Thursday 18 December 2008

Athletics: Are all these road races necessary?

Over the weekend, AK’s chair one Mr. Isaiah Kiplagat said that they would find ways of limiting the races Kenyan athletes run especially the younger ones to avoid burn-out. I couldn’t agree more on this.
We seem to have become with road-races in the last 2 years and this year given the success of our athletes in the Beijing Olympics, there are at least 3-4 road races every weekend. That’s a bit on the over-drive given the bodies of our athletes take beatings from serious sessions of training. This has led to short-lived careers of our athletes especially in the longer distances.
A causal look at the last 10 years shows you why we only have the likes of Paul Tergat and Catherine Ndereba remaining for such races. This is because they have learnt the art of choosing which the best races are for them and limiting their appearances to the same events. Even they admit, at times to have over-booked their schedules. Our younger athletes need take such lessons too and AK can guide this process to avoid burn-out and exploitation by the agents and greedy managers.

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