The Ethiopian running secret

One school of training is highly personalised, technical and data-driven. The other is the one that wins marathons

by Michael Crawley & Geoff Burns  BIO

A training group in Sebeta, Ethiopia in 2016. Photo supplied by the author

is an award-winning author and social anthropologist based at Durham University, UK. His latest book, To the Limit: The Meaning of Endurance from Mexico to the Himalayas (2024), was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Sports Book Awards.

is a sports physiologist for the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee and a faculty member at the University of Michigan’s School of Kinesiology. His research focuses on sports science and human performance, and his work has been featured in publications including The New York Times, the BBC, The Wall Street Journal, and Runner’s World. He is based in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Edited byRichard Fisher

Gojjam wipes a streak of vomit from the corner of his mouth and turns to his friend Zeleke. ‘I did your turn at the front today,’ he says, ‘and my soul almost came out.’ He squirts water from a bottle into his mouth and spits. ‘Leading is hard. It’s like carrying someone else’s burden.’ The two athletes sit on the side of the Chinese-built road that leads southwest into Oromia from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital city. Beyond the tumult of cars and buses and the occasional horse-drawn cart, farmland stretches to the horizon in every direction. They have just run 25 km with 14 other athletes at a pace designed to prepare them for an upcoming marathon. Before they started, their coach, Messeret, carefully divided the responsibility of leading sections of the run between them, emphasising the importance of doing their ‘duty’ as pacemakers and invoking them to ‘share their energy’ with their teammates. As the exchange between Gojjam and Zeleke illustrates, monitoring the effort of training is understood as a collective endeavour, requiring a great deal of trust and reliance on others.

In 2025, athletes from Ethiopia and the nearby East African nations of Kenya, Uganda, Eritrea and Tanzania filled 69 and 74 of the top-100 spots in the World Athletics marathon rankings for men and women, respectively. This is an extraordinary level of dominance, with few parallels in global sport. In these countries, distance running expertise is seen as something that is intuitive, learnt from others, honed through experience, and deeply dependent upon a group training dynamic. Increasingly, though, this approach goes against the grain of cutting-edge sports science, which advocates the monitoring of an ever-increasing number of physiological variables and individualised, precisely engineered training.

Sabastian Sawe of Kenya leading Yomif Kejelcha of Ethiopia during the 2026 TCS London Marathon on 26 April 2026 in London, UK. Both runners crossed the line in less than two hours. Photo by Warren Little/Getty Images

So do Ethiopian runners and those with similar methods succeed in spite of, or because of, their training philosophies? Viewed through the dual lens of anthropology and sports science, we believe this question runs deeper than athletics results, speaking to what it takes to stretch the limits of human ability, and how expertise is used, assessed, embraced or rejected. For a long time, African knowledge has been seen by the West as intuitive, superstitious and practical, and some might view the Ethiopian methodology as unscientific. We argue it may be just the opposite. So is it Western sports science that reveals new frontiers of human potential? Or is it merely catching up, while the true innovation occurs on the dirt tracks of Addis Ababa?

Join more than 270,000 newsletter subscribers

Join more than 270,000 newsletter subscribers

Our content is 100 per cent free and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Our content is 100 per cent free and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Our mutual interest in running training methods began more than a decade ago, following a conversation as competitors at the World 50 km championships in 2015. Since then, Michael – a social anthropologist – spent 15 months doing ethnographic work in Ethiopia, learning Amharic, living and running alongside athletes as they sought to change their lives through the sport. Geoff, who is now a sports physiologist for the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, has come at the problem of human performance from an engineering background, having previously worked in the automotive and medical fields.

There is no better place to understand the engineering and data-driven approach to running with which Geoff is familiar than a university town in the highlands of Arizona: Flagstaff. With miles and miles of relatively flat, soft dirt paths, it is situated at the perfect altitude – around 2,100 m – to promote beneficial oxygen-handling adaptations in the blood and muscles. It also has all the modern conveniences a detail-oriented runner could want: accessible tracks, stocked gyms, organic grocery stores, and skilled masseuses and physiotherapists. Top runners visit from all over the world and, as such, it has a further X-factor: a community of athletes engaged in the collective pursuit of getting faster. Yet whereas in Ethiopia the athletes work in groups, here the training is often more solitary. Modern trends in individualised, precise, engineered training have resulted in more and more of these athletes pursuing common dreams but in self-tailored, idealised isolation.

British long-distance Olympic runner Mo Farah training above Flagstaff, Arizona. Photo by Michael Steele/Getty Images

Visit the iconic blue track at Northern Arizona University any morning, and you’ll almost certainly find myriad bubbles of Olympians,........

© Aeon