Running out of time

Two Hours is a kind of Hoop Dreams for runners. Ed Caesar follows a handful of Kenyan marathoners, tracks their races and careers, and talks to them about their lives. Part of what’s moving about the book is the sense you get that these athletes (the children mostly of subsistence farmers from the Rift Valley in East Africa, who sometimes had to break rocks to pay for their primary schooling) were born with an inheritance as rich as any Notting Hill trustfunder’s — except that instead of stock options and the deeds to a house they have inherited a series of genetic codes which give them long, light legs and an extraordinary capacity to burn oxygen efficiently.

At least, that’s one way of telling the story:

What’s so intriguing about Kenya’s success at long distances, and what makes the scientists who study the reasons behind that success so excited, is that their champions almost uniformly hail from one tribe: the Kalenjin.

Caesar quotes from David Epstein’s book The Sports Gene, which puts their success down to a curious historic combination of facts. The Kalenjin are originally a valley tribe who have moved up recently into the mountains, so they combine the lung surface area of people born at altitude with the ‘sea-level ancestry’ that allows their haemoglobin to respond quickly to training at elevation.

And yet gene science hasn’t managed to prove the nature side of this argument — at least not yet. The consensus seems to be, we don’t have enough information, and some of the smart money is on nurture, too. Culture plays a large part in all this. Kenyans themselves seem to take a democratic view of their success. It’s a peculiarity of Kalenjins, says one European coach, that they possess utter faith that ‘anybody can run — it’s only a question of training.