible environmental similarities to his Kenyan runners: impoverished backgrounds, high motivation, and childhoods filled with running for transportation. If distance running success requires only monetary incentives, childhood running, and world-class training, then expect to see some of Berardelli’s Indian pupils alongside the Kenyans soon.
“So,” Berardelli said, with a doubtful smirk. “We will see.”
Berardelli believes that the Kenyans are, in general, more likely to be gifted runners. But he also knows that no matter their talent or body type or childhood environment or country of origin, 2:05 marathoners do not fall from the sky. Their gifts must be coupled with herculean will.
Although that, too, is not entirely separable from innate talent.
Sugar, some sugar,” he says. I must have looked confused. “You know, sugar. I appreciate.”
We were standing, the runner and I, in Iten, Kenya, on a dirt track in Kamariny Stadium. But to call Kamariny a stadium is to elevate a sandlot to a cathedral. On one side is a wooden bleacher painted sky blue and crooked as rotten teeth. On the other side is a sheer cliff four thousand feet above the Rift Valley floor and eight thousand feet above sea level. Dozens of runners circle the track in interval sessions, as a sheep wanders over the escarpment to graze on the infield.
The runner I’m speaking with is twenty-four-year-old Evans Kiplagat, and he wants me to buy him sugar. Earlier that Thursday morning, Kiplagat loped six miles to the track, then ran a hard workout. In a few minutes, he’ll embark on the six-mile trip home. If I don’t buy him food, he’ll return hungry to the wooden shed that a local man lets him use on his shamba—a subsistence farming plot.
Kiplagat’s parents did not own the shamba on which they lived, so when they both died of illnesses in 2001 he couldn’t remain on the land. He is thankful for his current room, “but food is a problem,” he says. Most Tuesdays and Thursdays, Kiplagat jogs to the track and latches on to a training group that includes an athlete like Geoffrey Mutai, a Boston and New York City marathon champion, or Saif Saaeed Shaheen (formerly Stephen Cherono), the world record holder in the 3,000-meter steeplechase who was raised and trains in Kenya but was paid to switch his citizenship to Qatar. After the workout, Kiplagat will log more miles, walking among his friends’ homes to see if anyone has leftover ugali, the doughy cornmeal that rural Kenyans eat every day of the week. If he scrounges up enough food, he’ll go for another six miles in the evening. For Kiplagat, every day is a two-a-day, if not a three-a-day, and that doesn’t count running six miles each way as transportation to and from the track on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
It is the schedule of a man who burns to run, whose passion is to compete on the highest stage, and to stand atop the podium and weep at his national anthem. Except, that’s not who Kiplagat is.
“If you could get a job in the military, would you stop training?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“What about a job with the police?”
“Yes. Any job,” he says.
Kiplagat would prefer to have a job that would allow him to continue training, but he is content to stop running tomorrow if someone offers him a decent living. He started training in 2007 after walloping his high school friends in a small race. Last year, Kiplagat ran 29:30 in a hilly 10K road race in Kenya, an outstanding time relative to most of the world, but not one that makes him stand out from the Kamariny Stadium crowd. So he’ll keep trying to borrow enough money to travel to Kenyan cities for races so that he can post a time that will attract an agent.
There are Evans Kiplagats all over Kamariny—about one hundred runners were training at the track the day I was there—striding right alongside world champions. Sporadically, an unfamiliar man will wander onto the track and right away try to keep pace with Olympians. If he holds up, perhaps he’ll come back. If not, he’ll slink back to the shamba. It’s a microcosm of the overall training scene in Kenya: there are few training secrets here—some top runners don’t even have coaches—but there are hordes of runners willing to train multiple times a day, as full-time athletes. In the United States, a top college distance runner usually has to put off making a living for a few years in order to chase a dream. “In Kenya, it’s just the opposite,” says Ibrahim Kinuthia, a former international runner and now a coach in Kenya. There is no career or grad school to delay, and thus no opportunity cost for most rural Kenyans to take a crack at training with the elites.* Given Kenya’s annual per capita income of $800, according to the World Bank, the potential payoff for running success is greater, relatively speaking, than even an NBA contract is for an inner-city American boy. Winning a single major marathon brings a six-figure payday. Even earning a few thousand dollars in smaller road races in America and Europe is a relative windfall for most rural Kenyans. Successful runners quickly become one-man or one-woman economies. In Eldoret, the major city near Iten and Kamariny Stadium, Moses Kiptanui, the former steeplechase world record holder, owns a dairy farming business. He also owns the trucks that transport the milk, and the building in town with the supermarket that sells the milk. The result of these economic incentives is an army of aspiring runners who undertake training plans fit for Olympians, with many falling by the wayside, and those who survive becoming professionals.
