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Dr Michael Crawley
59 Plays4 years ago
Dr Michael Crawley is an anthropologist, writer and runner.
Michael is a 2:20 marathon runner, he has competed at national and international level and currently works as Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology at Durham University.
Michaels new book Out of thin air, Running Wisdom and Magic from Above the Clouds in Ethiopia came out in the UK in November and the US last week.
The book has been described on letsrun.com as the deepest exploration of Ethiopian distance running ever produced in the English language.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, welcome to today's episode of the UK sports chat podcast. I'm Joe Williams. Hope you're all doing well. And in today's episode, I am speaking with
Michael Crawley's Background
00:00:12
Speaker
Dr. Michael Crawley, author of Out of Thin Air.
00:00:17
Speaker
Michael is an anthropologist and writer. He was awarded a PhD in anthropology by the University of Edinburgh following funded research, living and training alongside runners in Ethiopia. Michael himself is a 220 marathon runner, has competed at national and international level and currently works as assistant professor in social anthropology at Durham University.
00:00:41
Speaker
Michael's new book, Out of Thin Air, Running Wisdom and Magic from Above the Clouds in Ethiopia, came out in the UK in November and also in the States last week. The book has been described by letsrun.com as the deepest exploration of Ethiopian distance running ever produced in the English language. I really enjoyed chatting with Michael. Hope you all enjoy the interview. Have a great week and see you soon in the next podcast.
Lockdown and Running Decisions
00:01:13
Speaker
Hi, Michael, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. How are you? Yeah, good, thanks. Just settling into the newest lockdown, trying to work out whether to go running in the snow later, basically. Yeah, have you got snow now? Yeah, we had more snow overnight. I thought we were in for some milder weather, but it seems to have come back, so.
00:01:34
Speaker
Yeah, it was milder yesterday, so for listeners, it's Thursday morning, we're recording now, and it's quite milder here. I'm in Shropshire, but snow is forecast tonight, so I think it must be making its way down from you to us. Yeah, I always end up, I think every time there's been a new lockdown, I've kind of found it a bit difficult to motivate myself running wise for a few days, and then I get back into it, but the weather's sort of put a stop to that just now.
00:02:01
Speaker
Yeah. Cool. So yeah, thank you for coming on.
Cultural Insights: Ethiopian vs. Kenyan Running
00:02:07
Speaker
It's going to be great to talk about the book, which Out of Thin Air, which came out in November. Am I right? Yeah. In November in the UK, it just came out in America a couple of days ago as well. Brilliant. Okay. So tell us about the book and give us a little bit of an overview on your running as well. That'd be great.
00:02:26
Speaker
Sure. So the book kind of came about because I was kind of interested in how usually when we talk about runners from Ethiopia and Kenya and Uganda and that part of the world, we tend to refer to them as sort of East African runners and not as
00:02:45
Speaker
We don't tend to know a vast amount about how things are different between the
Anthropological Research Methods
00:02:51
Speaker
different countries and even how things are different within a country like Ethiopia. I felt like a lot of the time when we say East African running, we actually really mean Kenyan running just because Kenya is a much easier place to go and do research and to talk to people because most of the runners there speak English and because E10 is quite a comfortable place to go and stay and things. So I was really intrigued by
00:03:15
Speaker
trying to trying to see what was going on in Ethiopia, basically. And as an anthropologist, that seemed really appealing as a as a project, because what the way the anthropologists work is by going and sort of living with the people that they're trying to understand. So for me, having having an excuse to go and live in Ethiopia for 15 months and learn Amharic and run with the with the athletes there was was pretty appealing, basically. Yes, that's how it came about.
00:03:44
Speaker
Okay, so anthropology, I freshly googled this this morning, Michael, is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. So what was the primary aim with this trip, this 15 months you spent in Ethiopia? Was this, because you're a runner, you're a 220 marathon runner and you've competed at high levels, was this,
00:04:09
Speaker
for you as part of your running and what is around quicker? Was this part of study, part of your job? What was the primary aim with it? I suppose it's a bit of everything. It was technically my job in that the PhD was funded research, so I was being paid for it. But it was also, obviously I was
00:04:30
Speaker
I just really excited to go and be able to run in such an amazing place for that amount of time. It actually didn't do my running a huge amount of good just because I was trying to focus on the research, I think more than anything. So the time that most of the runners that I lived with were spending wrestling during the day, I was spending typing up notes and going off to interview people and things like that.
