Africa Horn Now

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Africa Horn Now

Man vs. Marathon

By

Jere Longman | M

Trying to identify the athlete who might be able to break the two-hour barrier.

Yannis Pitsiladis, who started the Sub2 Project to break the two-hour barrier in the marathon, paced Tulu in a test meant to identify promising talent. Credit Uriel Sinai for The New York Times

BEKOJI, Ethiopia — Dressed in a soccer jersey and gray pants, Chala Tulu, 14, began walking in his bare feet and then gradually increased his pace around a grass track at Bekoji Elementary School. Tulu wore a mask and a harness fitted with a small battery pack and a device known as a gas analyzer. He had volunteered for a VO2 max test, which measures the maximum amount of oxygen a runner can use.

A plow had furrowed the track with lane markers. Eucalyptus trees provided a wind break. Hills of barley and wheat rose in the distance, brown and tan in the weeks after the harvest. As Tulu picked up his speed with an elegant stride, children clapped and chanted his name.

Pacing him on a bicycle was the physiologist Yannis Pitsiladis. He had begun testing young athletes, trying to identify promising talent for an audacious plan: to use science to facilitate a sub-two-hour marathon by 2019, a decade or two sooner than many experts think possible.

Man vs. Marathon

This is Part 2 of a two-part series on a scientist’s attempt to produce a revolutionary marathon time.

The current record of 2 hours 2 minutes 57 seconds was set in 2014 by Dennis Kimetto of Kenya. Pitsiladis believed that the first runner to break two hours — and transform the limits of human endurance — would not be a current star but would fit a certain profile: someone who had grown up in a rural East African village at altitude, enhancing his oxygen-carrying capacity, and who was accustomed to hours of daily activity, like walking or running to school, hauling water and herding cattle.

“The issue which is unknown for a sub-two marathon is age,” said Pitsiladis, an antidoping expert with the International Olympic Committee and a professor of sport and exercise science at the University of Brighton in England.

“Is age a limiting factor?” Pitsiladis said. “Nineteen, 20, 21, is that a negative? Maybe 21 will be even better than 29. Twenty-nine might be a wealthy guy; he’s not as a hungry. A 17-year-old could be fearless and hungry, ready to run on coals if it makes him better.” So Pitsiladis closely observed Chala Tulu.

A Westerner, Pitsiladis had become sensitive to the challenges of imposing his ideas on East African runners. Ethiopia’s own traditions and techniques had produced Olympic gold medals for more than half a century. And Ethiopians had a particular and evident pride, derived in part from their never having been colonized by Europeans.

For the VO2 max testing, Pitsiladis received ethical clearance from Addis Ababa University in the Ethiopian capital, where he is a visiting professor. And he sought permission from Bekoji Elementary’s principal, vice principal and renowned coach, Sentayehu Eshetu.

The men gathered in a small office as Pitsiladis explained his enterprise, the Sub2 Project. He introduced his altitude expert, Zeru Bekele, an Ethiopian, clarifying that this was not an endeavor wholly by outsiders.

On this late morning in February, Pitsiladis explained that he wanted “to produce the next Kenenisa,” a reference to Kenenisa Bekele, a native of Bekoji who is an 11-time world cross-country champion, a three-time Olympic gold medalist on the track, and the world-record holder at 5,000 and 10,000 meters.

Bekele and a fellow Ethiopian, Haile Gebrselassie, are widely considered the greatest distance runners in history, and Pitsiladis had enlisted Bekele for his project, not for him to break the two-hour barrier himself but, through training and tests, to better understand what it might take. Pitsiladis spoke respectfully of Eshetu, the coach, who had discovered Bekele and other Olympic champions, choosing potential stars by their body type: short torsos and long legs.

“His eyes are good, but he cannot see inside,” Pitsiladis told the principal. “My machine can look inside.” The soft-spoken Eshetu consented, saying he welcomed the input of science to help mitigate against trial and error in identifying top athletes. “It’s necessary,” he said, “so we can guess who can be fruitful.”

A Running Hotbed

The vast success of its distance runners has given Ethiopia, one of the world’s poorest countries, a chance to boast on the world stage. Its top stars can make hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money and appearance fees, a fortune in a nation where the per capita income is $550, according to the World Bank.

Yet Ethiopia’s pre-eminence has faced stiff competition from Kenya and, recently, from Mo Farah, a native of neighboring Somalia and a British citizen who won the 5,000 meters and the 10,000 meters at the 2012 London Olympics — distances once dominated by Gebrselassie and Bekele.

“In Ethiopia, we have the talent, but what we are doing is by chance,” said Gebrselassie, who is now retired. “We don’t have the right coach. We don’t have the right nutritionist. We don’t have psychologist. No doctor. Since Mo Farah, they start to think about the science.”