Interestingly, a system that thrives on the hard work of many is fueled by an abiding belief in natural talent. The Kenyan coaches and runners I spoke with almost uniformly said that it was never too late to begin training. If one has talent, they said, then one just needs to start training hard and elite status will come swiftly.
A number of Kenya’s most luminous running stars have succeeded precisely because they did not assume it was too late. In a hotel in Nairobi I met Paul Tergat, former marathon world record holder and the greatest cross-country runner in history, who told me that he played volleyball in high school and didn’t start running until “between nineteen and twenty, when I started the military. There I met a number of great runners I used to read about, like Moses Tanui and Richard Chelimo. So I trained, and by twenty-one I realized I had the talent.” And by twenty-five he had won the first of five consecutive world cross-country championships.
The similarity to Jamaican sprinting—or to Canadian hockey, or to Brazilian soccer—is that there is a large number of athletes put in the top of the funnel, and a smaller number who display talent and survive the rigorous training and come out the bottom as world beaters.
While some of Kenya’s best runners have entered the game very late, for scores of others, training starts very early in life, before they even know it.
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Kenya is particularly harrowing for Yannis Pitsiladis, the University of Glasgow biologist whose passion is collecting the DNA of elite athletes. Given his fear of flying, he drives all over Kenya. Navigating the pocked roads of rural Kenya is like guiding a marble through the game Labyrinth. (Eventually, you’re going to lose.) And yet, for a decade, Pitsiladis has returned to Kenya over and over. As expected from the Kalenjin running hotbed, he and his colleagues have found that individuals with genes that indicate Nilotic ancestry are vastly overrepresented among elite athletes. But, as in Jamaica, the findings that have most affected him are cultural, not genetic.
Pitsiladis’s work has shown that international-level runners from Kenya are most often of the Kalenjin tribe, most often from poor, rural areas, and very likely to have had to run to school growing up. In one study Pitsiladis conducted with colleagues, 81 percent of 404 Kenyan professional runners had to run or walk a considerable distance to and from primary school as children. Kenyan kids who rely on their feet to get to and from school have 30 percent higher aerobic capacities on average than their peers. World-class athletes were also more likely than lesser athletes to have had to run or walk six miles or more to school. Pitsiladis talks fondly of one ten-year-old boy who was such a proficient runner that he took off at a six-minute-mile pace during a test of his aerobic capacity on a dirt track.
When I visited Kenya, running up and down the red dust hills of Iten, the epicenter of Kalenjin training, occasionally kids would join by my side, excitedly chirping their favorite English phrase: “How are you! How are you!” On my last run in Iten, a boy who looked about five years old tagged along as I trudged up a long hill. The boy was in ragged sandals and carrying a loaf of bread under one arm. He followed for a few minutes and then slunk under a wooden fence, tugging his loaf of bread behind him, and disappeared. It struck me that there is no such thing as a casual jogger in Kenya, only those who run for transportation, those who are killing themselves in training, and those who are not running at all.
After that run, I mentioned the bread boy to Harun Ngatia, a physiotherapist who treats Kenyan pros. “When the boy grows up,” he said, “all he will know is running.” His words reminded me of a late-1990s mock charity drive declared on a now-defunct online track-and-field message board: Help Americans compete in distance running by donating school buses to Kenyan children.