Living with Ethiopian Athletes
00:04:54
Speaker
But basically, the research method involves as far as possible living the same sort of life as the athletes were living. So that was the main thing. So I lived in a compound with some runners from Moyo Sports Management, which is an athlete management agency.
00:05:14
Speaker
And basically just tried to try to follow their sort of rhythms of training and eating and recuperating and things like that as much as possible. So that's the that's the anthropology side of things. That's the research method is called ethnography. And it basically means it literally it means writing culture, but it basically means just trying to trying to understand the world from the perspective of the people that you're you're living with, basically. OK.
00:05:44
Speaker
Cool. So it was your actual research for your PhD then the trip. Yeah. So I've written my PhD thesis, which is far more sort of the anthropological side of things, a bit more theoretical. And then the book is very much kind of a separate project that tries to tell the story sort of of me going there and trying to find my feet and find my way into the kind of forests with the runners and get to know the, um,
Writing and Running Ambitions
00:06:09
Speaker
the way that they trained and things. So it's a far more kind of accessible sort of personal sort of book really, I suppose. It tells the story of how an anthropologist works as well as tries to tell the story of a set of Ethiopian runners and also kind of give it a bit of the history of Ethiopian running, but also try to bring to life some of the sort of stories that of athletes basically in Ethiopia.
00:06:40
Speaker
Okay. And before we dig in more into that, then just tell us a little bit about your running background. Sure. Yeah. So I've, I've been running since I was about, um, 15, I think, um, probably even earlier than that. So my coach is actually joking the other day that he's, cause I'm, I'm back in, I grew up in Durham and then I've moved back, um, recently.
00:07:02
Speaker
And I'm back training with my coach who I used to be coached by when I was sort of 15. And he keeps joking that he's been coaching me for over half of my life and we still haven't quite got to where he thinks I'm capable of getting with my running. I'd run 220 for a marathon. I think I can maybe run a couple of minutes quicker than that if the opportunity arises.
00:07:22
Speaker
Um, I'd like to, you know, I would, I would quite like to do that because I've run to 2053. It's so close to that barrier, but it would be a shame to, to stop now, but, um, see how it goes. Yeah. Yeah. And have you, um, have you got a plan for that? Or are you just, obviously there's no events at the moment, but is that something? Um, yeah, I mean, I would have run a marathon.
00:07:47
Speaker
I probably would have tried to run a couple of marathons last year if it had been possible, but it's quite tricky when you can't really put a plan together if you don't know when the races are going to come. Just see how it goes. Back to Ethiopia then. How did you go about planning this?
Planning and Early Experiences in Ethiopia
00:08:07
Speaker
How long did it take? Why Ethiopia? I know you've touched on that.
00:08:12
Speaker
Um, so I started planning the trip sort of 2014, I suppose, 2014, 2015. Um, and the beginning of the PhD, I had sort of six months to, to sort of read about as much as I could about, um, Ethiopia and the sort of literature on it and things. And then, um, when I first went out, I lived with a French sociologist called Benoit Gordon. Um, he kind of put me up in a, um,
00:08:39
Speaker
in a sort of shed that he had in his garden for a while and at that stage I was kind of just going into the forest and basically just going I went up to the forest the first day and started running and a group of athletes kind of came and just sort of grabbed me and and took me along with them so it was quite easy really in terms of
00:09:03
Speaker
get having sort of access to the athletes and being able to talk to them and write about things. It turned out to be much easier than I expected because people are so keen on this idea that you have to train together.
00:09:16
Speaker
even when I was trying to run on my own, people would grab me and sort of draw me into that group environment for training. So it was quite an organic process really setting up the research in that sense, just because people were very keen on making me part of films. But then because I wanted to write about runners at all different levels of the sport, I
00:09:35
Speaker
I then started working with the athletes from the management agency who were at a slightly higher level than the people that I just met sort of in the forest at the beginning because I wanted to be able to sort of look at the whole picture of Ethiopian running rather than just sort of the very grassroots level or just the very best athletes.
