I'm seeing now that there is a train of thought saying that the Africans are kicking our ass in distance running because they train harder than us and I wanted to ask letsrun how they felt about that.
Heres my take:
I've been training with runners from Africa all through out my running carrer, starting in highschool and now as a post collegiate.
Where I attended highschool happend to be one of the places where highschool aged refugess from Sudan and Somalia went when they got to the US. My coach (being the smart guy he was) knew how talented these runners were and often got them to run for us. There was no doubt these runners were talented but also were incredibly lazy so much so that my coach had to eventually kick them off the team for missing practice, coming late to practice, and even often walking during runs or hiding in friends houses when they were suppose to be running.
I went to a pretty succesful 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.
Now I train post collegiatly (up in boulder) and sometimes train with a group of kenyans. While these guys train harder then the other African born runners I have encountered in the past they definitly dont train as hard to me. The popular thing with them although is to miss runs or work outs simply because "it's too cold out" which has been happening alot lately.
To confirm my believes that this isn't just my personal experience I bough the Train Hard, Win Easy the kenyan way book and compared it to the workouts of the Run with the Champions book. While the kenyans in the book do train hard they dont train any harder then our top runners or do any more milege.