And it isn’t just Kenya. Pitsiladis and a research team found a similar pattern in the world’s second distance running superpower, Ethiopia. As in Kenya, Ethiopian runners tend to come from a traditionally pastoralist ethnic group—the Oromo—and they are also much more likely to have had to run to school than nonrunners, and professional Ethiopian marathon runners are more likely to have had to run long distances to school than professional Ethiopian 5K and 10K runners. Meanwhile, analysis of the mitochondrial DNA of Ethiopian and Kenyan runners shows that their maternal lines are not especially closely related. So there is no single, genetic supertribe of runners that is contiguous from Ethiopia to Kenya. (Ethiopians tend to have more chunks of mitochondrial DNA found in Europeans, possibly reflective of Ethiopia as the original point of migration for all humans outside of Africa.)
No one has conducted a study of the running economy of untrained Ethiopian children, as the Danish scientists did in Kenya, so it is unknown how the Oromo compare with the Kalenjin in that respect, but it is clear that these two groups both embrace running as a way of life. “You have all these kids running,” says Pitsiladis, “and then a boy or girl sees that they can run faster than the others. You absolutely must have the right genes. You must choose your parents correctly, but you have thousands of kids running and the cream rises to the top. After ten years of work, I have to say that this is a socioeconomic phenomenon.”
When I asked Ethiopian icon Derartu Tulu—Olympic 10K gold medalist in 1992 and 2000—if any of her two biological or four adopted kids like to run with her, she replied: “No, they say they get tired when I take them training with me. They don’t like to run. . . . I think it is because they go to school by car.” Says Moses Kiptanui, the Kenyan former steeplechase world record holder, of his children: “A vehicle came and took them to school . . . they like to do easier sports.”
“How many of the top Kenyan runners have sons or daughters who are excelling at running?” Pitsiladis asks, rhetorically, after noting that there are plenty of Kenyan siblings and cousins who excel. “Almost none. Why? Because their father or mother becomes a world champion, has incredible resources, and the child never has to run to school again.”
Still, it would be an unfair stereotype to suggest that all great Kenyan athletes ran to school, as there are conspicuous exceptions, like Paul Tergat, the greatest cross country runner in history. “I think the majority of us are running to school barefoot,” Tergat says. “But my school was very close. I could walk to school.” And the same goes for Wilson Kipketer, one of the greatest middle-distance runners of all time, whose school was next door to his home. Both men were world record holders, so, clearly, running to school is not a necessary trait of a world record holder. Nor is it sufficient. A few of the Kenyan children that Pitsiladis has tested who run miles to school nonetheless have pedestrian aerobic capacities, reminiscent of the low responders in the HERITAGE Family Study. “It’s a small number,” he says, “but there are some.” Not to mention that millions of Kenyan children across the country travel to school on foot, and yet the Kalenjin still stand apart in their running success.
Pitsiladis believes adamantly that in addition to the large number of running kids, there is another essential component to Kenyan running success. It is exactly what the Rift Valley ledges that are home to both the Kalenjin in Kenya and the Oromo in Ethiopia share: altitude. “You must live at altitude,” Pitsiladis says. “Some have said that the best way is to live high and train low. The Kenyans live high and train higher.”
“If it’s just the altitude, where are the runners from Nepal?” Brother Colm O’Connell asked, while sitting in his home in Iten, as 800-meter world record holder David Rudisha sank into the couch.* In the backyard is “the gym,” a single metal pole dipped in cement at both ends so it resembles a barbell.
At the very least, the altitude along the Rift Valley rim—where mosquitoes are scarce—likely prevented Kenyan runners who live there from the distance running disadvantage of genetically lowered hemoglobin, which occurs in people with ancestry in malaria danger zones.
But O’Connell’s question is intriguing, and has been asked rhetorically for years about the Kenyan running phenomenon. Altitude is known to increase red blood cells in athletes who move from sea level to the mountains, so why, then, aren’t runners coming down from the Andes and the Himalayas and smoking the rest of the world, as the Ethiopians and Kenyans have done?
The “Nepali runners” question, though, is actually irrelevant to the Kenyan and Ethiopian running phenomena, and not only because the Himalayan climate does not foster a narrow body type. One clear point of science is that the genetic means by which people in different altitudinous regions of the world have adapted to life at low oxygen are completely distinct. In each of the planet’s three major civilizations that have resided at high altitude for thousands of years, the same problem of survival is met with different biological solutions.
