Out of Thin Air

Out of Thin Air: Running Wisdom and Magic from above the Clouds in Ethiopia was written by Michael Crawley and published on November 11, 2020 with a length of 288 pages. This book won the Margaret Mead Award in 2022. The audiobook is narrated by Raj Ghatak and has a length of 7 hours 47 minutes.

I learned about this book from reading The Ethiopian Running Secret, which is summarized as: “One school of training is highly personalized, technical and data-driven. The other is the one that wins marathons.”

Crawley, who is a very good runner (66 minutes for a half marathon, 2:20 for a marathon) from the United Kingdom, traveled to Ethiopia in 2015 as an anthropologist to study Ethiopian male runners and how the culture supports running. (Cultural norms in Ethiopia prevented him from studying the female runners.) Crawley used the results of his research in Ethiopia to earn a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Edinburgh in 2019.

The book and the research results would not have been possible if Crawley were not such a good runner. He was able to embed himself in the male running community, participating as a near equal in the training and racing. Consequently, he was able to gain the trust and friendship of the Ethiopian runners and was able thereby to learn a great deal about the culture of running.

The book contains a series of anecdotes about the author’s running background and about what he experiences with runners in Ethiopia. Crawley contrasts the solitary and data-driven training of European and North American athletes with the Ethiopian approach where runners train together and support one another.

The author participated in an Ethiopian race. As a foreigner, an older runner at age 28, and a slower runner, he must get permission from officials to run. The officials tell him he must drop out of the race if he is lapped by the lead runners so as not to hinder them, and he must not cross the finish line. During the race, Crawley lagged well behind the best runners, but whenever he caught up to an Ethiopian runner, the Ethiopian runner dropped out of the race, so Crawley was always in last place. Crawley managed to run fast enough that he is not lapped.

The Ethiopian runners, at least in the book, were little affected by technology, and they would sometimes refuse to use GPS watches to track their distance and time. They were aware that using a watch like a Garmin could easily lead to overtraining and injury through getting caught up in increasing running intensity each day. GPS watches were shared among runners in a group and often used to slow the group down rather than speed it up.

Many of the runners did not trust the watch’s measurements over their inner assessments of a run’s intensity. A watch was often left at home for some runs, such as an easy meandering run in the forest, where it was not important to measure distance or time. The runners were wary of the use of technology, which had the side-effect of emphasizing race time over all other measures, potentially leading to burnout, injury, and doping.

Crawley tells an amusing story of the top Ethiopian runner, Lelisa Desisa, being loaned a GPS watch by Nike. The Nike scientists were amazed and disconcerted by how much mileage the watch was recording. Crawley learned from another Ethiopian runner that the watch was being passed around to multiple runners in the training group, something a Nike researcher would never consider.

The book contains chapters about the Ethiopians’ approaches to training and their styles of running. Later chapters describe races. Winning a race that pays $100,000 can set up an Ethiopian for life financially, but only a very few achieve this.

The narrator, Raj Ghatak, does a good job, but he mispronounces the brand names Adidas and Nike.

Insightful reviews of the book were written by:

• Adharanand Finn (author of Running with the Kenyans)
• Brian Rock
• Jonathan Gault

Rating: Four stars (very good)