Running at Full Capacity: Shifting the narrative on Ethiopian running and maximising its effects on development

Long distance runners in East Africa are often portrayed in the international media as 'naturally' gifted or as running away from poverty. My PhD research, for which I lived and trained alongside Ethiopian runners in Addis Ababa and at rural training camps in the Ethiopian highlands, has presented a different account. In my thesis, entitled '"Condition": Energy, Time and Success Amongst Ethiopian Runners' I have describe how young runners seek to 'change their lives' through the sport, and how this decision influences the ways in which they think about their energy and their relationship to the environment, to other people, and to God. My research took place in a highly competitive environment in which runners believed strongly in the importance of teamwork and training in a group, but also knew that they had to compete as individuals if they wanted to succeed. The tension between the individual and the group was therefore at the core of my work.
I have worked hard to change the dominant narrative about East African runners through my academic work but also through speaking at non-academic events and through publishing in the Guardian newspaper and other publications. This fellowship will allow me to write a book for a popular audience that brings the stories of these runners, as well as ideas from anthropology, to a readership that would not otherwise encounter them. Written in a narrative style, this will be an accessible book that seeks not only to bring the world of Ethiopian running to life but also to give an insight into the process of doing ethnographic fieldwork and the unique perspective this gives the researcher and writer.
In the course of my research I gained an important insight into the economic realities of the sport of long-distance running, and heard many stories about athletes not understanding the contracts they had signed with athletics managers and brands and therefore falling victim to economic exploitation. An important part of this fellowship will involve working alongside Moyo Sports, a UK-based athlete management agency, to develop educational materials and run workshops for young runners about what to expect from the financial side of the sport. This work will form a continuation of engagement I have already had with the IAAF (the world governing body for athletics) for whom I gave the keynote address at their World Road Running seminar in 2018.
For my PhD research I focused primarily on running in Ethiopia but I also travelled with runners to races in Istanbul, China and various other European cities. There, I met many young men who had migrated through running but who were no longer competing at a high level as athletes. Given my interest in how people in Ethiopia conceived of running in terms of the skilful deployment of energy, I am interested in how moving to Europe - and often having to earn a living outside of running, and various other pressures that were absent or different in the Ethiopian context- affects the ways in which people think about their energy and the possibility of 'changing their life'. This fellowship will allow me to conduct short periods of additional fieldwork to interview these people and to help me to work towards a bigger project on sport and migration in the future, to be funded by an ESRC New Investigator grant or a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.