Manners was exhilarated by the success of Kenyan runners, as it defied stereotypes held by British colonialists. “The conventional wisdom was that blacks could sprint, but that anything that required tactical sophistication, or discipline, or training,” he says, “this was the white man’s province.”
With the Peace Corps, Manners returned for another three years to the western Rift Valley in Kenya, where locals still remembered him and his father. In the early 1970s, a few Kenyan middle- and long-distance runners began to show up on American college campuses, and Manners started writing about Kenyan running. In 1972, he coauthored an article for Track & Field News: “Basically, the piece said that coaches in America are wondering whether there are more great runners back there in Kenya,” Manners says. “And our answer was: Thousands!” Particularly among the Kalenjin.
The 4.9 million Kalenjin people represent about 12 percent of Kenya’s population, but more than three quarters of the country’s top runners. In 1975, in a footnote to a chapter he contributed to The African Running Revolution, a book compiled by Runner’s World magazine, Manners raised an evolutionary theory of Kenyan—and specifically Kalenjin—running success that remains controversial today.
Manners wrote that a part of traditional life for Kalenjin warriors was the practice of cattle raiding. Essentially, it entailed stealthily running and walking into the land of neighboring tribes, rounding up cattle, and escorting them back to Kalenjin land as quickly as possible. Cattle raiding was not considered theft so long as the raiders weren’t filching the cattle from the same subtribe within the Kalenjin. “The raids were conducted largely at night,” Manners wrote, “and sometimes ranged over distances as great as 100 miles! Most raiding parties were group ventures but each muren [or warrior] was expected to at least do his share.”
A muren who brought back a large number of cattle from a raid was hailed as a courageous and athletic warrior and could use his cattle and prestige to acquire wives. In a footnote, Manners wrote that, insofar as successful cattle raiders had to be strong runners to hustle captive herds to safety, and the best cattle raiders accumulated more wives and children, then cattle raiding could serve as a mechanism of reproductive advantage that favored men with superior distance running genes. In the next breath of the very same chapter, though, Manners seems to doubt the suggestion as soon as he raises it. “The idea just occurred to me, so I just put it in,” he says now.
But over the years, as he has continued to study Kalenjin running, and to interview Kalenjin runners and elders, he has come to regard the idea as much less fanciful—in part because other “hot spots” of endurance running talent have materialized in East Africa, and the athletes responsible are also from traditionally pastoralist cultures that once practiced cattle raiding.
In Ethiopia, the world’s second distance running superpower, the Oromo people make up about one third of the country’s population but the vast majority of its international runners. The Sebei people of Uganda—who live just across Mount Elgon from Kenya—account for essentially all of that nation’s top distance runners and include Stephen Kiprotich, who won the 2012 London Olympics marathon. The Ugandan Sebei are actually a subgroup of Kenya’s Kalenjin.
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In a converted attic storage room, under the slope of the roof on the third floor of his house in Montclair, New Jersey, Manners has his office. It’s the kind of eruption of paper and maps that one might find as the parent of a brilliant twelve-year-old who has been quietly making plans to visit Mars. Files, books in stacks, books on shelves, maps. Giant maps, affixed to the slanted ceiling, dotted with meaningfully placed tacks.
The maps show the specific districts of western Kenya from which runners flow forth en masse. Beside the maps sit every Association of Track and Field Statisticians Annual published since 1955. The ATFS is a volunteer group of track stats junkies, and many of the Annuals are long out of print. “I had to buy some of them from collectors,” Manners says. He also has nearly every African Athletics annual ever published, as well as a complete collection of Track & Field News dating back to 1971.
Manners has catalogued the specific geographical distribution and tribal membership of Kenyan runners—often by asking the runners in person—to a greater extent than any other human being alive. Along the way, he has collected staggering anecdotes of gifted Kalenjin runners.
Like the one about Amos Korir, who was supposed to compete in pole vault at the Community College of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania when he arrived there in 1977. But upon seeing how much better the other vaulters were he fibbed to the coach, claiming to be a runner. Korir was thrust into the 3,000-meter steeplechase—a race just shy of two miles that includes hurdles—and in his third-ever attempt at the event won the national junior college championship. Four years later, Korir was the third-ranked steeplechase runner in the world.