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By the late nineteenth century, scientists figured they understood altitude adaptation. They had studied native Bolivians, living in the Andes at higher than thirteen thousand feet. At that altitude, there are only around 60 percent as many oxygen molecules in each breath of air as at sea level. In order to compensate for the scarce oxygen, Andeans have profuse portions of red blood cells and, within them, oxygen-carrying hemoglobin.
The amount of oxygen in the blood is determined by two factors: how much hemoglobin one has and its “oxygen saturation,” or how much oxygen that hemoglobin is carrying. Because there is so little oxygen in their air, many of the hemoglobin molecules in the blood of the Andean highlanders rush through the body without a full load of oxygen—like roller coaster cars with few passengers. But the Andeans make up for it by having many more cars. This is not necessarily good from an athletic standpoint. Andeans have so much hemoglobin that their blood can become viscous and unable to circulate well, and some Andeans develop chronic mountain sickness.
Nineteenth-century scientists also saw that Europeans who traveled from sea level to altitude responded the same way, by producing more hemoglobin. So the book on altitude adaptation was closed for almost a century—until the 1970s, when Nepal and Tibet began to open to foreigners.
Cynthia Beall, an anthropology professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, started visiting to study Tibetans and Nepalese Sherpas who can live as high as eighteen thousand feet. To her surprise, Beall found that Tibetans had normal, sea-level hemoglobin values, and low oxygen saturation, lower than people at sea level. Few roller coaster cars, and many of them weren’t full.
Most Tibetans have a special version of a gene, EPAS1, that acts as a gauge, sensing the available oxygen and regulating the production of red blood cells so that the blood does not become dangerously thick. But it also means Tibetans don’t have the increase in oxygen-carrying hemoglobin that Andeans do. “So, how exactly are they surviving here?” Beall asked herself. “The oxygen in their blood seems very low, but they’re somehow delivering enough to function normally.”
Eventually, Beall determined that Tibetans survive by having extremely high levels of nitric oxide in their blood. Nitric oxide cues blood vessels in the lungs to relax and widen for blood flow. “The Tibetans have 240 times as much nitric oxide in the blood as we do,” Beall says. “That’s more than in people at sea level who have sepsis,” a life-threatening medical condition. So Tibetans adapted by having very high blood flow in their lungs, and they also breathe deeper and faster than native lowlanders, as if they’re in a constant state of hyperventilation. “They’re spending more energy doing that,” Beall says.
In 1995, Beall and a team moved on to the remaining population in the world that has lived at high altitude for thousands of years: Ethiopians, and specifically the Amhara ethnic group living at 11,600 feet along the Rift Valley. Yet again, she found an altitude biology unique in the world. The Amhara people had normal, sea-level allotments of hemoglobin and normal, sea-level oxygen saturation. The same number of roller coaster cars as sea-level natives and nearly all of them were filled, just as in sea-level natives. “If we didn’t know we were at altitude, I would’ve said we were looking at sea-level people,” Beall says. It’s not entirely clear how the Amhara pull this trick off. But Beall has preliminary data on Amhara Ethiopians that shows they move oxygen unusually rapidly from the tiny air sacs in their lungs into their blood.
New Zealand’s Peter Snell, former mile world record holder turned medical researcher, theorized that enhanced transfer of oxygen from the lungs to the blood might be an advantage for people with altitude ancestry when they came to run at sea level. “It’s possible,” Beall says of that prospect. She once raised it in a paper, but she’s adamant that nobody really knows. Plus, she saw the enhanced oxygen diffusion in her Amhara data, and most of the top Ethiopian runners are Oromo. An Oromo man holds the world records in the 5K and 10K, and an Oromo woman holds the women’s 5K record. (Scientists tracked the Oromo man, Kenenisa Bekele, over two runs at 6:30-per-mile pace, one at just under five thousand feet, and one above ten thousand feet. Astoundingly, his average heart rate only increased from 139 beats per minute to 141 on the higher run.)
Unlike the Amhara, who have been at altitude for thousands of years, Beall says that the pastoralist Oromo moved up from sea level just five hundred years ago. A foreigner would not distinguish Amhara and Oromo people on sight, but in terms of their altitude response, Beall would never confuse them.
