Access Lagos city marathon, Kenyans' probable secrets

The recent 42km Access bank Lagos city marathon held on Saturday, 6th February, 2016 won by a Kenyan had thrown up different controversies on the secret behind their success in every marathon race organized
across the world.

Abraham kiptom, the overall winner of the Saturday race, finished at Eko Atlantic city within a period of 2 hours,16 minutes and 20 seconds while our home-based athlete, Philip Sharabutu came 7th overall and 1st Nigerian with a time of 2 hours, 30 minutes and 51 seconds.

Read through these write up on "Why Kenyans Make Such Great Runners: A Story of Genes and Cultures" compiled by Max fisher, it will enlighten you more on the Kenyans' secrets.

By Max Fisher

Surprisingly, Western popular writing about Kenyans' running success seems to focus less on these genetic distinctions and more on cultural differences. For years, the cultural argument has been that Kenyans become great runners
because they often run several miles to and from school every day. But, about a decade ago, someone started asking actual Kenyans if this was true, and it turned out to be a merely a product of Western imaginations: 14 of 20 surveyed Kenyan race-winners said they'd walked or ridden the bus to school , like normal children do.

Another cultural argument says they run barefoot, which develops good habits, but if this were true then surely the far more populated countries of South Asia, where living without shoes is also common, would dominate over Kenyans.

Another ascribes it to the "simple food" of Kenya, but this again is true of many parts of the world, and Kenya's not-so-great health record suggests the country has not discovered the secret to great
nutrition.

And there is a cringe-inducing theory, still prevalent, that Kenyans' history as herders means they get practice running as they chase their sheep across the countryside.

Another argument notes that many of Kenya's best runners come from the sunny highlands in the Great Rift Valley, which also happens to be the birthplace of homo sapiens. The land there is flat with mild year-round weather, encouraging regular outdoor running. The high elevation -- about 7,000 feet -- could help runners here develop lungs capable of functioning in thinner air.

When these runners descend to the
relatively low-elevation courses at
Boston or Beijing, the thicker
atmosphere there would give them, in effect, a sustained oxygen boost. This may help explain why they developed physical traits better suited for running, although it's possible that these features are also due to something called "genetic
drift" -- evolution is based on random
genetic mutations, after all, so any
isolated community will "drift" to
certain common traits for no reason
other than chance.

Still, there are plenty of high places in the world, and neither Swiss nor Nepalese runners have yet made their big debut. And the conventional wisdom among trainers is that, although high altitudes can help
develop lung capacity, the best way to do this is by sleeping at high elevation and training at low elevation.

These theories seem to say more about how the West sees Kenya than about Kenya itself. But they are deep in the Western understanding. Malcolm Gladwell's ultra-best-seller, Outliers, shows just how deeply ingrained this thinking has become. His chapter on Kenyan runners argues, as one blogger summarized it, "ideal environments + a tremendous amount of hard work and focus on a specific thing = success beyond what most people achieve."World-champions runners, Gladwell says, are idolized in Kenya the way that Americans idolize rock stars.

Scientific research on the success of
Kenyan runners has yet to discover a
Cool Runnings gene that makes Kenyans biologically predisposed to reaching for the stars, or any scientific basis for Gladwell's argument that they just care more.

Most of Kenya's Olympic medal
winners come from a single tribe, the
Kalenjin, of whom there are only 4.4
million. Sub-Saharan Africans have
identified themselves by tribes such as this one for far longer than they've
identified by nationality -- a system
mostly imposed by the Western
colonialism -- so the Kalenjin distinction is not just academic, and the tribe is probably genetically insular enough that common physical traits could inform their athletic success.

Unlike the 1990 research, which came only a few short years into the Kenyan phenomenon, the 2000 study landed in the middle of an international debate about why these young men and women from East Africa were dominating a sport that had long been a point of Western pride. It was controversial.

"There's nothing in this world unless
you work hard to reach where you are, and so I think running is mental," said Kenyan Olympic gold medal-winner Kip Keino, who condemned the research as
racist. Westerners wrote about the
" black speed genes ," and some wondered if Kenyans had an unfair advantage.

Source:
https://ibadanelite./2016/02/15/access-lagos-city-marathon-kenyans-probable-secrets/