Or the one about Julius Randich, who arrived at Lubbock Christian University in Texas a heavy smoker with no competitive running background. By the end of his first year, 1991–92, Randich was the national small-colleges (NAIA) champion in the 10K. The following year, Randich set NAIA records in the 5K and 10K and was named the outstanding athlete in any sport in the NAIA. Kalenjin runners became all the rage among NAIA coaches, and several others would win the 10K national championships after Randich, including his younger brother Aron Rono, who won it four straight times.
And then there’s the one about Paul Rotich, perhaps the most famous of Manners’s anecdote collection. Rotich, the son of a prosperous Kalenjin farmer, arrived at South Plains Junior College in Texas in 1988, having lived a “comfortably sedentary” life, as Manners describes it. Rotich, a stout 5'8" and 190 pounds, quickly burned through most of the $10,000 his father had given him for two years of living expenses and tuition. “But rather than return home in disgrace,” Manners wrote, “Paul . . . decided to train in hopes of earning a track scholarship.” Rotich trained at night to avoid the embarrassment of being seen. That concern would be short-lived, as he made the national junior college cross-country championships in his first season. He went on to become a ten-time All-American in cross-country and indoor and outdoor track. As Manners reported, when Rotich returned to Kenya and detailed his running exploits to a cousin, the cousin replied: “So, it is true. If you can run, any Kalenjin can run.”
Manners does not think that any Kalenjin can be a great distance runner, but he does believe that the proportion of people who will become extremely fast middle- and long-distance runners extremely quickly upon training is significantly higher among the Kalenjin than it is among other tribes in Kenya, or among other peoples throughout the world.
Consider this: seventeen American men in history have run a marathon faster than 2:10 (or a 4:58 per mile pace); thirty-two Kalenjin men did it just in October 2011.* The statistics that describe Kalenjin distance running dominance are endless, and often so outlandish as to be laughable. For example: five American high-schoolers have run under four minutes in the mile in history; St. Patrick’s High School, in the Kalenjin training town of Iten, once had four sub–four milers in school at the same time. (Conversely, the Kenyan record in the 100-meters, 10.26 seconds, wouldn’t even have made the bare minimum standard to participate in the London Olympics.) Wilson Kipketer, a former St. Patrick’s student who became a Danish citizen and held the 800-meter world record from 1997 to 2010, does not hold his own high school’s record. (That distinction belongs to Japhet Kimutai, who ran 1:43.64.)
Manners was banking on the western Rift Valley’s fountain of talent when, in 2005, he held KenSAP’s first “great tryout,” as he calls it. While scientists and running enthusiasts have assayed Kenyan dominance every which way to make points about whether or not Kenyan runners are genetically gifted for endurance running, Manners’s tryout—which has the goal of helping poor Kenyan kids get into elite colleges—is more truly a random sample of Kalenjin than nearly any scientist has ever taken
and put on the track. The kids in his time trials generally come from elite, highly selective, government-funded boarding schools, and essentially none of them have any racing experience. This is panning for endurance gold in its most raw form.*
Each year, about half of the boys in the time trial will run faster than 5 minutes and 20 seconds in the 1,500-meter time trial, on a shoddy dirt track, above seven thousand feet. (The 1,500 is about 100 meters shy of a mile, and 5:20 translates to a mile time just over 5:40.) “Can you imagine, if you considered a comparable group from any American upper-echelon academic selection?” Manners asks. “I mean, it would be nowhere near that.”
In the tryout in 2005, a boy named Peter Kosgei ran 4:15 with no real training. Kosgei was accepted to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and quickly became the best athlete in the college’s history. In his freshman year, Kosgei won the Division III 3,000-meter steeplechase national title. By the end of his junior year, he had compiled eight more national titles in cross-country and track. His skill was so out of place in Division III that his teammate Scott Bickard compared it to “going to a Division III school to play basketball and you find yourself playing with a guy who can play in the NBA.”
