Afritrex - The Marathons
So five marathons in 12 months then? The running community and training guide books recommend that each marathon will take nearly 2 months to recover from before taking on the next bout of intensive training, and that each period of training should take at least three months, so with this in mind we’ve tried to space the races as evenly as possible to give ourselves the greatest chance of completing the challenge.
All very well and good in theory, but trying to slot ourselves into the African race calendar isn’t quite a simple as that so we’ve had to make a few compromises, straight into the first marathon within the first month of departing and then nothing for nearly five months. A sufficient length of time to get seriously fit before taking on two races within a month, one of those being the Comrades. If we make it out the other side of these two with our bodies intact, then the spacing of the next two races should ensure completion.
Ice to the Eskimos, Sand to the Arabs,
Marathons to the Africans. It is not an export to get rich on but there is nowhere better to experience running with the best.
In 490BC Pheidippides, a messenger in Ancient Greece runs 26 miles from Marathon to Athens to tell the Athenians not to surrender to the Persian fleet. Legend has it that after imparting his message he dropped dead of exhaustion. Ignoring this stark warning, perhaps a little dimmed by the intervening two and a half millennia, a 25-mile race from Marathon to Athens is included in the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896.
From then on the story has been African. The Marathon, the only discipline in athletics to have become a popular participation sport, is now a 26.3 mile dash across a varied surface with people who find it much easier than you do… Except if you belong to the Kalenjin tribe who live on a plateau 7000ft above sea level in northwest Kenya who astonishingly boast 12 of the world's top-20 distance runners. Their seemingly effortless victories in some marathons have sparked off a passionate debate about genetic advantage in long-distance running. So here is a breakdown of what is needed:
- a high altitude genetic history, (do the South Downs count?)
- long legs (we're not kidding..)
- an excess number of oxygen carrying red blood cells and hence a slow heart rate during exercise (not exactly nurtured by the Great British diet of caffeine to wake up and beer to calm down)
- and predominantly slow twitch muscle fibres which are destroyed by the sprint based, stop-start sports of Rugby and Hockey that we have respectively played in our youths.
If Darwin were alive now, he’d be wearing his best parental glare with his finger firmly pointing towards home. He would of course have ignored the last, greatest of the Marathon runner’s skills; a determination to succeed against all odds. For this is the true core of the marathon runner; his mental strength. A marathon is after all, a very long way. A very long way to want to give up; to want the pain to stop, to want to follow Darwin’s finger homeward, un-evolved tail between legs. Across a continent of extremes from tropic through savanna to scorching desert it is no wonder that the running conditions are as varied as the seasons.
We will start our race in the warm gardens and fruit laden groves of Marrakech, not a week after suffering neck deep snow and temperatures well below freezing. From there to the world’s most grueling Ultramarathon in stifling humidity over a hundred kilometers and almost a vertical kilometer rise. The final marathon is the ‘home game’ of the Kalenjin tribe, the Nairobi Marathon at 5,500ft above sea level. If we see this out unscathed we will truly be marathon runners, heirs of the messengers of ancient Greece, though still over an hour behind the last of the Kalenjin tribe.
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