00:09:56
Speaker
Yeah. So where about Ethiopia, were you?
Urban Running in Addis Ababa
00:10:00
Speaker
I was in Addis Ababa, which is the, for the most part, which is the capital city. Okay. So in Ethiopia, it's quite different to Kenya, where most athletes obviously live in, in Iten or Kaptagat or the kind of quite rural areas. In Ethiopia, you know, most of the athletes are from, from places like that, but once they get to a certain level, they move to the city.
00:10:21
Speaker
So I lived in a compound with a group of runners from Moyo Sports and we ran in the forest, which is just sort of above the city of Addis Ababa. You can just get into the forest just by walking. But then three mornings a week, we would take a bus to go to places that were seen as particularly important for running. So in Toto, which is the mountain, sort of higher up into the mountain,
00:10:49
Speaker
or we'd go to places to run at slightly higher altitude, or we'd go to lower altitude to try and run fast. But yeah, for the most part, the sort of top athletes in Ethiopia all live in Addis, the capital, which is slightly different. And then I took trips basically out to more rural training camps. So I went up to Gondar in the north of Ethiopia for a while. I went to Bokoji, which is where,
00:11:15
Speaker
and a whole load of other top athletes are from, just to see kind of where the journey, I suppose, of being an Ethiopian athlete starts as well. Yeah. Okay. So on that first run, you said that you went out into the forest and you were grabbed by a group. Yeah.
00:11:39
Speaker
How did you react to that? Because I think if you're running in the UK and someone grabs you, that's the culture right there then, is it?
00:11:50
Speaker
Yeah, well, I suppose I, um, yeah, I think it's quite different to the, in the UK context, most people do most of their running on their own, I guess. And in Ethiopia, it's, it's really seen as quite antisocial to run on your own. Um, and I, I really didn't mind cause the whole point of me being there was to try to, to meet runners and to try to, um, you know, talk to them about their running and everything. So it was great from that point. Uh, the problem was that I'd, you know, only sort of 24 hours previously arrived from, from the UK and hadn't adapted at all to the altitude yet. So, um,
00:12:21
Speaker
So trying to keep up with them at sort of two and a half thousand meters above sea level on the first day was obviously quite tricky, but it was great to be involved in that. And I think that's probably one of the biggest differences between
00:12:37
Speaker
Ethiopia and other parts of the world, the really strong belief that you need to have a group around you in order to be successful as an athlete. People would say you can go running on your own, but that's just kind of to maintain your health.
00:12:54
Speaker
If you want to be an athlete, if you want to sort of be changed and develop as an athlete, you really need other people around you to do that. So yeah. Okay. And was that on that first day?
Training Adaptations in Ethiopia
00:13:07
Speaker
So, you know, what, what sort of time were you getting up and, and, and going out? I'm just trying to picture what your, what that first day looked like. Cause is there much of a time difference to Ethiopia? I don't think there is, is it? Cause it's.
00:13:19
Speaker
It's about three hours usually, but there's a very different way of... Ethiopia is basically on the equator, so it gets light at 6am every morning and it gets dark at 6pm every night, more or less. So as soon as the sun comes up, people head to training. So it's quite easy to get into the forest at the same time as other people. Just wake up with the sun and go to the forest and start running.
00:13:45
Speaker
We'd get up a lot earlier than that to go on the bus to get to training on a Monday, a Wednesday and a Friday. We'd normally get up about 4.30 in order to get to training before six o'clock. But yeah, I just sort of woke up and wandered up into the forest and it all started from there really.
00:14:03
Speaker
Okay. What session were they doing? How quick were they? Not running that fast actually. So in the forests, it's difficult to run that fast in the forests around Alice because it's all very steep hillside and also quite sort of tightly packed eucalyptus trees. So the style of running in those forests is to sort of
00:14:28
Speaker
zigzag in and out of the trees and to run quite slowly but to kind of use the hills to make sure that you're running.
