Supposedly, the Tarahumara Indians (of Northern Mexico) are the world’s greatest distance runners. they have unrivaled stamina-stories of these people running deer down (the deer dies of exhaustion) are widely circulated.
So why don’t these people win all the big marathon runs? Do these people ever get on the Mexican Olympic Teams?
Don’t forget that a marathon is not merely an endurance contest – it is primarily a contest of speed. Being able to run 26+ miles without tiring isn’t, in and of itself, enough to be competitive.
Right. Hundreds of people run the Boston Marathon, etc., but there is only one winner.
Do many of them have the money to travel to the places where marathons are held? According to Wikipedia, most of them live a traditional farming and herding lifestyle, which tends not to be one of the world’s more lucrative ways to live.
Do they have other interests (such as jobs, kids, farms, etc) that wouldn’t mix well with traveling around the world to compete in marathons? IANAFarmer or herder, much less a traditional Tarahumara farmer or herder, but as I understand it, those aren’t 40-hour a week jobs with two weeks vacation every year, where you can regularly take time off to travel to marathons.
Is there discrimination against Native Americans in Mexican society in general, or in Mexican sport?
Human endurance is something special in the animal world. Man has always used the tactic of running animals down with his huge endurance. So the Tarahumara might be extremes of this, but there’s no shortage of people who can run the distance. Now running this distance quickly is an entirely different matter.
Marathon running is its own skill. You need to not only condition yourself properly but understand how to have a good start, how to properly pace, how to have a good ending, when and if to hit “the wall”, etc. These elements of training and the desire for competing in the marathon might be missing from the tarahumara culture.
This. Now if it was a matter of fastest 100 mile races, or farthest 24 hour distance, then you might see more third-world endurance runners winning.
Well, they don’t win ultramarathons either. I’d say it’s a combination of (a) they don’t enter, being poor subsistence farmers, and (b) their endurance is exaggerated.
LeHigh University term paper.
Huh.
Okay, maybe not exaggerated.
My impression is that the Tarahumara, for the most part, don’t want anything to do with the outside world and its culture beyond what is necessary for survival. Perhaps there just aren’t that many individuals who are interested in the outside world enough to compete in the olympics.
From what I’ve seen, it’s a pretty big struggle convincing them to learn spanish, to send their children to school, or even to get them to trust modern medicine or outsider doctors.
Short legs. The runners who do really well in marathons usually have long legs.