Enda Shoes - The Kenyan Alternative

I'm a day late on this post. Blame work or writer laziness.

I heard about Enda Shoes just before I left Kenya. My friend, Justin Lagat, was contacted by them to do some writing for the new company. For a sample, you can head for the Enda blog. The latest article is about Justin's diet as he trains as an elite runner, prepping for the Ottawa Marathon. As a matter of fact, he should be on the plane headed this way so that he can toe the line with the world's best on Sunday.

The concept behind Enda is as simple as training the Kenyan way - work hard to be the best. They're designing shoes that will have a very modest 4mm heel-to-toe drop and lightweight performance characteristics that should make training in them a quick, responsive experience. Like the Asics I've favored for years, these shoes work really well for mid-foot strikers.

To answer what might seem to be the obvious question, nope, I'm not getting paid for this post. Nor will I get paid for the post I'll write when I get a chance to try out my first pair of Itens - that the model name for the first shoes they're producing. Nope, no pay, and in fact, I'm paying them.

I bought a pair of shoes by contributing to their Kickstarter program. Enda is a start-up that is attracting some early interest, both in the quality of the shoe they're building, but also because they are bring the shoe manufacturing home to Kenya. For years, the elite Kenyans have run in American or Japanese shoes made in China.

Navalayo Osembo-Ombati and Weldon Kennedy decided to turn that on its head. Kenya, like almost every developing nation, desperately needs good jobs. The two co-founders have launched Enda to bring the rewards of Kenyan runners home to the larger masses. In doing so, the two relay on the Kenya and East African tradition of harambee.

Loosely translated, it means 'all pull together'. In the fledgling days of the new country, when the economic outlook was terribly bleak, individuals and micro-businesses would pool resources, doing together what they couldn't alone. Wells got dug, houses built, businesses started, by pulling together.

The athletes are no different. Most of the major camps have an elite sponsor to help bring along the next generation. Wilson Kipsang has his. Lornah Kiplagat started the HATC in Iten. Asbel Kiprop's is in Iten. The athletes give back, generously.

Instead of sending all the manufacturing jobs to China, Enda is locating them in Kenya, providing jobs, income, food for the families there. For now, it's just the assembly, but Enda plans to 100 percent source the shoes from Kenya in the future. Enda represents that same spirit of harambee that grew the Kenyan nation, that supports its businesses and athletes today.

So, knowing all this about Enda, can I ask you a favor?

Can you go to their Kickstarter page and take a look? Share this post? Or like them on Facebook and help spread the word?

If you run, take a look at the shoes. You're going to be buying new shoes sometime soon anyway - consider contributing to something bigger than Nike's wallet. You'll know where the profits are going.

Please, think about it.

A thousand Kenyan children will thank you.

PS. If you are up at 7AM EDT on Sunday like I will be, give a quiet cheer for Justin Lagat. He's a good man in a tough field and could use all the moral support we have to offer.

Good luck, Justin!

Does Doping Violate the Social Contract if All the Elites Do It?

I did something stupid and time-wasting last week: I argued with someone in the comments section of a blog I follow. We were debating libertarian philosophy, and it took me about three exchanges with him (I’m assuming him, but twits come in all shapes, sizes, and genders) for me to realize I was arguing with a child. The tipping point was a blanket statement by said twit that there can be no social contract between individuals because all such contracts are enforceable. He further stated that, “Paul's social contract is NOT voluntary because it considers -existence- to be 'agreement'.”

For a child, this is completely true. An adult recognizes that there are three options available to him. First, he may comply with all the tenets of the social contract like 'murder is bad and will be punished'. Second, he can leave. Third, he can accept that the social contract prescribes certain penalties for failure to comply to the contract and accept the consequences for consciously violating them.  In each case, the individual maintains his sovereignty, with the understanding that each decision carries with it concomitant consequences and responsibilities.