00:14:37
Speaker
sort of always on a camber or always slightly up and downhill so that you're not kind of pounding your legs in the same way. So they would see that kind of forest running as being deliberately quite easy, as being a way of kind of massaging your legs and aiding recovery whilst developing aerobically because obviously the altitude is very high.
00:15:00
Speaker
Um, but for the most part, it was quite easy to keep up on once I was acclimatized on those kinds of forest runs, even with people who were running sort of 206 for a marathon. Um, often they would still do that. They're sort of easy running in the forest at like, um, you know, four 30 per kilometer, five minutes per kilometer sort of pace. So, uh, there was very much this sense that you train very easy on the easy days and then, you know,
00:15:27
Speaker
when you were going to run hard, you were going to run really hard and then sort of have that differentiation between the two kinds of training. Yes. How was it adapting to the altitude that first day compared to 12 months along?
00:15:45
Speaker
Pretty difficult. It took me quite a while. I don't think altitude was that good for me. You know how people kind of have varying levels of adaptability to altitude in terms of how much it improves their running. I never felt like it was that good for my running actually. And it took me a while to acclimatise to it.
00:16:10
Speaker
Um, so I came back a couple of times to the UK, uh, in the course of the 15 months and I went into a race in China and things like that as well. Um, and whenever I was away for a week or, or something, and then came back, it was sort of, you kind of have to start from scratch again, building up the acclimatization things. So, um, what, what does a training week look like then with the, um, you know, with the, with the groups that you were running with?
00:16:40
Speaker
So the group I was with, we did Monday morning, we would go to a sort of rough road trail. So a surface that's known as Korokonch in Amharic, which I think is a great word. It kind of it basically sounds exactly like the noise of feet on the ground. There's basically kind of roads made of kind of stone and gravel.
00:17:05
Speaker
And we would do sort of somewhere between 25 and 35 kilometers normally on quite hilly routes on Coroconch on a Monday. And then a Wednesday morning would be a speed session where we'd either go to a track or we'd go to something like a really big field somewhere. And those sessions were normally something like
00:17:36
Speaker
one minute hard, two minutes hard, three minutes hard, times six or something like that. So usually just on the watch and people would really kind of try to compete in those sessions and try to really run extremely hard on the Wednesday mornings. That was like the one day that they were allowed to just run as hard as they wanted. The other days it was normally the coach was quite keen on making sure that they were quite controlled with the training.
00:18:04
Speaker
And then on a Friday, we'd go to, Friday was the only day that we would ever go and run on the road. So that was referred to as asphalt training. We'd go to either a very flat road down in a place called Cebeta, or we'd go to a sort of rolling, very hilly roads in a place called Cendafa. And they were places where you'd have a kind of kilometer marker on the road, a white post that marked each kilometer and people would know basically
00:18:34
Speaker
how fast the top athletes could run 20 kilometers on a particular stretch of road. So that would be the kind of really objective session where people would really be able to compare themselves and their fitness to other people really well. There was definitely a sense that, you know, you had those three very hard sessions and then apart from that, the rest of the week was about kind of this different kind of running, which was about recuperation and about
00:19:02
Speaker
sort of exploring the forest in some way and try to keep things a bit more interesting and creative with the running. So we'd run right up into places where...
Training Philosophy and Techniques
00:19:12
Speaker
you'd really need to sort of almost be on your hands and knees to pull yourself up some of the slopes that we ran up and things like that. So it was kind of a bit more of a kind of creative and playful form of training in many ways, which I think we would not normally associate with such high performance sport. You know, it was that kind of really more resembles trail running in many ways, I think.
00:19:35
Speaker
Yeah, it's really interesting you say that. And just listening to you saying this, it's quite common for, I think, especially new runners to go out and just run the same pace all the time and try and just go a bit further. And hopefully that's getting your fitness up, but it's the quality, isn't it? And in what you're saying, so you've got that one really, well, you've got this three-hard session, one which is completely flat out, and then the rest is,
00:20:03
Speaker
fun and, you know, playing with it, like you say. Yeah. And I think people, people really kind of had to learn that slowness as well. It was seen as like, that was seen as a skill as much as running fast was to, to learn to, to go and run, you know, as slow as 10, 11 minute miling in the forest. Sometimes that you needed to, that was part of learning to be a top athlete was learning when you needed to, to go out and just take it really easy, basically.
