Marathon running in Great Britain is no longer wasted on youth
Globally the trend is going the other direction with more young athletes going straight into the long hauls
Great Britain's Liz Yelling during last year's London Marathon. Photograph: Christopher Lee/Getty Images
At the British team press conference ahead of the London marathon, one reporter wanted to ask an obvious but indelicate question. He struggled to find the right way to phrase it, and fell back on an old formulation: "You are," he said to Liz Yelling, "all women of a certain age, aren't you?" To her credit Yelling, who is 37, laughed and agreed. Great Britain have three places in the women's Olympic marathon. Two have been filled by Paula Radcliffe and Mara Yamauchi, who are both 38. The leading contenders for the third space are Yelling and Jo Pavey, who is also 38.
There are 19 athletes classed as "leading Britons" running in Sunday's London marathon, and 13 of them are older than 30. Only one, John Beattie from Newham & Essex, is younger than 28. Across the entire UKA entry list of club runners there are more athletes aged 50 and over than there are 25 or under. In Great Britain, marathon running has become a veteran's game.
Globally, though, the trend is going in the other direction. In Kenya, Ethiopia and America, more and more young athletes are moving straight into marathon running. Of the nine elite Kenyan athletes in Sunday's field, seven are aged 29 or under. The world record holder, Patrick Makau, is 27, the world champion, Abel Kirui, is 29, and the man who won silver behind him, Vincent Kipruto, is 27. Ethiopia's Tsegaye Kebede won bronze in the 2008 Olympic marathon when he was 21. At 34, Martin Lel is the old man of the Kenyan team and even he says that these days "a marathon runner reaches his peak at around the age of 26".
Not in Britain, they don't. Ben Whitby, 35, explains. "European runners tend to move through the distances first and then come into the marathon." Whitby's friend and training partner Scott Overall, 28, says he is "a classic example. I started at 800m, 1500m, and worked my way up to the 5km, 10km. As you get older you do some road races and then as you move towards the end of your career, when you are not in the fastest shape ever, you run a marathon."
British athletes tend to move into marathon running almost as a last resort, when they have lost the speed of their early years but developed the stamina that comes with the accumulation of high mileage in training. Overall moved into marathon running because he failed to qualify for the Olympic 5,000m team. Yelling, who works as a coach in her spare time, says: "In Britain we stop kids running. We are always placing limitations on what kids can do at certain ages, for their own well-being. They go into schools and then are not allowed to run long distances. When you come out of that system, you start building up the distances. We worry about the welfare of our children more."
The reigning Olympic marathon champion, Constantina Dita from Romania, won the title at 38. She believes the difference is physiological. "Europeans have a different body to African athletes. We need to see how the body responds to the marathon distances in training. I have met many young European girls who run marathons and then after one or two years they are done with their careers, because they are burned out or broken down."
Richard Nerurkar, who finished fifth for Great Britain in the 1996 Olympic marathon, agrees with Yelling that we mollycoddle our young runners. "If you are a coach working with a very good 20-year-old athlete in Britain you would be under a lot of pressure not to put too much load on them." Nerurkar feels this has changed over the past 30 years. "If you were to go back to the 70s and look at our top juniors, runners like Nicky Lees, I am sure they were running 90 miles a week. They weren't running marathons, they were running good times at 5,000m, and they probably could have run 2hr 12min, 2hr 13min marathons as juniors."
"There is an obvious difference between Africans and Europeans," Nerurkar says, referring to the age that runners move into the marathon. "You explain that by saying an African teenager is much tougher than a European teenager in terms of endurance. Compared to what a lot of African youngsters endure in their childhood, western teenagers have a very soft upbringing."
Britain's Lee Merrien, 32, says: "There is certainly more of a culture of just going out and running in Kenya. The best form of transport is your own two feet so they have got better background in running from a younger age."
Marathon running has become more lucrative than track running, and Overall believes this is one reason why American and Kenyan athletes are moving into the sport at a younger age. "They have such strength in depth in the distance events on the track, guys know that realistically they are not going to make a championship team. So how can they make a living? Go to the roads. There are so many road races around the world, big city marathons even half marathons and people go where the money is."
Louise Damen, 29, is in the queue of marathon runners forming behind Paula Radcliffe and her fellow veterans. "They are good role models," she says. "But from a developmental point of view, it would be fantastic for a slightly younger marathon runner to have an opportunity to run in the Olympic Games."
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