[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: The podcast.

JAD: And today, since we are right about to have the New York City marathon zip through our neighborhood sitting here in New York ...

ROBERT: We have a puzzle.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: It's a puzzle.

JAD: A puzzle. It's a—it's a—yeah. It's a puzzle, and it comes from NPR's East Africa correspondent, Gregory Warner.

GREGORY WARNER: I prepared for this story by taking a jog through Nairobi.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Well, all right, so where do we start with this, Greg?

GREGORY WARNER: I think we should start in 1968. I mean, there's a lot of places we could start but let's start there. Let's try it.

JAD: Okay.

GREGORY WARNER: So 1968, Summer Olympics in Mexico City.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Mexico City, thankfully a city of peace on the Olympic opening day.]

GREGORY WARNER: At 7,900 feet, one of the highest elevated Olympics, and that's difficult for runners, because there's less oxygen. And one of the big races that everybody's looking forward to is the 1,500 meter between the 23-year-old American favorite, Jim Ryun ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Jim Ryun, an American, number 300 ...]

GREGORY WARNER: He's the world record holder. And this guy named Kipchoge Keino.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Kip Keino, of Kenya, number 565.]

GREGORY WARNER: Kip Keino, he's called.

JAD: Kip Keino.

GREGORY WARNER: They bill him as an untrained Nandi tribesman from Kenya. He's actually a policeman from a long line of cattle rustlers. And here's what you need to know about Kip. He's running three different races at this Olympics. Not only the 1,500, but also the 5,000 meter and the 10,000 meter. If you include the qualifying matches, he'll be running six Olympic events in eight days.

JAD: Wow!

GREGORY WARNER: Six races in eight days, which would never be done today, was hardly done then. So first up ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: 10,000 meters.]

GREGORY WARNER: The 10,000 meter race. He's in the lead, two laps away from finishing, when he collapses. He falls off the track. He gets rushed to the Kenyan doctor, who's a German guy, who diagnoses him with a gallbladder infection, which turns out is incredibly painful. It actually hurts the most when you take deep breaths, like when you're running. And if you don't treat it, your gallbladder could burst. So basically, the doctor sends Kip to bed, says, "There's no way you can run," but Kip, he runs the next race anyway. He ends up getting silver.

JAD: Wow!

GREGORY WARNER: He's sent to bed by the German doctor again, who literally says, "Okay, this time, you have to stay in bed. If you run any more races, you could die."

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Back to the track for one of the most memorable events of the whole games, the 1,500 meters.]

GREGORY WARNER: Three days later, it's the big match-up against Jim Ryun. And Kip, apparently he just leapt out of bed an hour before the race and he said something like, "If I die, I'm gonna die on the track." So Kip Keino starts off ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: They're up and running. Three and three quarter laps of the stadium.]

GREGORY WARNER: He starts out dead last.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Keino running last and then moving up to the middle of the pack now.]

GREGORY WARNER: By the end of the first lap, he's in third.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Kip Keino third.]

GREGORY WARNER: In the third lap, he takes the lead.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Here comes Kip Keino, coming up with his teammate.]

GREGORY WARNER: He goes ahead, but that's okay for Jim Ryun. Jim Ryun's known to have the greatest kick in the sport.

ROBERT: Kick?

GREGORY WARNER: Kick. Right at the end of the race, every runner gives this extra boost. And Ryun's got the best kick in the business.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Jim Ryun is beginning to move.]

GREGORY WARNER: So he's thinking ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The kick is beginning.]

GREGORY WARNER: ... there's no way that Kip Keino, at altitude, suffering a gallbladder infection, can hold out against my kick. And in the final lap, it looks like he's right. He starts shooting up the field, gaining on Kip Keino, who is clearly in pain. He's sort of grimacing, gritting his teeth.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: 300 yards left. The crowd's going mad.]

GREGORY WARNER: Lurching to the finish line. And even though he is in an ungodly amount of pain, even though pain is shooting through his entire body, amazingly ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: And Keino will never be caught.]