00:20:30
Speaker
Yeah. So if you're at, yeah, and you coach 10 and 11 minute mile in there. So if you, if you're running hobbyist who perhaps runs a 10 minute mile for a marathon, that, that to them taking that lesson and putting that into their training is, you know, it's slowing right down to 13 minutes, maybe even 14 minutes, you know, um, which some people have, like you said, find very, very difficult to do because it's because of the pace.
00:21:00
Speaker
Yeah, and that's, that's kind of why, where the, the forest comes into it as well. They use that kind of environment in order to make them run slower. You know, you can't.
00:21:09
Speaker
It's a way of making sure that they're going to over train really in some ways that they're going to a place where it's the environment itself kind of dictates the pace that they're running. And it's quite easy because they're constantly having to sort of stop and turn back because the forest is too, you know, there's too many branches or something like that. It's deliberately or like looking for farmers fields that are covered in stones or kind of roughly plowed so that they're kind of almost doing
00:21:38
Speaker
kind of plyometric style exercises to get across the field, you know, looking for things that break up the monotony of, of what can otherwise be quite monotonous when you're training that, you know, running that much. Yeah. So, um, you mentioned the important places to run. Can you give us an example of, of one of those? Uh, yeah. So, um, in Toto is the, the mountain sort of, um,
00:22:04
Speaker
just behind that as however, but basically, so that was seen as a really important place to go just because you could run very slowly up there, but the altitude was so high, you could run up to about 3,200 meters above sea level there, which was seen as just basically a way of going and benefiting from the higher altitude and the
00:22:27
Speaker
sort of higher number of red blood cells that your body would produce as a result of being up there. So that was seen as quite important for that reason, but also the mountain was important for other reasons. It has a lot of churches up there and it's seen as quite a sort of
00:22:42
Speaker
sacred place in many ways. It's also where Haile Gebre Selassie is really associated with in Toto as it being a place that he always trains. So people saw that as an important place to go. And then they would go to on other so they would not so much the importance of particular places, but the importance of kind of having a balance between different training locations. So they would go up to in Toto on one day
00:23:04
Speaker
and then take the bus for an hour and a half to go to Akaki the next day, which was the lowest place that we were able to get to to train, which was about 2,100 metres maybe above sea level.
00:23:18
Speaker
And that was much, you know, the temperature change between those two places, even though they're both a bus ride from Addis is, you know, between something like 10 and 15 degrees. So you're able to go from, you're able to lose a thousand meters of altitude, but also have, you know, suddenly in this quite hot environment with the red dust roads. And, um, and that was seen as being really, um, the place to go to run quickly, uh, because it was hot. So there was about connecting different kinds of training to different places, I suppose.
00:23:47
Speaker
Yeah. And did you stick with the same group of people predominantly in your time there? Yes. So yeah, there was, you know, I was mainly with the Moira sports group just because I wanted to make sure that I was
Cultural and Language Connections
00:24:07
Speaker
kind of forming the friendships and the relationships with those guys to the extent that I'd be able to really write about about their lives in detail. But then obviously I met loads of other people along the way that also sort of make their way into the book. But it is mainly, it's kind of mainly a book about Amhara runners, which is just like several different
00:24:27
Speaker
ethnic groups that produce runners in Ethiopia. So there's some runners from Tigray, some from Aromia. And then my book is mainly about Amharic runners, just because Amharic was the language that I learned. And so it's mainly about that particular group of people. That was a question I was going to ask. How did you find communicating and language, but you learned the local language?