Bekoji seemed an ideal place for Pitsiladis to start his talent search. A highlands farming village of about 17,000 nearly 9,200 feet above sea level, it is one of the world capitals of distance running, having produced 10 Olympic gold medals.Before Tulu was chosen for the VO2 max test, Pitsiladis asked him a few questions. What did he want to become? How far did he travel to school?

About three miles, Tulu said. He walked and ran along the main road and a rural path that sliced through barley fields and cut across a riverbed. “Very good, very good,” Pitsiladis called out as Tulu began to circle the track. Tulu ran in a relaxed manner, his stride long and fluid. His heels nearly kicked his backside in a manner similar to that of Bekele, whose likeness, along with the Olympic rings, was painted on the side of a school building.

“I want to be a famous runner, like Kenenisa,” Tulu said. Particularly intriguing to Pitsiladis was that Tulu preferred to run without his shoes and had removed them for the test.

Amare Gebre, a teacher at Bekoji Elementary School, displayed a calendar that featured Ethiopian runners. The village is a distance running capital, having produced 10 Olympic gold medals. Credit Uriel Sinai for The New York Times

For more than 30 years, researchers had quantified how the weight of running shoes affected performance. Less weight on the extremities translated into greater running economy, meaning less oxygen was needed to run at a given speed.

The aerobic cost of running increases 1 percent per three and a half ounces of shoe weight, which could amount to a minute in a marathon, research showed. Pitsiladis wanted his Sub2 Project to experiment with a minimalist shoe, which might consist only of a film that covered the bottom of the foot.

Pitsiladis thought that the runner who first broke two hours might be a young, barefoot athlete who would continue to run without shoes, as Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia did through the cobblestone streets of Rome in winning the 1960 Olympic marathon. (He won again in 1964, this time in shoes.)

Pitsiladis had collaborated on a Harvard study, published in Nature in 2010, that found that barefoot runners tended to land on the forefoot or midfoot whereas runners in cushioned shoes tended to land on their heels.

Forefoot landings tended to be more gentle, avoiding the large shock waves that travel up the legs of heel strikers, the study found. Thus, barefoot runners, using the foot’s natural architecture, could run comfortably even on the hardest surfaces.

“Barefoot is a quick solution that could go wrong, but it could go bloody right,” Pitsiladis said. “If you said I’m only allowing you to choose one thing, which would it be? Because I’m a risky person, I’d say, ‘Let’s do it barefoot.’”

No Easy Commute

Relatively little scientific research has been conducted on the world’s fastest marathon runners. For one thing, East Africa is not the easiest place to work.

The biomedical lab at Addis Ababa University contains hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment acquired over the years — ultra-low-temperature freezers and sophisticated machines, resembling high-tech bread makers, that analyze genes and blood. But because of insufficient funding and a lack of available experts to operate the equipment, much of it was unplugged and covered by tablecloths when Pitsiladis toured the lab with graduate students.

“It’s like having a cake shop,” he said. “You’ve got the best sweets in the world, and you can only look at them.”

For his testing in Bekoji, Pitsiladis had haggled for a bicycle a day earlier in a bazaar in Addis Ababa. Eventually, he ventured down an alley, where wet clothes hung on a line, and made a deal. Then he had to make six withdrawals from a cash machine to circumvent its limits.

That was a minor inconvenience compared with retrieving a cylinder of oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen from the Ethiopian Revenues and Customs Authority. The canister, needed to calibrate the VO2 max tests, had been shipped from Italy in November because none were available in Ethiopia. Nearly three months later, it had not cleared customs.

Before heading to Bekoji, Pitsiladis and Zeru Bekele, his altitude expert, spent a maddening five hours extricating the cylinder from the authorities at Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa. They paid a 100 percent tax on the container and one fee after another. At the last minute, customs officials refused to release the canister to anyone but the purchasing agent from Addis Ababa University. Bekele spent an hour picking up the agent and driving her to the airport.

“Come on,” Pitsiladis said in exasperation before leaving for his hotel. “This is ridiculous.” Ridiculous became surreal when a Charlie Chaplin movie, “The Gold Rush,” began playing in a waiting area at customs. Finally, Bekele secured the canister and took it to Pitsiladis at his hotel. Pitsiladis cradled it like a baby.

“No one in their right mind would do this job,” he said with a laugh.

A software glitch left the results of Tulu’s VO2 max test unclear. Still, he did not appear to Pitsiladis to be a candidate to eventually break the two-hour barrier. Perhaps no one at the school was.

Earlier, as Pitsiladis had arrived and children had gathered around his van, he had said with disbelief and mild disappointment, “They’re all wearing something on their feet!” But Kenenisa Bekele had arranged for the trip with a phone call to Eshetu, his former coach, so Pitsiladis proceeded with the testing.

