Damn, that's interesting!

4677 readers

1 users here now

No clickbait
No Racism and Hate speech
No Imgur Gallery Links
No Infographics
Moderator Discretion
Repost Guidelines
No videos over 15 minutes long
No "Photoshopped" posts
Image w/ text posts must be sourced in comments

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

422

Birthplaces of the 100 fastest 10km runners of all time (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

84 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 83 points 7 months ago (13 children)

The topography explains it all. https://geology.com/articles/east-africa-rift.shtml

tl;dr The people of that area in East Africa naturally live close to sea level, however there are easily accessible elevations changes that distance runners have trained on for probably centuries. It turns out that training at high altitudes and recovering at low altitudes provides a tangible and demonstrable advantage compared to just single elevation training.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 7 months ago

Yeah like the other commenter said this isn’t it, nobody is commuting up and down 10,000’ on a regular basis, especially in antiquity. Just because different elevations “look close” on a map means nothing.

Far more likely is this is a concentrated population of folks with highly desirable traits for distance running.

load more comments (12 replies)