Beall tested Oromo people living at about the altitude of Denver, “so you wouldn’t expect to see much,” she says, in terms of elevated hemoglobin. “But they already had more than a gram of hemoglobin more than the Amhara at a comparable altitude.” And the hemoglobin was packed with oxygen. “Their hemoglobin level was definitely higher than you would expect from a random group of lowlanders,” she says. Whereas the Amhara had low hemoglobin even at high altitudes, the Oromo had high hemoglobin even at moderate altitudes.
For one, these differences emphasize the diversity of physiology between peoples who have lived at altitude for different spans of history, and for whom evolution has landed on novel genetic solutions. Himalayans and Amhara Ethiopians are thought to have lived at altitude for thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of years, and Andeans for a shorter span, which may explain why Andeans are not yet fully adapted to their extraordinarily high homeland—and why they greatly elevate hemoglobin, just as lowlanders who go to altitude. (Like the Oromo, Kenya’s Kalenjin are relatively new altitude dwellers, having settled at altitude no more than two thousand years ago.)
As for Beall’s data from the Oromo—the ethnic group of the majority of top Ethiopian runners—they smack of altitude responders. The Oromo she tested increased their hemoglobin markedly even at altitudes below a mile high. And not only do different ethnic groups respond biologically to altitude in unique ways, there is also tremendous variation among individuals from the same ethnic group.
In 2003, a team of scientists from Norway and Texas exposed athletes to 9,200 feet of altitude for one day and looked at changes in the levels of the hormone EPO—which spurs the body to produce red blood cells. (Cheating endurance athletes inject EPO in an effort to force their bodies to produce more red blood cells.) The variation ranged from an athlete whose EPO levels declined, to another whose levels increased more than 400 percent.
In separate work on runners who trained for a month at altitude, those whose supply of red blood cells increased 8 percent on average improved their 5K time by thirty-seven seconds upon returning to sea level, whereas those who had no increase in red blood cells did slightly worse than they had previously in the 5K when they returned to sea level. As with other forms of training—and all manner of medicine—altitude training is most effective if tailored to each athlete’s unique physiology.
The idea of individualized responses to altitude rings true to Bob Larsen, who coached Americans Deena Kastor and Meb Keflezighi—winners, respectively, of a bronze and a silver medal in the 2004 Olympic marathon. “We have some evidence that some people have to be there for a long time,” Larsen says. “It really took Deena about two years of being at altitude. Meb was quick. He was a little flat his second week at altitude, but after about six weeks he set the American record [in the 10K].”
Even with individual variation in altitude response, there seems to be a rough “sweet spot” for training, an altitude where red blood cell production increases, but not too much. Where the air is thin, but not too thin. Andeans and Himalayans live far above it. Anecdotally, the sweet spot is around six to nine thousand feet, high enough to cause physiological changes, but not so high that the air is too thin for hard training.
As it happens, the ridges of the Rift Valley in Ethiopia and Kenya are plumb in the sweet spot. The foremost training bases in Kenya: Eldoret, 6,890 feet. Iten: 7,545 feet. Kapsabet: 6,395 feet. Kaptagat: 7,870 feet. Nyahururu: 7,215 feet. The major training cities in Ethiopia, Addis Ababa and Bekoji, both have running sites around 8,000 to 9,000 feet. In the United States, pro endurance athletes hunting for the sweet spot train in Mammoth Lakes, California: 7,880 feet. Or Flagstaff, Arizona: 7,000 feet.
Preferable to moving to altitude to train is being born there. Altitude natives who are born and go through childhood at elevation tend to have proportionally larger lungs than sea-level natives, and large lungs have large surface areas that permit more oxygen to pass from the lungs into the blood. This cannot be the result of altitude ancestry that has altered genes over generations, because it occurs not only in natives of the Himalayas, but also among American children who do not have altitude ancestry but who grow up high in the Rockies. Once childhood is gone, though, so too is the chance for this adaptation. It is not genetic, but neither is it alterable after adolescence.
No scientist contends that altitude alone forges tireless runners or that it is impossible to become a great distance runner without altitude training. But some, like Pitsiladis, say that it’s simply far less likely. A helpful combination, perhaps, is to have sea-level ancestry—so that hemoglobin can elevate quickly upon training at altitude—but to be born at altitude, in order to develop larger lung surface area, and then to live and train in the sweet spot. This is exactly the story of legions of Kalenjin Kenyans and Oromo Ethiopians.