GREGORY WARNER: ... he does not slow down. Jim Ryun never catches him, and he wins.

JOHN MANNERS: When he hung on around that last turn, it was—oh, I was hysterical.

GREGORY WARNER: This is John Manners.

JOHN MANNERS: I am a semi-retired journalist who for many years had a specialty in covering the exploits of Kenyan runners, African runners in general.

GREGORY WARNER: He was watching that race ...

JOHN MANNERS: ... in a bar about 50 miles north of New York.

GREGORY WARNER: But as a kid, Manners actually lived in the part of Kenya that Kip Keino is from.

JOHN MANNERS: My people. [laughs]

GREGORY WARNER: And so when Keino won gold, it sparked a question for Manners that he would spend the next 40 years thinking about.

JOHN MANNERS: I wanted to find a reason why my people, as I chose to regard them, were great.

GREGORY WARNER: Because on that day in 1968, Kip Keino didn't just win a race. He ushered in an era of East African dominance in the sport ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's Kenya one, it's Kenya two, it's Kenya five.]

GREGORY WARNER: ... that is almost hard to believe.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The Kenyans have done it again. One, two, and three.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yep, it was, once again, the Kenyans, the eighth successive gold medal in Olympic history.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's a world record. A world record.]

JAD: So 1968 was the beginning of the Kenyan dominance in running?

GREGORY WARNER: Yeah, but ...

DAVID EPSTEIN: In the United States, we think of Kenyans as being good runners, but really, it's this one, tiny, small geographic swath...

GREGORY WARNER: ... within Kenya ...

DAVID EPSTEIN: ... where all the runners come from.

GREGORY WARNER: That's David Epstein, he's a senior editor at Sports Illustrated. He wrote a book called The Sports Gene, and the geographic swath that he's talking about is in Western Kenya. It's a mountainous region, spread out, about the size of Massachusetts. And the people who live there are a particular tribe of Kenyans called ...

DAVID EPSTEIN: The Kalenjin.

GREGORY WARNER: Pretty small group of people.

DAVID EPSTEIN: This tribe accounts for about 0.06 percent ...

GREGORY WARNER: ... of the world's population. But, from this one, tiny tribe has come ...

DAVID EPSTEIN: ... this unbelievable fount of talent that I think is unparalleled in any other sport ever.

GREGORY WARNER: There's all kinds of statistics.

DAVID EPSTEIN: It sort of becomes laughable. You know, there have been five American high school runners who have broken four minutes in the mile.

GREGORY WARNER: The first was actually Jim Ryun.

DAVID EPSTEIN: But there's one high school in Iten, in Kenya, that had four sub-four milers at the same time. There's 17 American men in history who have run under 2:10 in the marathon. That's about four minutes and 58 seconds per mile pace. Seventeen American men in history. There were 32 Kalenjin who did it in October of 2011. So you start to look at these statistics, and it appears to be the greatest concentration of elite athletic talent ever in any sport, anywhere in the world.

JOHN MANNERS: And that's the question. I mean, how does that happen?

GREGORY WARNER: That was John Manners' question 40 years ago.

JOHN MANNERS: Something has to account for this extraordinary set of numbers.

GREGORY WARNER: But what? And there have been any number of scientists and sports gurus and athletes have gone to this place to figure out what's happening, what's the secret here? You know, and there's all kinds of theories. Like, it's something about the tree that they use to make the spoon which they use to mix the corn meal.

JAD: What did the tree do?

GREGORY WARNER: Well, this was this Swedish scientist who came in and looked at ugali, which is a corn meal. It's the basic staple food of Kenyans, because he wanted to mix it with the water from the spring in the pot that Kalenjin used, thinking that something chemical was happening that was making these guys, you know, run super fast.

JAD: What?

GREGORY WARNER: I mean, you know, it's kind of silly, but a lot of people here tell me it's the bananas. But people have also suggested some more reasonable theories.

JOHN MANNERS: Well ...

GREGORY WARNER: According to John Manners ...