Sadly, Kosgei was unable to compete in track during his senior year. On a trip home to Kenya during spring break in March 2011, Kosgei was mugged and left with two broken legs. When I met him at a KenSAP function eight months later, Kosgei was pursuing a graduate degree in chemistry and told me that he aspired to race again one day. At Hamilton, he said, he trained a paltry thirty to thirty-five miles a week, and thus felt that he had only grazed the outermost layer of his potential.
A slew of other KenSAP runners have met quick success. Evans Kosgei—no relation to Peter—held down a 3.8 GPA in computer science and engineering at Lehigh University and, after adjusting to life in America for a year, decided to go out for cross-country in his sophomore year. He struggled even to finish his five-mile tryout. But, in short order, Kosgei was running at the Division I national championships in both cross-country and track. In 2012, he was named Lehigh’s Graduating Scholar-Athlete of the Year.
Manners says that many KenSAP students have no interest in running, and some of those who were welcomed by American coaches quickly dropped the sport to focus on academics. But of the seventy-one KenSAP students through 2011—none with significant prior training experience—fourteen made varsity NCAA rosters.
Of course, stumbling upon hidden distance running talent is not exclusive to Kenya. And, as with Jamaican sprinting, it is the very systematizing of the process by which talent is stumbled upon that makes it less like stumbling and more like tactical filtering. The ultimate question is whether finding endurance talent is more likely to occur in Kenya, or specifically among the Kalenjin, and whether that is largely due to innate biological characteristics. For certain sports, it’s obvious and uncontroversial that particular populations will have a greater or lesser frequency of gifted prospective athletes. Pygmy populations have an average adult male height of around five feet. So, while they may produce an NBA player someday, a basketball scout taking a random sample from a Pygmy population will discover fewer athletes who, given the proper training, might make the NBA than if the sample were taken in Lithuania.
Presently, there is no way to know how the KenSAP time trial would compare with a similar exercise focused on a different ethnic group in Kenya or somewhere else in the world, and the KenSAP tryout isn’t intended to be a scientific experiment. There was one research group, though, that tried to get at the answer in a scientific manner.
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Beginning in 1998, a team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s world-renowned Copenhagen Muscle Research Centre set out to put data behind the many anecdotes and arguments about Kalenjin distance running dominance. Among the theories they sought to investigate: that members of the Kalenjin tribe might have a particularly high proportion of slow-twitch muscle fibers in their legs; that Kalenjin people are born with higher aerobic capacity (VO2max); and that Kalenjin people might respond more quickly to endurance training than members of other ethnic groups.
To untangle at least a segment of the nature from the nurture, the scientists set out to study not only elite runners, but also Kalenjin boys who lived in cities and those who lived in rural villages, as well as Danish boys living in Copenhagen.
Overall, the findings did not support any of the long-standing but uninvestigated theories. Elite runners from the Kalenjin tribe and from Europe did not differ on average in their proportion of slow-twitch muscle fibers, nor did Danish boys differ from Kalenjin boys who lived in cities or those who lived in rural villages. Kalenjin boys from villages did have higher VO2max than Kalenjin boys from cities, who were much less active, but it was similar to the VO2max of the active Danish boys. And Kalenjin boys, as a group, did not on average respond to three months of endurance training—as measured by aerobic capacity—to a greater degree than did Danish boys.
As expected from their latitudes of ancestry, though, the Kalenjin and Danish boys did display body type differences. A greater portion of the body length of the Kalenjin boys was composed of legs. The Kalenjin boys were, on average, two inches shorter than the Danish boys, but had legs that were about three quarters of an inch longer.
The scientists’ most unique finding, though, was not the length of the legs, but their girth. The volume and average thickness of the lower legs of the Kalenjin boys was 15 to 17 percent less than in the Danish boys. The finding is substantial because the leg is akin to a pendulum, and the greater the weight at the end of the pendulum, the more energy is required to swing it.* Biologists have demonstrated this in humans in controlled conditions. In one particularly well-controlled study, researchers experimented with adding weights onto different parts of runners’ bodies: the waist, the upper thigh, the upper shin, and around the ankle.