I got to thinking about this while I was out on the trails yesterday, specifically within the scope of doping in the running community. When you step to the line to race, you operate on the assumption that you are doing so in the fairest of environments. The rules are published and understood by all. We all face the same wind or rain or heat. The running surface is the same. The clock or the first chest to break the tape declares the winner. These are part of the social contract we hold with each other for races.

Doping shatters that shared covenant. Or does it?

The thought that crossed my mind yesterday dealt with the rampant cheating that occurred on the Tour de France (and is rumored still to be happening) as highlighted by Tyler Hamilton’s book, The Secret Race.

It was accepted practice inside the peloton that there were cheaters, even specific individuals that were expected to cheat at given points to help the team win. Based on the fallout from the scandals, every single team was involved.

So, was the social contract actually ruptured in this case? If all the competitors are engaged in the same behavior, who is harmed?

This becomes an important point in the running world as the Olympics approach. Kenya has been cleared by the IAAF to compete. The status of the Russians is less secure. Certainly, based on the reports we see in the news, I’d have to say not a single prominent Russian athlete is clean.

A plethora of articles in the last five years make the argument that we should just accept that the athletes are doping and legitimize performance-enhancing drug use.

Yascha Mounk, writing in the New York Times in 2012, suggested exactly that, writing, “The distinction we currently draw between which substances should be allowed, and which should be prohibited, ultimately says a lot about our own arbitrary assumptions – and precious little about anything else.”

Early in his article, he blurs the line between food and drink and drugs, treating them all as performance-enhancing. While good nutrition and hydration are necessary for proper athletic performance, they are just as valuable to the rest of us. Not so with the cocktails of PED’s some athletes are ingesting, inhaling, and shooting.

In his opinion, so-called dangerous drugs should be banned but relatively safe drugs such as EPO should be permitted. Since we haven’t been able to successfully moderate PED use now, I don’t see how his plan would be any sort of improvement if the goal is ‘clean’ athletes. He clearly has surrendered to the ‘everyone-does-it’ belief. He isn’t alone.

Runner’s World provided a more balanced approach in 2013. In Sports Medicine Experts Debate: Should Doping Be Allowed?, sport ethicist Julian Savulescu offers two interlocking rationales for allowing drugs. First, that detection of PED use is woefully inadequate. Second, that we are hard against the limits of human performance so cheating is inevitable in pursuit of new records. He wrote a longer piece, again at the NYT, that also pointed out that cheaters have an advantage over clean athletes—the obvious solution in his mind seems to be to encourage those clean athletes to dope.

Interestingly enough, he starts the NYT article with a statement that “We should allow drugs in competitive sports for three reasons. First, the ban is ruining the mood and spirit of the game. It’s hard to enjoy any sports narrative if we don’t know who is clean and who isn’t.” It is a paradoxical concept, one that I think undermines his premise. Of course we want to cheer for clean athletes. We do so because at a fundamental level we want to “Be like Mike.” Hero worship is ingrained in our DNA and has inspired generations to strive and succeed. PED’s tarnish the image, leaving it with a scummy film that we all can see.

The other side of the debate leans less on the practicalities of testing and PED use and more on the dangers and moral implications of such use.

The dangers are well known. Multiple studies demonstrate that steroid use causes cancer, heart attacks, and liver disease. The best known of these is testosterone, one of the controversial steroids at the master’s level where aging athletes get treated for low-T.  Even EPO, considered reasonably benign, is estimated to have caused twenty deaths in cycling.

The trade for improved performance pits the risk-taking strategy of winning now with drugs against the principle of personal performance, integrity, and good health. The master’s runner who compensates for a lack of testosterone with pills or one who ups his oxygen uptake with EPO may win the race but denies a level playing field to a competitor who might have more natural talent and has trained better. Athletic performance is not entirely, or even mostly, about winning. It is about competing, within the rules, and striving for excellence. As Coubertin, founder of the International Olympic Committee, said, "The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle, the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well."