JOHN MANNERS: ... people talked a lot about altitude and the ability to process oxygen and what have you.

GREGORY WARNER: Other people have said it's because the Kalenjin have a high starchy diet. Or ...

DAVID EPSTEIN: Because they run to school, that's a very prominent phenomenon. We know that the runners that come from the Kalenjin tribe that become great runners, they're much more likely to have run to and from school long distances, like 10K to and from school.

GREGORY WARNER: But ...

DAVID EPSTEIN: There are millions of kids in Kenya who run to and from school ...

GREGORY WARNER: Or who live at altitude. The problem with all of these is that these are not specific to the Kalenjin.

DAVID EPSTEIN: Yeah.

GREGORY WARNER: So then you get the socioeconomic arguments. The salary of a runner is attractive. You know, $10 or $20,000 a year seems like a fortune worth striving for. But the country's not so poor that it can't send competitors to the athletic competitions.

JAD: This is Malcolm Gladwell's argument, actually.

ROBERT: Very close.

GREGORY WARNER: Yeah.

JAD: That there's a—that there's a social pressure to it, that this is how you get out.

GREGORY WARNER: Yeah, and there's so many role models. I mean, every village has some kind of champion.

ROBERT: Yeah.

GREGORY WARNER: The problem with that argument—I mean, there's actually no problem with the argument. It makes sense, but it doesn't say how the Kalenjin got so good in the first place that they created these role models.

DAVID EPSTEIN: I mean, where did the role models come from?

GREGORY WARNER: So the idea you're left with is maybe there's something genetically different about them that makes them better than us. This is obviously a dangerous idea, and ,in fact, when David Epstein was writing his book about sports and athletics ...

DAVID EPSTEIN: I almost backed out of writing the book because I realized I was gonna have to address ethnic differences and gender differences. I really did almost back out of it. There were scientists who confessed to me that they were withholding data.

GREGORY WARNER: That they had studies that showed a genetic advantage, but they wouldn't show him because they were afraid that they'd lose tenure. But, he says, you have to acknowledge the obvious.

DAVID EPSTEIN: One aspect of innate biology that clearly helps Kalenjin that's been studied by scientists is their body build. So the Kalenjin are what's called a Nilotic people. They're from—they have ancestry at very low latitude. I was criss-crossing the equator when I was visiting their training camps. And when you have your ancestry in a hot and dry climate, you evolve a certain body type for cooling. And we know this—we've known this for over a century. It's called Allen's rule, that organisms—not just humans—all organisms that evolve in hot and dry climates have a certain body type.

GREGORY WARNER: Namely ...

DAVID EPSTEIN: Very long and thin limbs, so that there's a lot of surface area through which heat can dissipate. Their limbs get thinner the farther away they get from their center of gravity. So they have extremely thin ankles and extremely thin calves, which is particularly important because your leg is like a pendulum, and the more weight you have farther away from your center of gravity, the more difficult it is to swing. This has been tested in the lab, too, right? So you take a runner and put eight pounds of weight around their waist. It increases the energy they have to use to run at a given pace. But if you take that same eight pounds and put it in the form of two four-pound weights around their ankles, it's like over 25 percent the increase in energy they need to run at the same pace.

GREGORY WARNER: So if you have fat ankles, find a different sport?

DAVID EPSTEIN: Right. You're not gonna win the New York Marathon if you have thick ankles.

GREGORY WARNER: And so it gets you to this place where you think, well, I don't know, maybe Kalenjin from this area, maybe they have this built-in advantage.

JAD: Hmm.

GREGORY WARNER: It's physics.

JAD: I don't know. Somehow, like I—to sort of just peg it all on physics smells like an argument that I really don't like.

ROBERT: No, nobody likes it.

GREGORY WARNER: I don't think it's a question of like or dislike, I think it's just not the reason I watch the Olympics. I mean, you know, going back to Kip Keino, who overcame a gallbladder infection to break the Olympic world record in 1968, he didn't win because he had thin ankles. He won because of something which is the reason we watch sports. You know, it's that essence, the willpower or triumph over adversity.

