Haji Adilo and his brothers are the coaching minds behind the runners to watch at the New York City marathon. “This is very difficult work,” coach Haji Adilo says as we drive past an elderly woman toting a bundle of sticks on her back down Entoto Mountain in northern Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on a Thursday morning. “She’ll probably only get a few hundred birr for this.” Then he pulls out a 100 birr note (a little more than $3) from his pocket and hands it to her through the window of his black Toyota. Four-and-a-half hours earlier, as the sun was just beginning to rise, we were driving up the same mountain for a training session. Adilo, 44, was monitoring a different kind of difficult work — often glorified in Ethiopia: marathon running. Entoto Mountain stands around 10,000 feet and overlooks Ethiopia’s burgeoning capital city. It’s the highest nearby reachable point, a climb upon which to push athletes to their peak endurance. It's part of the schematic planning that Adilo oversees as coach of Ethiopia’s preeminent marathon training group. |