Collective running
From The Ethiopian running secret
https://aeon.co/essays/what-ethiopian-running-says-about-the-limits-of-human-ability
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.
And
In Ethiopia, it is the ability to run in a way that protects your own and others’ energy that is seen as the primary skill of an endurance athlete. In this instance, doing this well was often seen to require the rejection of quantified data rather than its embrace. Rather than seeing energy as contained within the individual body, and the athlete as a system of inputs and outputs, Ethiopian athletes see the process of expending and monitoring energy as a collective responsibility. Because the total amount of energy is seen as limited, for one athlete to gain within this system necessarily involves another athlete losing something. For this reason, there is a complex ethics of training in Ethiopia, which ensures that energy is shared as evenly as possible.
Among Ethiopian athletes, running alone is seen as deeply antisocial in the same way that eating alone is. Running together is an important way to ensure that people control themselves and avoid ‘burning up’, as they put it, by training too hard. Similarly, it is important that food is shared equally between athletes, and if people fail to do their ‘duty’ as a pacemaker, they are often required to redress this energetic imbalance by ‘sponsoring’ bread or bananas for the rest of the athletes.
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