JAD: Right, the triumph of the human over everything.

ROBERT: Yes.

GREGORY WARNER: And this is where I ran across a completely new, fascinating, and somewhat terrifying way of explaining why the Kalenjin are so good. And it's an idea that eventually led me to go to Kalenjin country myself.

GREGORY WARNER: That's a perfect way of beginning, a little cow hoot.

GREGORY WARNER: Once you get to Iten, which is in the mountains, the air is cool. There's a lot of cows, a lot of people. And at around 5:30, 6:00 am, all you hear is the pitter-patter of feet. And then—phew, phew, phew!—all these people just pass you all of a sudden, and then, you know, you wait for a few more seconds, and then—zoom, zoom, zoom!—people pass you again, because everybody's running. I even started morning jogging when I was there. I'm not really a morning jogger, but I just kind of got into the flow. Anyway, while I was there, I met this guy.

COLM O'CONNELL: [laughs]

GREGORY WARNER: His name's Brother Colm O'Connell.

COLM O'CONNELL: Colm O'Connell. I'm Irish, of course. Came to Kenya in 1976.

GREGORY WARNER: Famous running coach who works with a lot of Kenyan runners. So I met him in an Irish pub in Eldoret, which is a—there's only one. When I asked him this question: what is it that makes the Kalenjin so good? This is what he told me.

COLM O'CONNELL: When you train an athlete to a high level, you need to remember that they live on the edge of injury. They live on the edge of overtraining. They live on the edge of pain.

GREGORY WARNER: Pain.

COLM O'CONNELL: Pain tolerance, yes yes.

GREGORY WARNER: Now look, to some degree, everybody who's a runner talks about this insidious, protean nature of pain, how it finds all the places. You become breathless and your lungs have needles. The best runners have to learn to mentally override these distress signals, to run despite the pain. He actually calls it "expanding your pain barrier." But Colm O'Connell says for the Kalenjin, pain is something else entirely.

COLM O'CONNELL: Your ability to withstand pain, that, in a sense, in the Kalenjin tradition, made you a man.

GREGORY WARNER: Quite literally.

JOHN MANNERS: The central event of their young lives will come up when they are going to be initiated into the tribe.

GREGORY WARNER: That's John Manners again. Remember, he spent part of his childhood in Kalenjin territory, and he says when he was a boy, say, 12 years old, he would notice his friends had scars on their arms and legs.

JOHN MANNERS: Marks of having burned their arms and legs with hot coals.

GREGORY WARNER: He soon learned they were practicing for this initiation moment.

JOHN MANNERS: You know you're facing it for 10 years at least.

GREGORY WARNER: Because, as a Kalenjin teenager, boy or girl, you have to go through an experience which is so painful, it's a kind of theatrical orgy of pain. And here's what happens. First, you have to crawl naked through stinging nettles, which is like formic acid, you know, and African stinging nettles are much, much stingier than the western stinging nettle. But then your fingers are squeezed together. Then you get beaten on that bony part of your ankle where it really hurts. But all that's just warm-up, because then one morning comes the circumcision. Now we have some idea of how circumcision works. Maybe some of us are circumcised. So you perform it on a baby, and it's—it's one kind of experience. I've gone through that myself. I've seen it done. I've had to hold the legs also of my nephew. It's hard. But the Kalenjin circumcise somewhere right after puberty, so around age 13 to 17.

JAD: Hmm.

SOREN WHEELER: Whoa!

GREGORY WARNER: The foreskin is not only cut, but it's tied into a bow. The more than the tied into a bow thing, I gotta stop there. I kind of froze. I don't really know how to describe it past there.

JOHN MANNERS: I believe either the top or the bottom of the foreskin is pierced, and then the head of the penis is pushed through the opening. And ...

GREGORY WARNER: The thing is, it's not just the cut, actually.

JOHN MANNERS: When he undergoes the operation, he is obliged to be absolutely stoical, still, unflinching.

