Music Meets Running

When I was a teenager, cross country was my absolute passion. I did not like and was relatively bad on the track and was too young for the road. In cross country regional to national races, I could sometimes surpass myself in a way I could hardly explain. I would love the cold, the rain,  the pale blue skies, the fog, the deep mud, the up- and downhill, the choke points after the start, the endless grass of the suburban areas, the socio-geographical diversity I could find within the other young competitors, the so-called ‘university of life’. I would prefer training in the fields and the forest to common teenhood rituals. And, of course, as many others, I was totally fascinated by the glittering emergence of Eastern African runners — with Kenyan at the forefront — in international competitions and especially the World Championships, over which those super-athletes have oustandingly reigned since the mid-1980’s.

Evertything really began in 1986 with the victory in the World Cross Country Championships, in Colombier, Switzerland, of an almost unknown Kenyan athlete — John Ngugi, who was then going to win five World Champion titles between 1986 and 1992; the next big name would be the Kenyan Paul Tergat who would achieve the same exploit than Ngugi but in a row between 1995 and 1999; in the 2000’s, the Ethiopian Kenenisa Bekele would win no less than six titles between 2002 and 2007… Between 1986 and 2024, 16 Kenyan, 8 Ethiopian, 3 Ugandan, and 1 Eritrean won the gold medal at the World Cross Country Championships. But maybe the most impressive is the unbelievable quantity of team victories obtained by Kenya over the abovementioned period: twenty-five! Many observators have pointed out deterministic factors like life in altitude for explaining such a domination of Eastern Africa over the cross country discipline; however, anybody having pushed forward the analysis knows that the Eastern African runners’ secret has been their hard training methods, mainly based on high frequency runs (up to three sessions a day) and spectacular, voluminous high velocity, interval training sessions, the whole associated with kind of an ascetic way of life. 

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Settled in Aarhus, Denmark, the 2019 World Athletics Cross Country Championships reconstruct more or less artificially in a peripherical urban area the old fashion British style of cross country: a rolling diversified route with grass, sand, mud, even water sections; the hills are very steep. The race is a model of Eastern Africa middle-distance competition ‘philosophy’: the leaders and especially the Ugandan athletes instinctively program an alternance of accelerations and decelerations in order to provoke a selection at the back of the lead pack, with constant increase of the average velocity on the approach of the finish line. Look how fast they go when the path is going up, look how the winner stunningly wins… Accompanied by harsh and intense rock’n roll, the film of the race becomes impressively dramatic, theatrical — a true cross country lesson. 

Soundtrack: “American X”, by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (2007) (sorry for the sometimes crude lyrics…).