Elite athletes should not be able to endanger other runners, either, by competing in a fraudulent manner, yet they do. Coubertin’s sentiment has been abandoned with a win-at-all-costs mentality. In the case of Russia, they do so with state sanction, making a mockery of the Olympic ideal.

Galen Rupp was not an aging athlete when reports surfaced (via Steve Magness) that he may have been taking substances to boost his testosterone at age 16, which, if true, would have been quite unusual. Rupp and his coach, Alberto Salazar, deny that he took a banned substance but questions remain, not just of Rupp but the entire Nike Oregon Project.

This is where the social contract shows its frayed edges. It is one thing to propose, as Savulescu and Mounk do, that athletes be allowed to openly choose to use PEDs. We presume that these athletes are adults, capable of making informed decisions. We treat them the same way we treat boxers who think having their brains battered is sensible. (Boxing, by the way, has its own rules and problems with drug use.) We might consider altering our rules to permit PEDs and thus adjusting the social contract.

Children, however, cannot legally consent to use drugs. Parents and guardians are responsible to provide the consent. As a society we have a social contract that provides for care of children. We mandate that the children receive basic education, get proper nutrition, that they have shelter. Are we perfect in accomplishing these? No. Our efforts fall short of our ideals. They always will.

Altering the social contract on PEDs requires we alter the contract for our children, too. We cannot espouse an ideal, striving for excellence, and simultaneously advocate for legalized cheating. When excellence is redefined as having superior dope, we devalue the components of human effort and heart. Changing the contract within the narrow confines of the sport conflicts with the greater contract we hold as a society.

The overarching social contract encompasses the entirety of our society, not just the elite running community. I asked a question above, If all the competitors are engaged in the same behavior, who is harmed? The answer is the next generation and those who place long-term health over short-term glory, sportsmanship over placement. In other words, nearly everyone but the doped elite athlete or the doped master’s race winner at the local 5K.

The PED-using athletes set a terrible example for the sport and to our young. In the last year, four high school runners— Maton, Fisher, Hunter, and Slagowski—have broken the four-minute barrier for the mile, nearly doubling the total. This worries me.

Audiobook Reviewer on Finishing Kick!

AudioBook Reviewer, run by Paul Stokes, took a listen to Finishing Kick and posted their opinion at the site, AudiobookReviewer.

They said some nice things about the story and my writing - always one of those 'hold-your-breath' moments as you just never know how a book will hit someone. They also said very nice things about the narrator, Annette Romano, who did such a fabulous job.

There is also a giveaway, so if you want the audio version of the book, head over and enter. Also, I don't ask often, but would you please, please, please share the giveaway info with your friends? Share this out on Facebook or Twitter. Annette and I would be very grateful.

Longer, more nerdy blog post coming, hopefully later today.

The Running Boom is Dead! Long Live the Running Boom!

The Wall Street Journal, in a fit of hyperbolic excess, has decreed the running boom dead—and painted millennials as the killers.

One tiny problem. It’s not dead.

Let’s deconstruct the WSJ and see where they go wrong.

“After two decades of furious growth in footrace participants, the number of finishers dropped 9% in 2015, according to industry-funded research group Running USA.”

The first bit of evidence that Rachel Bachman, the author of the article, offers immediately seeks to conflate running with racing. I don’t doubt that the total number of finishers dropped substantially. Have you checked out the entry fees lately? You would think that the basic law of economics would be applied to everything produced at the WSJ, but they apparently did not bother to do so in the case of race entry fees.

As the fees become increasingly expensive, the participation rate is going to drop. When I signed up for my first marathon, the fee was about $50. That same marathon now charges $145 for the same race, an almost three-fold increase in a seventeen year period. The 5K, held on the same day, is $45, nearly as much as my first marathon. No wonder finishers are down. They aren’t entering in the first place because the races are much too expensive.

Bachman addresses the racing versus running argument in her next paragraph:

“A sport traditionally dominated by young adults, running is losing its hold on 18- to 34-year-olds. Millennials, in their late teens to mid-30s, recently passed baby boomers as the nation’s largest living generation. In footraces and other running events, however, their presence is shrinking, to 33% of finishers in 2015 from 35% a year earlier.”