Zeru Bekele, the altitude expert, who is not related to Kenenisa, said he worried that as more schools were built in the countryside, Ethiopian children might lose something athletically by not having to run so far to class. “It could be in Bekoji that we’re 20 years too late,” Pitsiladis said. “These are city kids.”

Perhaps he would have to go to a more remote area to find the next marathon star — higher, to 11,500 feet or 13,000 feet, where a promising barefoot teenager might live. “Maybe the next Abebe Bikila is someone who doesn’t know about athletics and has never heard of the Olympic Games,” Pitsiladis said.

He had more immediate concerns. Pitsiladis needed a current star to give legitimacy to his provocative theories and to pique sponsor interest in the Sub2 Project, which he estimated would cost $30 million. One of Pitsiladis’s former doctoral students, Barry Fudge, had found his own willing science subject on the track in Farah, the British Olympic champion.

“Yannis would bite his right arm off to find somebody like that,” said Fudge, the head of endurance for the British track and field federation. Pitsiladis had hoped Kenenisa Bekele would be that athlete, but months of dealing with him suggested serious obstacles might still lie ahead as Pitsiladis applied his science to elite runners in Ethiopia.

Even then, Pitsiladis showed a knack for experimenting in training.

To mimic the sticky summer conditions in Asia, Pitsiladis devised a thermal chamber in a home in Addis Ababa, employing heaters and kettles of boiling water while Bekele trained on a treadmill. Bekele then won his races with a punishing kick and regal eyes that seemed to intimidate others with their commanding intent.

“I really like the guy,” Pitsiladis said. “He’s the greatest athlete we’ve seen.”

Bekele made his marathon debut in Paris in 2014, finishing first and setting a course record in 2:05:04 — the sixth-fastest debut ever. But injury sideswiped him. At last year’s Dubai Marathon in the United Arab Emirates, he dropped out after 18 ½ miles, and he withdrew from the London Marathon three months later.

In July, Bekele arrived at Pitsiladis’s lab in England about 25 pounds above his competitive weight of 123. He limped when he walked. His right calf was nearly an inch smaller around than his left calf.

“I thought it was over,” Pitsiladis said. “He looked like a broken man.”

Injuries had piled up. A stress fracture in his ankle. A torn calf muscle. Strained Achilles’ tendons. It was as if a string had been pulled, yanking Bekele’s back and legs and feet, leaving his muscles out of balance.

Bekele was 33. He surely would not be the marathoner to break two hours. (“I’m very close to old,” he said.) Still, he hoped to make a comeback, to win a gold medal in the marathon or the 10,000 meters at this year’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and, later, to beat the world record in the marathon.

“I have that vision,” Bekele said.

If Pitsiladis could restore Bekele, Pitsiladis believed, sponsors would find the Sub2 Project a worthwhile investment.

“The whole world will believe in what I’m doing,” Pitsiladis said.

His words were hopeful, if not a sure bet.

The two men needed each other but had a complicated relationship. They seem opposites in perhaps every way but their willful determination. Pitsiladis is an extroverted scientist, Bekele a reserved and proud athlete, wary of science, or at least reluctant to change the training that brought him so much success.

So although Pitsiladis and Bekele agreed to renew their partnership, it was full of operatic uncertainty. Again and again, Pitsiladis would say, “We’re five minutes from disaster.” They could not even agree on what foods were good for runners to eat.

After a workout in September, Pitsiladis had Bekele stop his sport utility vehicle at a roadside stand in Addis Ababa and climbed out to buy bananas.

Bekele took a bite and said, “Bananas are not good sometimes.”

Pitsiladis told him: “They’re good all the time. They refuel the muscles.”

Bekele did not mean he disliked the taste.

“He thinks bananas make you fat,” Pitsiladis said.

Steps Forward (and Back)

When he visited Addis Ababa in September, Pitsiladis found that Bekele had bought into some of the prescribed rehab program but not all of it. For the first time, he was working regularly with weights and using exercise balls to strengthen his core muscles. He agreed to quit eating cakes and to adhere to a traditional, carbohydrate-rich Ethiopian diet of stews and a spongy flatbread called injera.

By late September, Bekele had dropped 11 pounds. Pitsiladis planned each meal, restricting Bekele’s calorie intake to about 1,785 per day.

“Just enough to keep you alive,” Pitsiladis told Bekele.

Yet Bekele resisted the professional techniques employed by physiotherapists for the Sub2 Project. He preferred a simple massage from a friend.

He was not the only Ethiopian runner sensitive about who worked on his legs.