Coincidentally, or maybe not, Shalane Flanagan, the fastest current American female marathoner—and daughter of a former marathon world record holder—was born and spent part of her childhood in the foothills of the Rockies, in Boulder, Colorado, above a mile high. Ryan Hall, the fastest current male American marathon runner, was raised in Big Bear Lake, California: seven thousand feet, and up.
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Drive north toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, to the point where the black asphalt disappears beneath a wash of brown rock and dirt, and you will be in Truchas, New Mexico, at eight thousand feet.
Not long before the road vanishes, on the left just past a cattle gate, is a low-slung adobe house with a yellow school bus in the yard. The bus hasn’t moved in decades. In the alfalfa field out back, eighty-five-year-old Presiliano Sandoval is working in the heat. His fingers, which haven’t been parallel since before the school bus worked, are curled around the wooden handle of a shovel.
In the adobe house, Presiliano raised the greatest American athlete no one remembers. Even now, Anthony Sandoval lives just an hour’s drive to the southwest, in Los Alamos. Anthony was one of six children, but Presiliano could tell that he was different. Presiliano remembers Anthony, at eight years old, was content to walk alone in the winter into the mountains with a hammer and wedge to split frost-hardened piñon trees.
By the summer of sixth grade, three times a week Anthony was taking his father’s cows several miles into the mountains so they could graze. “It was never less than two hours of walking,” with sporadic running mixed in, Anthony says. He had always been a good runner, but when he returned from that summer, he was by far the fastest boy in school.
Presiliano yearned for his son to get an education that Truchas could not provide, so he enrolled him at Los Alamos High School an hour away, where Anthony was surrounded by the sons and daughters of the physicists and nuclear engineers who worked at Los Alamos National Lab, birthplace of the atomic bomb. The locale was so secretive during World War II that babies born in Los Alamos had “P.O. Box 1663” listed as the city of record on their birth certificates.
At the start of Sandoval’s freshman year, a friend suggested he go out for cross country. “I said, ‘What’s cross country?’” Sandoval recalls. “But I went out that year, and ended up second in the state. And then I never lost another race after that in high school.” In his junior year, Sandoval ran farther than 12.5 miles in 60 minutes, setting the under-twenty world record for a one-hour run. In 1972, his senior year, then 5'6" and 98 pounds, Sandoval won the junior national championships in cross-country.
The Sandovals had no phone in the adobe home in Truchas, but reams of recruiting letters were mailed straight to Los Alamos High School. The boy whose aunts and uncles had been shepherds and uranium miners would go to Stanford. In Palo Alto, Sandoval excelled in class, earning admission to med school while training sixty to seventy miles a week.
At the Pac-8 championships in 1976, his senior year of college, Sandoval won the 10K, just ahead of three Kenyans running for Washington State, one of whom would later set the world record. And then, off his college track training, Sandoval jumped into the 1976 Olympic marathon trials. He finished fourth, one minute and one spot off the Olympic team. So away he went to med school, figuring he would have other chances at the Olympics, when he could actually train for the marathon distance.
But Sandoval was insatiably interested in serving people and in medicine, so he pursued cardiology, a study-intensive specialty that did not accommodate marathon training. Still, Sandoval’s ability was evident. In 1979, immersed in his medical studies, Sandoval managed just thirty-five miles per week of training. It was enough for him to run a 2:14 marathon, an utterly preposterous result given what was essentially a jogger’s training regimen. (A baseball fan might think of this as akin to a guy who takes batting practice in his local beer league and then hits .300 against major league pitchers.)
In 1980, with the Olympics again approaching and still deep in med school, Sandoval carved out a few months of rigorous training. It was enough. At mile 23 of the Olympic Trials in Buffalo, he simply ran away. He finished in 2:10:19, a U.S. Olympic Trials record that stood for twenty-seven years. “Tony was, at that point, probably the fastest runner in the world,” says Frank Shorter, the last American man to win gold in the Olympic marathon.