GREGORY WARNER: So in some versions of this ceremony, mud is caked on the face, and then the mud is allowed to dry. If a crack appears in the mud—your cheek may twitch, your forehead may crinkle—and if that happens, a little crack will appear in the mud, and all the people around will know to immediately start beating you with large sticks. The worst part, though, is not just the beating. It's that, after that moment, if you don't make it through this ceremony, you get labeled a "kebitet," a coward. You're a pariah in society. You're not part of society. In the olden days, you didn't have access to the economic opportunities to afford what's called the bride price, which is what you need to get a wife. However, if you show yourself to be a true warrior, if you make it through this experience, then hey, you get the rights of reproduction. You may even have two or three wives. So Manners wondered—and he's just speculating here—but maybe, if you have 2,000 years of this sexual selection of ensuring that the stoical, tough-guy types get to have babies, the sensitive types don't, maybe it's not just that the Kalenjin are built for speed, it's not just that they have the body type, maybe they have some sort of innate ability mentally, to persevere through pain.

JAD: Huh. And is that a cultural ability? Or would he say that all that selection has filtered into their DNA in some way?

GREGORY WARNER: Well, so Manners says he isn't sure. And there's certainly no gene for stoicism that's been discovered, and any athletic success has to be ascribed to a host of factors. But can I play one cut?

SOREN: Here, I'll play it. You want me to play the first one?

GREGORY WARNER: All right, so I was in Iten, I was thinking about that question, and I met this kid named Elly Kipgogei. He's 19 years old. He's a self-described bookworm.

ELLY KIPGOGEI: From the very beginning, I never wanted to go through the traditional form of circumcision, because I knew the ordeal of it was so bad.

GREGORY WARNER: And actually what he said was, "Please circumcise me in the hospital. I want to do the cowardly way." But his relatives said, "No, you'd shame the entire family, and if you don't do it ..."

ELLY KIPGOGEI: "You're not a full man." That's how they put it.

GREGORY WARNER: So he felt like he had to just do it.

ELLY KIPGOGEI: It is so hard. There's beatings. You're supposed to stay for nine hours inside cold water. Then early in the morning, around seven in the morning, circumcision. They use a sharp stick. I hope you understand that a sharp stick, so it's just bad!

GREGORY WARNER: Now he said the whole initiation ritual actually went on for a couple weeks. It was more than just the cut. And during the whole time, he was kept in a hut on the outskirts of the village. His face was powdered white like a ghost, and he was told, "Whenever you leave this hut ..."

ELLY KIPGOGEI: "You are not allowed to walk."

GREGORY WARNER: You're not allowed to walk.

ELLY KIPGOGEI: So you're supposed to run. Very fast. So you're running very swift. Having the pain.

GREGORY WARNER: And before the circumcision, Elly was never a runner. Afterwards, when he was done with initiation and he was back in high school ...

ELLY KIPGOGEI: I said, oh, let me give that a try. So I could run, and I feel pain, I feel pain, I'm feeling pain, and I wanted to stop, then I realized, no, let me try to persevere. Let me just try, let me try one more time. And two minutes later, I was at school.

GREGORY WARNER: Elly joined his track team, started running to school and during his lunchtimes.

ELLY KIPGOGEI: And after training for two weeks and three weeks there, I became an expert, and I was known as the school athlete.

GREGORY WARNER: After how long?

ELLY KIPGOGEI: After two weeks alone. Two weeks alone.

GREGORY WARNER: Two weeks!

ELLY KIPGOGEI: That's how it began.

GREGORY WARNER: That's a crazy story. Is that really true?

ELLY KIPGOGEI: Yeah, it is true. So, probably my ability of running was a bit higher than the rest.

GREGORY WARNER: Turns out, Elly's mom was an accomplished athlete.

GREGORY WARNER: Okay, so you're saying you had some physical ability to run, but you just didn't really do it before.

ELLY KIPGOGEI: Yeah, I never realized that I can—I could run.

GREGORY WARNER: So we didn't talk at all about women, but Kalenjin girls also go through an initiation rite of their own—female genital mutilation.

