Every morning in Africa, a runner wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest runner, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're the lion or a runner-when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.
There are mountain lions and bears and wolves in the US. Probably way more large predators than in Kenya, how come college teams aren’t snacks for the animals?
With all that high altitude training in Utah, Arizona, and Colorado, you'd think that US runners would just be a bunch of snacks.
The only land mammals that consider people prey are polar bears, and the only ones that consider people worth killing on the regular are tigers and polar bears, although I wouldn't be too happy to encounter a mountain lion or a grizzly on a run. I've been very close to lions in the wild, and they ignored me, as they had been doing to people their entire lives.
Note that polar bears are actually marine mammals:
The wild animals live in special areas or zones called....game parks orgame reserves.
The athletes do not train inside the game parks rather in forests or areas with no dangerous animals...
The animals that one may encountered are maybe buffaloes which are more dangerous than even the cats...
There was an incident of a hippo attack some years ago (and yes hippos can run faster than human beings)
All in all Kenya has a plethora of larger dangerous animals but they mostly live in gazetted zones away from where people live.
The highland areas of SW Kenya, SE Uganda, and Ethiopia - where most of the famous distance runners come from - are very densely populated. They also have fairly cool climates. Summer temperatures in Eldoret, Kenya and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia are lower than in most of the high-altitude cities in the US.
I lived in a similar area in rural Tanzania and didn't see a big cat, or any other large, wild mammal in a year of living there, except when I went to game parks, etc. The largest animals I saw were medium-sized monkeys, and I saw those infrequently. There are huge areas of dry, scrubby plains in East Africa with a lot more animals and a lot fewer people, but that's not where the famous runners are from.
This post was edited 3 minutes after it was posted.
Come on now. Lions kill and eat people on a semi-regular basis. I would bet that there is not a lot of distance running going on where there is lion habitat, with the exception perhaps of Tim's former crew.
Can someone explain this to me? You'd think every now and then a famous runner would become a snack, but I've never heard of that happening.
do you still think East African all live in huts and do runs across the savannah?
They're training on dirt roads frequented by mopeds and cars + they're normally in large packs, not exactly prime environment for a lion who would have to go near roads, not be deterred by the noise nor being vastly outnumbered by much taller beings.
Even more rural running routes in Kenya will be farmland which is enclosed areas with roads between them and then in Ethiopia (I've not been but my understanding is) its very similar + running in wooded areas
Same reason why Australian runners don’t get bitten by snakes, or Australian runners don’t get eaten by crocodiles, or Australian runners don’t get kicked by kangaroos. Dumb luck
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