Do the Africans really train harder?

my personal take, i think if we in americas had the same insentive to train like east africans do we would have many more talented athletes surface. in america we have football, basketball, baseball, soccer, hocky, (the list goes on) to take the talented people. imagine if every sportsman (and woman) had focused all effort on running instead of their respective sports. kenya has soccer, but it suck so might as well run.

What is the point of believing for yourself that talented people are mostly lazy, or else commiserating or whatever else we are doing here? Let's just assume that everyone more talented than you are now magically lazier than you, which I assume would be make you happy. How does that change anything? Tell me.

Ticktock wrote:

Africa is pretty resource-poor, which explains its slow development. Which isn't to say it doesn't have resources, they're just not as plentiful.

Wrong, try again. Africa is extremely rich in natural resources. There are many reasons for Africa's poverty and instability. Lack of natural resources is not one of them.

rolled up wrote:

as others have stated, if this cutsie argument were true, africa would not be a shithole where people hack each other with machetes after an election goes bad.

try again.

Your argument has nothing to do with the topic, but I can't let it slide:

For a LONG LONG time Western and Northern Europe was a backwards, barbarian, shithole where people would hack each other to death with axes over petty tribal feuds.

It's all about culture and technological advancement not race that explains social behavior.

no I don't believe all talented people or all Africans are lazy

not false wrote:

Culture as in many of the best African runners today grew up on farms, or being more active at a very young age. Thus when they begin hard training they are starting at a higher level. Running for them is also their ticket to money.

The best American runners were very active as young kids. I don't care about your argument enough to look them up though.

thats complete nonsense. African kids do not run miles to an from school - Paul Tergat lived w/in 800m from his school, as did all of his friends.

They take the bus every chance they get, etc.

What makes you think their motivations are so much different than ours?

Watch the Duncan Kibet interview on the front page - he slags off country kids, saying how cutting edge he is for Kenya etc.

Its like the "Kenyan Runner" is a modern version of the "Noble Savage"....my god...

Interesting to hear from someone who has trained with these athletes

'went to a pretty successful college program (qualified for nationals 3 years) that was large majority Kenyan. It was the same deal down there, the Kenyans all though incredibly talented and kicked my ass all through out college often did the bear minium the coaches asked them to do and often missed or came late to practice. The coaches however didn't cut these guys because our team was not deep and one guy missing out of our top 5 would be ruin us'

However, what are the names of these Kenyan runners. Did any of them run world class times? Maybe away from the Kenyan training camps they got a bit lazy/distracted and realised they could still win at the college level without killing themselves

I trained with some Ethiopians in the UK. They did not do huge mileage but seemed to do more fast work- nearly every day. They also avoided the roads and trained almost exclusively on grass to prevent injury even though they were preparing for road races

One other difference I think is in UK (I assume in US also) a 15 year old boy is training 6 times a week. A 13 year old girl is training twice a day in Kenya/ Ethiopia. They have that base advantage which they carry into the senior ranks

One further point

If you had 50 American or UK runners training for years at high altitude camps and they were still miles behind the East Africans you might say race is the main factor.

However, this is not the case. The top East Africans are not being developed in US colleges, but back in ther homelands at altitude. Does that not give some indication that it is how and where they are training that is the determining factor?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

A lot of Kenyan runners have admitted they never "ran to school"

There are people who have "active lifestyles" in Ghana,the Mongolian steppes, the Andes,and even parts of Kenya itself where some American idiot college coach went recruiting and came back with a 15 min dud. Unlike the Kalenjin and other select groups of people like them (imbred or not), most people don't seem to translate that active lifestyle you're talking about in a 13.04 5k in their 4th race of their life. There is a genetic pattern around that Rift Valley that is directly connected to distance running ability!!!And this is not something that's achieved in a few years of jogging to school, but more like in millions of years of evolution and some crazy gene selection.

I've not often heard it argued that African runners train harder than anyone else...

I think ukathleticscoach is speaking a lot of sense.

Training aside, they don't uck competition like the top US runners. How come all these Americans who are training so hard seldom seem to test themselves against the best at things like the World Xc champs or in the top marathons?