This is just laziness on Bachman’s part. The two top participation groups are 25-34 year-olds and 35-44 year-olds. The former account for 25 percent of racers. The latter is actually bigger at 26 percent. The group that lags? The 18-24 year-olds at 8 percent. Where did the push that overtook boomers come from? Yep, the newly minted adults. (Stats from RunningUSA)

The fact is that from age 18 to 34, people are at one of the most active periods of their lives. They are going to college, starting first jobs, forming families. I have daughters in this age cohort. They would like to run, but they are moms with young children. One, with a daughter, works full time and goes to school, the other is working on a degree in electrical engineering and has two children. As anyone with kids recognizes, getting out the door is an ordeal. We won’t even bring up sleep deprivation, when new parents celebrate four consecutive hours of sleep as a Hallelujah moment.

Their children will get older, they’ll graduate with degrees, and I am quite sure that both will return to regular running. Of course, they might be in the 35-44 cohort by then, though I suspect they’ll find a way to get there sooner.

By the way, the third largest participation group is the 45-54 year olds at 19 percent, which lends credence to the influence of life events on running.

Bachman then presents stats from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association showing a shocking decline in running.

“But the larger pool of noncompetitive runners also is shrinking—especially among millennials, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. Overall, the number of adults who run 50 times a year or more declined 11% from 2013 to 2015.

In the same span, the total number of frequent runners ages 25-34 dropped 19%. Runners ages 18-24 dropped 22%. That translates into about 2.5 million fewer young people who run consistently.”

The SFIA information built from polling does not include critical data such as confidence levels, margins of error, and response rate. Given the rate of decline in racing is less while having a solid economic argument for the decline calls this number into question. I’d dig into the report that SFIA wrote but the price tag is a little spendy for a modest blogger.

I’d also like to address response rate for just a moment. Pollsters in nearly every field are having a notoriously hard time getting accurate samples and the response rates have tumbled to somewhere south of ten percent. And this is relatively old data on polling. The newer numbers are likely much, much worse.

Moving on . . .

Millennials aren’t sedentary. Rather, they’re fueling the proliferation of studios that specialize in everything from cycling, CrossFit and boxing to ballet barre workouts, boot camp and weight training. Their hunger for variety is reflected in the success of ClassPass, which offers entry to a range of fitness classes in 31 U.S. cities for a monthly fee. The service has booked 18 million reservations in less than three years, most of them for people in their 20s, a spokeswoman said.

More silliness. Take the 18 million figure. Divide by three. Divide again by the ‘consistent runner’ number of 50 above. That leave a total of 60,000 people – of all age groups, not just millennials, a virtual drop in the bucket. Still, I would love to see the demographic breakdown for the membership. I suspect that it not support the argument that the millennials are driving growth. The fees for ClassPass, while reasonable, price it out of reach of the majority of that age group. I have a request for information from ClassPass. I’ll update here if and when they get back to me. The fee issue applies to Crossfit studios and the like, too.

Novelties also have a big initial push (see Color and Mud Runs) with declining participation later. This applies to the night-time glow-in-the-dark yoga events mentioned in the article. Not a surprise that the same company that developed the Color runs designed Soul Pose. Bigsley Event House is not a running sponsor; they’re a purveyor of novelty events.

That younger people are experimenting with different workouts and sports and yes, novelty events, shouldn’t surprise anyone. Personally, I’ve tried running (racing, road running, ultra-running, trail-running), martial arts, weight training, cycling, racquetball, basketball, hiking, and more. Just because they try other things doesn’t mean that they won’t be back later.

We’ll finish with a quote from the article by Rich Harshbarger.

“Once these millennials start their families and hit their professional stride in terms of earning potential, they’re going to come back to this sport.”

In the meantime, let’s stop blaming millennials for something they didn’t do and hasn’t happened. The running boom lives.