But it was the year of the Moscow Olympic Games, and President Jimmy Carter decreed that the U.S. would lead sixty-four countries in an Olympic boycott to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Sandoval, like 465 other American athletes, was forced to stay home.
As he embarked on his career as a cardiologist, Sandoval began a pattern that would last more than a decade: he would try, but struggle, to ramp up his training each time the Olympics approached. In 1984, he finished sixth at the trials. In 1988, in the middle of a cardiology fellowship, he finished twenty-seventh.
As the 1992 Olympic Trials approached, Sandoval, by then thirty-seven, realized it would be his last shot. Finally, he took time off to train, and was in phenomenal shape. On a warm, windy day in Columbus, Ohio, he felt effortless through the opening miles. “I was in heaven,” Sandoval says. “I was thinking, ‘This is my fifth Olympic Trials, and this is going to be a good day.’” And it was, until he planted his foot to make a turn at the bottom of a hill around mile eight and felt pain shoot down the back of his leg. “I figured it was my calf, so I stopped to massage it,” Sandoval says. “I was watching the time. I was in such good shape, I figured I could give the leaders about two minutes and still make the team.” By mile 13, his leg was swelling and he could hardly walk. He hobbled off the course. “I knew it was over then,” Sandoval says, quietly, “that I’d never go to the Olympics.” He had run five miles on a ruptured Achilles tendon.
Today, in an office across the street from his high school track, Sandoval is one of just a few cardiologists serving all of rural northern New Mexico. In his home, Sandoval still has the blue velour USA outfit he would have worn at the 1980 Olympics. “It just hurts when you start thinking about it,” Sandoval says. “I never got to run as hard as I can.” His voice halts when he mentions how proud his six children—all college athletes—would have been to see Dad’s medal. “I think sometimes he wishes he’d taken more time off from medicine to train,” says Sandoval’s wife, Mary.
Even now, Sandoval is thin enough to hide behind a parking meter, and by 6:30 A.M. most mornings he is skimming along forest switchbacks in the nearby Jemez Mountains. There is no wasted movement in his stride. His arms are carried high and tight. He seems barely to come off the ground, sweeping over the soil as lightly as a water bug flitting across a pond. He refers to some of the trees and rock outcrops along the trails as “old friends.”
David Martin, former head of USA Track and Field’s physiological testing program, studied Sandoval back when he was competing. “Anthony was a physiological specimen to be reckoned with,” Martin says. “He had long legs, a huge heart, huge lungs, and a small torso. I tested him at my lab in Atlanta, and boy could he move oxygen. I don’t want to say Anthony is a genetic freak, but he’s unusual, because even as he got older his body size remained diminutive and his heart size increased.”
Martin pauses, and considers Sandoval in his entirety. His quiet toughness. His lithe body. His huge aerobic capacity. His rural youth at eight thousand feet, and his childhood of running and walking for transportation. He clearly had physiological gifts, but he also had a unique crucible in which to discover and develop them.
“You know what he is?” Martin asks, awaking excitedly from a pensive moment. “He’s a Kenyan, that’s what he is! He’s an American Kenyan.”
•
Eldoret is a bustling city of 250,000 near the heart of the Kalenjin training region in Kenya. The occasional donkey cart jockeys with cars for right of way as they navigate the rutted roads. The rush in the street is frantic. Shoppers hustle in and out of ground-level stores or the eateries above them. Narrow alleys are stuffed with hole-in-the-wall shops. Here you can buy Nike running shoes that were brand-new fifteen years ago but are still unworn, because Kenyan professional runners will sell the shoes they receive from sponsor companies to resellers as soon as they get them. In one alcove, a man furtively peddles Kenyan national team gear out of a backpack.
One day while I was in Eldoret, I sat in a garden behind a steel guard wall and had Kenyan tea—which has milk and sugar—with Claudio Berardelli, a young Italian who moved to Kenya and has become one of the world’s top coaches of distance runners. Berardelli was coauthor of a paper that was about to come out in the European Journal of Applied Physiology. The paper looked explicitly at running economy, comparing 2:08 European marathoners with 2:08 Kalenjin marathoners. Not surprisingly, the physiologies of the runners—their aerobic capacities and running economies—were very similar. The authors concluded, then, that superior running economy does not explain the dominance of Kalenjin marathoners over Europeans.