Halie G has been ducking alot of competition lately.

classics wrote:

For a LONG LONG time Western and Northern Europe was a backwards, barbarian, shithole where people would hack each other to death with axes over petty tribal feuds.

It's all about culture and technological advancement not race that explains social behavior.

you mean for a much, much shorter time than africa has been that way? oh yeah, that's right. your argument there is stupid in case you couldn't tell.

i'm not arguing that their simple world isn't good for developing endurance athletes. it is. i'm also not arguing that they are barbarians. on a personal level, they are wonderful people. (east africans i'm talking about here in particular)

but to argue that africans are better runners because they come from a culture that honors hard work and dedication is silly.

because if there were an ounce of truth to that, then such a culture would have worked itself out of it's deep, dark hole.

ukathleticscoach wrote:

The top East Africans are not being developed in US colleges, but back in ther homelands at altitude. Does that not give some indication that it is how and where they are training that is the determining factor?

Um, who are the top 2 fastest US runners of all time in the 10k? Abdi and Meb, who were born in East Africa, but did not run as kids, moved to the USA, were raised in a US culture, started running late (especially Abdi), went through US HS and college systems, and..... became faster than other 10k runners in US history.

Lagat went to college in the USA and has spent a lot of his life training here.

So much for the "environment" argument.

Isn't Mo Farah the best UK distance runner right now? Where he is from? Again, is all this coincidence?

Lots of westerners train at altitude or have altitude tents. There is no big advantage there for east africans. If there is any altitude advantage for them it is the fact that east africans have had their ancestors live and adapt to altitude over aeons. This is now built into their genes, and is an adaptation that is more complete than one can get simply by moving there or occasionally training there.

classics wrote:

Your argument has nothing to do with the topic, but I can't let it slide:

oh, and ps...

my argument has everything to do with the argument, and you're stupid if you can't see that.

africans are better in athletics because of genetics, plain and simple. it has nothing to do with culture.

Oh, by the way, 2 Kenyans just broke 2:04:30 in Rotterdam. Is great as Ryan Hall is, 2:06 something is fairly soon gonna be like 2:10 was not too long ago: a very good time, but nothing to go ga ga over. And Hall is virtually all alone as far as non africans are concerned in his battle against the upper echelon east africans.

not false wrote:

You sir, are a moron, a racist, and that has nothing to do with what I said. Culture as in many of the best African runners today grew up on farms, or being more active at a very young age. Thus when they begin hard training they are starting at a higher level. Running for them is also their ticket to money.

The best American runners were very active as young kids. I don't care about your argument enough to look them up though.

no, i'm not a racist, and you are definitely the moron here.

there are many, many thousands of kids who are very active at a young age in the US. Although not as large of a percent of the population in Kenya, for instance, most likely a larger total number.

so being "active" as a kid does not explain how a small country can produce armies of 13min-ish 5k guys.

it's cute that you think so though. you are so open-minded and progressive.

on here you get a lot of apparently good American runners and they seem to always advise that we not 'race' our tempos, that we hold back. Canova argues that this is the difference, that Kenyans run 12-40 minute tempos very very fast, and that they do a lot of progression runs where they finish their miles very fast. Malmo, who did his morning recovery runs at an average of well under 6 minutes per mile (in other words, a tough guy whose easy runs were all well within a minute of his marathon pace), would still run 4 mile tempos at over 5 minute mile pace, if I remember correctly. Keep pushing the tempo runs to insane paces, while modulating your pace far more by doing extremely slow recovery runs (so that the tempos don't destroy you), and maybe you reach far greater heights. And then you add on the long, early years of aerobic development at altitude and you have a big engine for the running.

As for the genetics question, no evidence has ever been shown to support that, but look at it this way. All human beings are descendants of the Rift Valley (e.g. Ethiopia and Kenya). So, any genes that developed in the Rift Valley peoples by, say, 70,000 to 140,000 years ago would have been passed on, with alterations due to random mutation, adaptation, and sexual selection, to those who lift the Rift Valley and populated the rest of Africa and the other continents. So, why would Rift Valley residents have genes for distance running that the rest of the world didn't have? It seems unlikely that the distance running genes suddenly popped up after the migrations, since distance running was, according to a Harvard study, a primary driver in very early human evolution.