Even when the weight stayed the same, the farther down the leg it was placed the greater the energetic cost to the runners. In one phase, each runner had to wear eight pounds around his waist, which required about 4 percent more energy to run at a given pace compared with when he wasn’t wearing eight pounds of weights. But when the runners were subsequently equipped with a four-pound weight on each ankle they burned energy 24 percent more rapidly while running at the same pace, even though their total weight had not changed one ounce from the previous condition.
Weight that is far out on the limbs is called “distal weight,” and the less of it a distance runner has, the better (i.e., if you have thick calves and ankles, you won’t be winning the New York City Marathon). A separate research team calculated that adding just one tenth of one pound to the ankle increases oxygen consumption during running by about 1 percent. (Engineers at Adidas replicated that finding in the process of constructing lighter shoes.) Compared with the Danish runners, the Kalenjin runners tested by the Danish scientists had nearly a pound less weight in their lower legs. The scientists calculated the energy savings at 8 percent per kilometer.
“Running economy” is the measure of how much oxygen a runner utilizes to run at a given pace. Much like the fuel economy of a car, you get a certain amount of bang for a certain amount of gas, and that differs according to the size and shape of the car. Elite distance runners have both high VO2max and good running economy. Or, to continue the car analogy, the rare mix of a big engine and good fuel economy. Among elite runners, all of whom have large engines, running economy often differentiates the extremely great from the merely very good.
And on that measure, untrained Kalenjin boys were better than untrained Danish boys. Proportionally long legs and thin lower legs contribute separately to good running economy, and they had both.* Even the Kalenjin city boys, who were less active and less aerobically fit than the Danish boys, started with better running economy. Both within and between groups of Kenyan and Danish runners, lower leg thickness was an important predictor of runnin
g economy. Among Danes and Kenyans who were training similar mileage each week—or not training at all—Kenyans had superior running economy.
That is, when they were using the same proportion of their oxygen-carrying capacity, the Kenyans were going faster for that same effort. As one might expect from the artificial selection for body types that occurs in high-level sports, elite Kenyan runners had even more narrow lower legs—and much better running economy—than did untrained Kenyan boys. One of the scientists, Bengt Saltin, among the most prominent exercise scientists in the world, wrote: “the relationship seems to confirm that the lower leg thickness expressed in absolute terms is a crucial factor for running economy.” Later, Henrik Larsen, another researcher in the Copenhagen group, declared: “We have solved the main problem” of Kenyan running dominance.
Lithe legs help running economy no matter one’s nationality or ethnicity. One of the best running economies ever measured in a laboratory belonged to Eritrean runner Zersenay Tadese, the world record holder in the half marathon as of this writing. The measurements, taken in a lab in Spain, show that Tadese does not have particularly long legs—his legs are only slightly proportionally longer than those of elite Spanish runners—but they are considerably narrower. Interestingly, Tadese grew up dreaming of a career in competitive cycling—one of the first national sports federations formed in Eritrea was for cycling—but found vastly more success when he switched to running just prior to his twentieth birthday, placing thirtieth at the World Cross Country Championships in his very first season in 2002, before winning the world title in 2007. Surely, Tadese’s aerobic fitness from cycling carried over to running, but his thin lower legs are an advantage best exploited on the track, not the bike.
As Tadese proves, it isn’t as though thin lower legs are confined to the Kalenjin. But the Kalenjin do, in general, have a particularly linear build, with narrow hips and long, thin limbs. Some anthropologists actually refer to the extreme of a slender body build as the Nilotic type—“Nilotic” refers to a set of related ethnic groups residing in the Nile Valley—and, it so happens, the Kalenjin are a Nilotic people.* The Nilotic body type evolved in low latitude environments that are both hot and dry, because the long, thin proportions are better for cooling. (Conversely, the extreme of the short, stocky build was historically known as the Eskimo type, though the term “Eskimo” has been replaced in some countries, where it is considered derogatory.) And the Kalenjin are as low latitude as it gets. When I visited Kenya in 2012, while driving between training sites I crisscrossed the equator. But the Kalenjin initially migrated to Kenya from southern Sudan, where other Nilotes live today, like the Dinka, an ethnic group known for its tall and slender constituents. A few very long-limbed professional basketball players have been Dinka—most notably Manute Bol, who was 7'7" and reportedly had a wingspan that was 8'6".
The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance Page 21