In reality, though, they did not ask a question that could provide such an answer. It is no surprise that 2:08 marathoners look physiologically similar no matter their nationality or ancestry. After all, they are all 2:08 marathoners. The question is whether there are many more people in one place who are capable of becoming 2:08 marathoners than in another or why 2:03 and 2:04 marathoners come only from Kenya and Ethiopia.
Berardelli’s opinion, outside of the paper, was very different from the conclusion in it: “I don’t believe that in Italy there is not somewhere another [Stefano] Baldini,” he says, referencing the Italian who won gold in the 2004 Olympic marathon. “And Italians are probably saying, ‘There is no need to look for him, because Kenyans always win.’ So they don’t find him.” But does he think there are as many potential Baldinis in Italy as in Kenya? “I think in Kenya maybe you will find ten Baldinis, and in Italy maybe you find two Baldinis. But come on guys, work on finding them!” So, then, Berardelli’s opinion is that gold-medal marathon potential is not exclusive to Kenya, but that it is more common there. “I think the Kenyan lifestyle probably fixed genetically some characteristics good for running,” he says.
And while a naturally narrow body type is crucial to running economy, economy can also be improved. There is no better example than the greatest female marathoner of all time, Britain’s Paula Radcliffe. Radcliffe entered her first races at nine, though she hadn’t begun real training. By seventeen, Radcliffe was a promising junior athlete, and Andrew M. Jones, a British physiologist, started working with her. Immediately, Jones saw that Radcliffe was gifted. There were outstanding athletes in her family—her great aunt Charlotte was an Olympic silver medalist swimmer—and she had a VO2max essentially as high as elite female athletes ever get, even though she was training less than thirty miles a week. “Clearly, she was exceptionally talented,” Jones wrote of Radcliffe. “However, this athletic potential was only achieved following ten further years of increasingly arduous training.”
Over those years, Radcliffe got taller, but stayed the same weight as she trained maniacally, often at altitude. Her VO2max did not improve at all—it was already at the top—but each year her running economy got incrementally better, presumably at least partly because her legs got longer while her weight did not increase. In 2003, eleven years after she was first tested, Radcliffe’s VO2max was no different from what it was when she was eighteen and training lightly, but her running economy had improved dramatically, and she shattered the women’s world marathon record in 2:15:25. Obviously, Radcliffe’s exceptional running economy was at least partly created by her training.*
Genetic science, even as it matures, is unlikely to provide anything resembling a complete answer to the questions behind Kenyan running prowess. Just as it is tough to find genes for height—even though we know they exist—it is extraordinarily difficult to pin down genes for even one physiological factor involved in running, let alone all of them. As Sir Roger Bannister, a world-renowned neurologist and the first man to break four minutes in the mile, once said: “The human body is centuries in advance of the physiologist, and can perform an integration of heart, lungs, and muscles which is too complex for the scientist to analyze.”
Additionally, the prevalence of gene variants differs to such an extent among ethnicities that geneticists use ethnically matched control subjects in their studies. So a Kalenjin genetic study uses Kalenjin runners and compares them with Kalenjin controls. Thus, genetic studies usually look for differences among members of an ethnic group, and usually say little about differences between ethnic groups. With the physiology of running far from fully understood, we should not hold our breath for genetic technology in itself to solve the Kenyan question, at least not anytime soon. We will have to look other places for insight, as did the Danish researchers who tested running economy in Kalenjin boys.
When I last spoke with Berardelli he had just begun to coach a group of Indian athletes who came to Kenya to train. On the face of it, they have incredible environmental similarities to his Kenyan runners: impoverished backgrounds, high motivation, and childhoods filled with running for transportation. If distance running success requires only monetary incentives, childhood running, and world-class training, then expect to see some of Berardelli’s Indian pupils alongside the Kenyans soon.
“So,” Berardelli said, with a doubtful smirk. “We will see.”
Berardelli believes that the Kenyans are, in general, more likely to be gifted runners. But he also knows that no matter their talent or body type or childhood environment or country of origin, 2:05 marathoners do not fall from the sky. Their gifts must be coupled with herculean will.
Although that, too, is not entirely separable from innate talent.
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