Dr Mike Crawley, Assistant Professor in Anthropology, spent 15 months in Ethiopia researching the lifestyle and ways of the country’s running culture.
Mike, who is a keen marathon runner himself and has finished a marathon in 2 hours 20 minutes, has written a book about his adventures - and here he is telling us more about it.
This meant getting up at 4.30am three mornings a week to take the bus to training and running well over 100 kilometres a week in the forests around Addis Ababa.
Tell us about your time in Ethiopia...
I was in Ethiopia conducting ethnographic fieldwork for my PhD. In order to try to understand the Ethiopian runners’ attempts to ‘change their lives,’ as they put it, through the sport, I lived and trained alongside athletes. This meant getting up at 4.30am three mornings a week to take the bus to training and running well over 100 kilometres a week in the forests around Addis Ababa.
What inspired you to write your book, Out of Thin Air?
After I’d written my PhD thesis, I realised that very little was known about Ethiopian running. More people have been to Kenya to write about running, because it’s a little more accessible and there is less of a language barrier. One of the motivations for writing the book was to challenge assumptions that East African running success is genetic or ‘natural,’ which I think undermines the hard work and expertise that go into creating top class athletes. I wanted to bring what I’d learnt about Ethiopian running to life by writing a more personal account of my time in Ethiopia, combining writing about my own experiences with telling the stories of the runners I knew. I hope the book appeals to people who are interested in running but also to people who are interested in Ethiopia more generally. I also hope it demonstrates the value of an anthropological approach to learning about something, characterised by a long-term immersion in a place and deep relationships with people there.
You are a keen runner yourself, what did you learn about the running culture in Ethiopia?
I learnt that it’s all relative! I went from being one of the faster runners in Scotland (where I was studying at the time) to more or less the slowest runner in Addis Ababa. There are a huge number of young people in Ethiopia running twice a day with a dream of one day turning professional, and there is a strong belief that training together is important – success is seen as collectively produced rather than as belonging to an individual. I was also struck by how patient runners were with their preparations. Much of the running on easier training days was done extremely slowly, so I also learnt that sometimes you have to slow down to speed up!