A few days ago, a story sent a shiver down the spine of many an East African sports fan: the era of Ethiopian, Kenyan, and (to a lesser extent) Ugandan marathon dominance might be drawing to a close.
Not because rival runners had suddenly found new secret to beat them, but because the planet itself was getting too hot to run on.
As the world warms, Bloomberg reported that marathon runners are adapting: training at cooler hours, moving indoors to avoid heat exhaustion and heatstroke, and doubling down on moisture-wicking apparel, cooling headbands, and, for the richer ones, climate chambers.
And here is where the story gets uncomfortable for us. A Rift Valley runner once needed nothing more than a single pair of shoes and standard cotton shorts and T-shirts. Add technical gear, and the entry threshold climbs steeply. A climate chamber costs about $100,000 (roughly Sh13 million). No upstart athlete has that kind of money.
Come down to Nairobi's Gikomba or Ngara markets, and the picture sharpens. A decent pair of secondhand running shoes (mitumba) costs between Sh500 and Sh1,500. Technical cooling gear costs three to eight times more.
A cooling headband costs between Sh1,300 and Sh2,600. A moisture-wicking shirt costs Sh1,000–4,500, and moisture-wicking shorts go for Sh1,000–5,000. All told, a full cooling and wicking kit will set back a promising athlete in a village on the edge of Iten anywhere between Sh3,300 and Sh12,000. You would think these were too high hurdles for new entrants. But the implications are deeper: it means that as the incumbent champions leave the scene, there would be no new blood to replace them.
Thankfully, talking to professional runners and researching the subject, I was heartened to learn that while the challenges are real, they are still, miraculously, surmountable.
For starters, young runners in Iten or Bekoji, Ethiopia, grow up living and training at 2,000 to 2,800 metres above sea level. Among other things, this gives them superior oxygen-carrying capacity that no heat-chamber session can replicate. Dashing along those village paths brings advantages that technology cannot yet replace. Running hundreds, possibly thousands, of kilometres from a young age on variable dirt terrain creates elite running economy, using less oxygen per kilometre than competitors who were not raised at altitude.
Also, although I am politically uncomfortable with this one, physiologically, East African runners tend to have a lower body mass index (BMI) and favourable surface-area-to-mass ratios. This allows their bodies to dissipate heat more efficiently than those of heavier, stockier athletes from rival nations.
For the top-tier, there is no need to lose sleep. They will always receive top-of-the-line cooling gear from major athletic brands. But the gap widens for unsponsored grassroots runners.
How? As summer marathons and hot-weather World Championship races become more punishing, organisers may implement strict heat-acclimatisation or tech requirements that favour athletes with sports-science team backing.
Secondly, although many still rise to the top, a child in Eldoret, running barefoot or in secondhand shoes, faces major economic hurdles in reaching scouted international camps. If elite performance increasingly demands biometric heat monitoring and custom hydration protocols, their talent will take longer to be discovered.
Eliud Kipchoge is alive to these dangers. He has previously said: "There is no doubt that climate change is running faster than all of us. We need to do more, do it faster and most importantly do it better." In other words, the pace of environmental change is outpacing human efforts to mitigate it.
In interviews, he has described the climate crisis as a "race against time", where environmental degradation in his Rift Valley backyard poses a direct risk to the pipeline of talent and the health of the athletes who train there. He views protecting these environments as a fundamental duty for the sports community.
History gives us hope. Whenever a new technology or training methodology emerges, East African athletes adapt quickly, often outperforming the athletes who helped develop the tech in the first place.
When Nike developed the original Vaporfly carbon-plated super shoe ahead of the 2016 Rio Olympics, critics speculated it might disrupt East African dominance if Western athletes gained broader access to the high-tech footwear.
Kenyan and Ethiopian runners adopted super shoes instantly. Eliud Kipchoge used them to run the first sub-two-hour marathon (1:59:40 in Vienna, 2019), and Kelvin Kiptum broke the official world record wearing Nike's Prototype Alphafly.
When GPS watches and optical heart-rate monitors emerged, sceptics thought the "analogue" nature of African group running, where athletes ran entirely by feel and the coach's whistle, would leave them behind.
They were wrong. Today's elite East African camps are fully digitised, blending high-tech feedback with natural physiological gifts.
Thanks to these East African lands, a trainer told me, "The world's fastest marathoners will continue to come from Kenya and Ethiopia, even if they put on an ice vest 15 minutes before the gun goes off."
The author is a journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans. X@cobbo3