00:24:55
Speaker
I did, I think I probably speak quite a running specific version of Amharic. So it's like, I can, I'm very good at chatting about races and about training times and places and things like that. But it's because I mainly learned the language through hanging out with runners. I'm good at talking about politics or things, you know. Makes sense. So what did, um,
00:25:24
Speaker
What did the rest of the day look like in a typical training week then? So how much of the time was spent resting? Do they incorporate strength training in? What does the rest of it look like? So for the most part, we'd go running in the morning first thing, then sort of spend most of the day just around the compound really. People spent a lot of time
00:25:49
Speaker
washing running kit and running shoes and things like that and hanging stuff up to dry in the sun and just chatting about running basically for long periods of the day but also trying to sleep as well so people would you know if they were training really hard sometimes people would sleep for most of the day really between the first training session and the the second training session and
00:26:11
Speaker
Apart from that, just spending time kind of cooking and stuff like that. Occasionally, we go play pool and things to relax. We'll go watch football matches and stuff. But people were quite keen on this idea that you needed to minimize anything that was going to be detrimental to your running. So they referred to that as doing laps. If you were going to do chores, going to buy food, going to
00:26:36
Speaker
visit people and things. They'd call that a zur in Amharic, which literally means laps. And they were basically to be avoided if you weren't running around a track. If possible. And you mentioned this at the beginning then. How much of your time you spent interviewing and researching and doing the bits for your PhD?
Interviewing Ethiopian Running Figures
00:27:01
Speaker
I tried to do an interview every day, if I could, with someone where I really tried to get into depth about their running and how they managed to get to Addis Ababa and the trajectory of their running lives and things. But I was always trying to schedule that kind of thing in a way that wasn't going to interrupt their training. So it was quite a tricky balance in some ways. But I managed to interview
00:27:31
Speaker
you know, a variety of other people, Wami Beratu being the most interesting, he was the runner who was supposed to go to the 1960 Olympics, instead of Abubu Bikala, but he got ill the week before, and Bikala went instead and obviously won the Olympic marathon barefoot and kind of started the whole
00:27:53
Speaker
sort of Ethiopian running tradition, I suppose, in many ways. So I do manage to talk to some of the kind of older things in Ethiopian running as well, which is really interesting. Yeah. Okay. Have any of those runners and people that you were training with come through since you were with them, you know, on a world stage? So anyone who stands out?
Notable Ethiopian Athletes
00:28:18
Speaker
The one who really stands out is Jamal Yima, who I met him when he'd first moved to Addis from a training camp. And he kind of turned up for an interview in
00:28:33
Speaker
wearing the Ethiopian national clean kit that he'd been given because he went for the first race abroad in Durban for the African Championships. I kind of met him right at the beginning of his sort of
00:28:48
Speaker
time when he was running internationally at least and he's gone on to break the Ethiopian record and run 58 33 for a half so he's yeah in the sort of last four years he's really he's been amazing and incredibly consistent in half marathon he's run under 60 minutes pretty much every time he's run an amazing athlete and I was really kind of
00:29:11
Speaker
Looking forward to his marathon debut, which he made in Valencia in December, but unfortunately he tripped at the drink station at 5K and hurt himself. So we're still kind of waiting to see what his marathon debut is going to look like when hopefully there's a race on this year for him. Yeah.
00:29:31
Speaker
Yeah. Have you took, sorry, let me ask that again. How does or how will your training differ now compared to before you went?
Incorporating Ethiopian Philosophy into Personal Running
00:29:45
Speaker
How has that changed and evolved? Well, I think the main thing that you can sort of take from the Ethiopian approach is trying to sort of
00:29:56
Speaker
Um, trying to just keep things as interesting as possible, I guess. So trying to, um, if there's, so I would in.
00:30:05
Speaker
In Edinburgh when I kind of got back from, from Ethiopia the first time and I was a bit, just sort of a little bit disillusioned with my own running just because I'd spent so long with a group of people who were so much better than I was kind of tried to get myself interested again I asked highly a my friend to write me a training program, a sort of Ethiopian style training program to use in the UK.
00:30:27
Speaker
And basically what it meant was the sort of places that I could find to replicate the Ethiopian way of training were basically the golf courses around Edinburgh. So I ended up doing all this kind of zigzag running around the golf courses, which I really loved and which were brilliant in the first lockdown when golf wasn't allowed. And then also going to Arthur's Seat a lot more and just basically just incorporating a load of really hilly, really sort of trail running
00:30:55
Speaker
into what I was doing. But the other thing that I think is important is that people in Ethiopia, they really kind of approach certain training sessions in this way that made the running seem kind of like an adventure or like some kind of
00:31:13
Speaker
I don't know, like an excursion or something like that that was more exciting than just a training session. They would talk about it for a couple of days in advance and really kind of build it up. And in Ethiopia that would normally involve something like getting up at three in the morning to go and run up and down a hill.