“If I treat five or six athletes in a day, they believe I can’t help them anymore because I’ve taken all the bad energy from the other athletes and it will affect them in a negative way,” said Jonathan Schaible, a physiotherapist who worked with Bekele.

Part of this distrust stems from beliefs in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, athletic officials said. Religious figures known as debteras are considered fortune tellers and magical healers but are also said to summon spirits that bring misfortune and sickness. Some athletes carry protective amulets and sprinkle holy water into their workout bags, fearing that competitors could put a hex on them, Zeru Bekele said.

In late September, on his way to train at Entoto, a eucalyptus forest above Addis Ababa, Kenenisa Bekele stopped to pray at a shrine outside the octagonal, brightly painted St. Mary’s Church. He referred to debteras as priests and said he considered them “very clever.”

“If they want to make someone crazy, they can,” Bekele said. “If they want to kill you, they kill you indirectly. You can’t see, but they send some powers, some evil, to you.”

This subject had been one of intense discussion between Bekele and Pitsiladis. Last summer, when Bekele went to England for treatment, the two sat in a car and talked for hours. According to Pitsiladis, Bekele told him: “I don’t need this treatment. All I need is for the priests to O.K. me.”

If that was what he believed, Pitsiladis said he replied, perhaps Bekele should return to Ethiopia. He stayed. Pitsiladis, who is Greek Orthodox, gave him a painting of St. Raphael, who was martyred on the Greek island Lesbos.

“I wanted to demonstrate that, while religion may be important, don’t let people use religion to take over your mind,” Pitsiladis said. “You are in control of your destiny, not these people around you.”

When he left Addis Ababa in September, Pitsiladis seemed more encouraged. Bekele had agreed to regular physiotherapy. He was sticking to his diet.

In early November, the tentative assurance evaporated.

Plans for any exotic training methods affiliated with the Sub2 Project faltered. There would be only a desperate attempt to get Bekele to the starting line of the London Marathon on April 24, a race in which he would have to give an encouraging performance to qualify for Ethiopia’s Olympic marathon team.

In January, Bekele traveled to Munich to visit a popular and controversial doctor, Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt. His supporters, including the Jamaican sprint star Usain Bolt, swear by him and call him Healing Hans.

But some scientists have questioned his unconventional treatments, such as injections of Actovegin, a filtered extract of calf’s blood, along with lubricants and antioxidants. Travis Tygart, the chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, once described Müller-Wohlfahrt’s injections to ESPN as a “Frankenstein-type treatment.”

Pitsiladis accompanied Bekele to Munich, wary of the treatments. At least Müller-Wohlfahrt admonished Bekele to follow the rehab program the Sub2 Project had prescribed, Pitsiladis said. (Müller-Wohlfahrt declined a request for an interview.)

When Pitsiladis returned to Addis Ababa in February, he placed Bekele on an even stricter diet, 1,000 to 1,500 calories a day. As his weight declined, so would the pain in his heel. That was the hope, anyway. The London Marathon was only 10 weeks away.

In March, Bekele turned inward, secretive, as he sometimes had at the height of his career. He declined to tell Pitsiladis about his training regimen. He would not allow his physiotherapist to weigh him.

“He likes to make history when no one is watching,” said Mersha Asrat, Bekele’s coach.

Pitsiladis grew exasperated. But he had gotten Bekele in sufficient shape to run the London Marathon. Bekele was no longer the broken runner he had been. In an instant message, he told Pitsiladis, “Thank you for believing in me.”

Pitsiladis replied: “I believe in you 100 percent. And you need to trust me 100 percent. Then we can do it together.

Pitsiladis waited while Bekele was interviewed after gamely finishing third at the London Marathon last month. Credit Uriel Sinai for 

A Reward to Collect

Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya eventually won in 2:03:05, the second-fastest marathon ever. While Bekele was left to run alone in the final miles, he gamely finished third in 2:06:36. The running world buzzed about his comeback. If chosen for Ethiopia’s marathon team for the Rio Olympics, he was expected to be a medal contender.

“It was nice because I come back from injury,” Bekele said. “Not bad.”

Pitsiladis hugged Bekele. Perhaps now, Bekele would more readily buy into a scientific approach to training. “Let’s see,” Pitsiladis said.

In any case, the Sub2 Project would continue. Pitsiladis planned to open a training center in Kenya and hoped to enlist Kipchoge. The International Olympic Committee had pledged funding to his lab for antidoping research, Pitsiladis said. The money could also be used for altitude research in the Sub2 Project. An American biotech firm had also shown interest, Pitsiladis said.

“I want to impact a life,” he said of his desire to break the two-hour barrier. “You’re here once. You want to do something that matters. I wanted to be an athlete in the Olympics. I didn’t do it. So how else can you make a mark that you were here? I think it’s important.”