JAD: The same type of ritual?

GREGORY WARNER: Not the same ceremony, but a similar type of stoical testing ceremony.

JOHN MANNERS: And to me this made no sense.

GREGORY WARNER: This is John Manners again.

JOHN MANNERS: Obviously, the women are not the warriors. They don't need to be brave. Why is it important for them to show courage during this operation? And when I asked this question of my Kalenjin friends many years ago, they were kind of astonished at the question, as though the answer should have been self-evident, and the answer they gave me was: a woman who shows cowardice during this operation might bear cowardly sons.

GREGORY WARNER: So some Kalenjin might say that Elly actually got two things from his mom. One was his physical prowess, his speed on the track. The other was a mental ability to persevere through pain.

ELLY KIPGOGEI: Yeah. People usually say it's called a blessing. In Kalenjin, we call it peruto. Blessing is what you get from probably a forefather, probably a grandmother, so he or she blesses you with that activity. That's what they used to say. The blessing.

ROBERT: That's pretty interesting.

JAD: It's interesting.

ROBERT: Although we're using inheriting words or blessing words, what we're really talking about is the pressure of a culture that is simply choosing to deeply psychically reward certain behaviors, and create expectations for those behaviors and create success around those behaviors. Those are all cultural, not biological things, but they—they are the equivalent.

JOHN MANNERS: I think it's both. And I don't know what proportion each contributes to the ultimate result. I—it's—I have no way of judging.

GREGORY WARNER: But whatever the mechanism—and whatever it is, it'll probably stay a mystery—of all the explanations out there for why this one group of people is so good at running, this is the first one that's made me want to run. Once I met Elly and talked to these runners in Kenya—you know, this is an embarrassing story because I don't run very fast, but I got to the gym, and I was on the treadmill, and I was like, "I'm taking it up to seven," you know? Seven miles an hour. Like, 7.1, actually, I went. And, you know, it's not, like, very fast, but that would usually be my end run. Like, at the last five minutes, I might do a 7.1, but I did the whole 25 minutes at 7.1. And I thought, why did I ever think that this was undoable before? Why was I staying at, like, 6.8? If we're trying to figure out what makes these runners so great, and our first answer is a totally scientifically factually true but somehow demoralizing absolute that puts one set of people over there and the rest of us over here—we all have our body type that we're born with—but then if the second explanation of this Kalenjin advantage may be just as inaccessible to the rest of us, but still it feels like a more egalitarian version of advantage, even if we're talking about a very specific culture.

JAD: Yeah, I think if you run with extreme pain for a month after having been circumcised, and somehow that gave you a certain culturally troubling but also real relationship to pain, well that feels like a fair advantage to me. Not that I would wish it on anyone.

GREGORY WARNER: Actually, even Elly does not wish it on his kids, when he has kids.

ELLY KIPGOGEI: The system is changing from the traditional format to the new format right now.

GREGORY WARNER: I mean, he's part of a new generation of Kalenjin. He says for his contemporaries, the pain-free hospital circumcision is becoming slowly less of a stigma.

ELLY KIPGOGEI: And I can't imagine my son going through the same procedure as their father. So my son or my sons won't go through the same procedure as I did.

GREGORY WARNER: But didn't—I mean, don't you want your son to be—to have the benefits of what you ...?

ELLY KIPGOGEI: The benefits are only about the perseverance part of it. And the ability of perseverance you can get through many ways.

GREGORY WARNER: He tells himself he's gonna be able to pass on those Kalenjin values without resorting to the ancient rituals.

ELLY KIPGOGEI: I will teach him how to persevere.

GREGORY WARNER: And he thinks his kids will still be able to be champion runners, if that's what they want to be.

ROBERT: Thanks to Gregory Warner, NPR's East Africa correspondent.

JAD: Also we should say thanks to Phia Bennin for production help on this piece. Thank you Phia. And thank you guys for listening. I'm Jad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert.

JAD: We'll see you next time.

[LISTENER: That's my kitty-cat Max, and this is Richie. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

 

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