00:31:29
Speaker
um because you to avoid traffic but also just to make it a bit more exciting you know so yeah i mean i didn't do my daughter was born shortly after i got back and you know we were uh losing enough sleep anyway so i didn't do a huge amount of the running at three o'clock in the morning thing but but just you know trying to have a bit more
00:31:51
Speaker
variety in in your training, I think. So there are certain sessions that I do do here that I didn't do before, like what the session that they call Regime Baggett, which means long hills, where you just get you basically find a long hill and run up and down it for an hour. And the idea is not is
00:32:13
Speaker
you run at a continuous pace. It's not like you sprint up and then jot down, but you just kind of run up and down a hill for an hour at a steady pace. And that seems to be really effective at building strength and things. So that's the sort of things, particularly training seconds I do now that I didn't do before.
00:32:29
Speaker
Yeah. And just as you were telling that, I had a big smile on my face imagining you running through the through the different holes on the golf course. Like you say, it's a more interesting way to train. Like you said earlier, it takes the way what can sometimes be monotonous.
00:32:53
Speaker
and then unfortunately I've not been able to find it in it's hard to get a group together with you know since lockdowns happened and things like that but the other thing is just try to make make running sociable as far as possible I guess that that's that's the other thing that comes out of the Ethiopian way.
Running with Hyenas
00:33:13
Speaker
One other question there before we wrap up is did which of the local animals did you meet when you were out there did you come across when you were out running?
00:33:21
Speaker
I met quite a few hyenas. They were, well, not so much met them, saw them. And people would, so there was, you know, running in the forest, you're not actually 100% top of the food chain in the way that you are in the UK, I suppose. So there's always that slight element of danger that you might run into a hyena. And the way that my friend put it was that I asked him if it was dangerous. And he said, well,
00:33:49
Speaker
you know most hyenas you meet them and they just run away but you do they're just like people you get the occasional crazy one um so you've got so there and everywhere stories that you know a couple several runners a year supposedly are killed by hyenas um from what people say so either yeah you have to be a little bit um a little bit careful and that was so one of the especially
00:34:13
Speaker
Um, difficult runs that I went on, which was like a three hour run through the forest. Um, where I was just really exhausted and a bit stroppy with the, with the guys who were leading this run. Um, I try, I was like, look, I'm going to, I'm going to head back. I'm just, I'm too tired. And they were like, no, no, you can't. Cause the, you know, there's hyenas too many hyenas around here. So, um, part of the incentive for keeping up with the group as well.
00:34:39
Speaker
Yes. Wow. I've been to Africa once so it's Kenya and that was on Safari and we actually saw just after Lions had
00:34:54
Speaker
had killed and they were feeding and the large male lion all of a sudden it was all quiet and you couldn't really see a huge amount and the big male lion jumped up and what you couldn't see there was a there must have been like 10 hyenas all sneaking around trying to come and pinch it and all of a sudden these hyenas just ran it was like wow what an amazing moment but they're
00:35:21
Speaker
They're bigger than you expect. I mean, I've seen them in documentaries and things and because they often pictured next to a lion, they don't look very big, but they're actually pretty big things. Yeah, they are. Well, thanks ever so much for coming on and talking to us about your trip to Ethiopia.
Conclusion and Book Information
00:35:43
Speaker
The book's called Out of Thin Air. How can people connect with you, your social channels, and tell us where we can get the book?
00:35:51
Speaker
I'm at MPH Crawley on Twitter. Where can you buy the book? Well, if the bookshops are open, you can buy it in Waterstones. It's on Amazon, obviously. I mean, I always try to encourage people to buy it from independent bookshops if you can, if they're selling stuff online at the moment. But yeah, hopefully we'll be out of lockdown soon.
00:36:16
Speaker
I could be able to go out and get it from there. And also I've downloaded it on Audible. I know that a lot of people like to listen to books as they run as well. So it's also available on Audible. Yeah. Yeah, great. Michael, thanks ever so much for coming on. It's been great. Great chatting. Thank you very much.