The Rift Valley highlands of East Africa are celebrated as ‘the cradle of world class runners’ (Nearman 2011, p. B14), ‘the epicentre of the endurance world’ (Rosen 2008) and ‘the world's foremost manufacturer of elite middle- and long-distance running talent’ (Dabbs 2012, p. B17).1 The Rift Valley runs through Kenya and Ethiopia, and to date, the majority of successful Kenyan and Ethiopian runners remain clustered geographically within this high-altitude region (Scott et al. 2003). This article focuses on Kenyan female athletes, for whom this great acclaim is justified; since 2000, for example, nine of the 13 first-place women at the Boston Marathon have been Kenyan (Fisher 2012). Furthermore, male and female Kenyans have together won 68 Olympic medals in races from the 400 metres to the marathon, far more than any other African country. A particularly well-documented string of victories belongs to the Kenyan senior men's cross-country team that won the long-distance World cross-country team title every year from 1986 to 2003 (Larson 2007, p. 118). Kenya first gained Olympic success at the Games held in Mexico City in 1968, with gold medals won by Kipchoge Keino, Amos Biwott and Natfali Temu, in the 1500 metres, 3000 metres steeplechase and 10,000 metres respectively, and in recent years, runners from the region have dominated track races, cross-country competitions and major marathons around the world (Finn 2012, Tanser 2008, Wirz 2006).

Among female runners in Kenya, the rise of Pamela Jelimo is perhaps the most prominent example of how global sport has had an impact at national and local levels. In September 2008, Jelimo returned to her Rift Valley home of Kaptamok as Kenya's first female Olympic gold medal winner (Makori 2008). However, unlike the men and women who excelled before the era of professional sport, Jelimo combined her breakthrough in Beijing with enormous pecuniary success on the international athletics circuit. During her widely publicised four-month streak of victories in Golden League competitions across three continents, Jelimo earned over US$1,000,000 in prize money. This transformed the 18-year-old middle-distance athlete into one of Kenya's running celebrities in only her first season of racing at the international level. Men greeted her return brandishing ‘Pamela Marry Me’ placards, the president of Kenya Mwai Kibaki granted her a private audience, and now Pamela Jelimo Road connects her village with the Kipchoge Keino athletics stadium in Eldoret, in a symmetric salute to both groundbreaking Olympic champions (International Athletics Association 2009).

Researchers across disciplines have helped to explain aspects of this high performance in running. These studies include (i) physiological explanations relating to diet, energy balance, neuromuscular functioning, anatomy, genetic make up and body composition (Scott et al. 2009, Fudge et al. 2008, Onywera et al. 2006, Saltin et al. 1995); (ii) anthropological explanations relating to traditions, customs and rituals, geography, and the meaning of running to different groups of people (Finn 2012, Denison 2007, Manners 1997, 2007, Leseth 2003); (iii) historical and economic explanations concerning colonialism, imperialism, racism, and the way in which different African nations have responded to independence and the part that sport has played historically in nation-building (Banda 2010, Runciman 2006, Simms and Rendell 2004, Bale and Sang 1996); and (iv) sociological and political economic explanations, which highlight a division of labour, power and corruption in both world and local athletics, the struggle for recognition and respect by men and women runners from different parts of Africa, the development of sport in Africa, and the role of sport in the development of Africa (Bloomfield 2011, Cornelissen 2011, Njororai and Simiyu 2010, Lindsey and Banda 2011, Armstrong and Giulianotti 2004).

Studies that have adopted a political economy approach to sport in the Global South have also been forthcoming. This body of work consists of a number of themes including the governance and ownership arrangements for sports clubs, the production of alienated labour, patterns of labour migration through sport and the export and import of athletes, the production of sporting goods through child labour, different models of state provision and intervention through sport, and the political economy of attracting and hosting major sporting events. Klein's (1989) political economy of sport in the Dominican Republic viewed the history of baseball as an expression of underdevelopment and American exploitation, while Perelman's (2012) account of the globalisation process and the extent to which ‘barbaric sport’, in particular the Olympic games, has reproduced and sustained unequal patterns of social, political, ideological and economic power is a more recent contribution.

Studies of African sport, in particular, have also contributed to this body of work. Armstrong and Guilianotti's (2004) account of the role of football in African societies considers the contribution that the game has made to conflict, reconciliation and community. Jarvie's 1985 study of Class, race and sport in South Africa's political economy remains the most substantive and detailed study to take a political economy approach to African sport. More specifically, this study builds upon Gramsci's ideas of organic and conjunctural crisis to explain the political economy of apartheid sport. It considers the way in which sport was used to impose pressure upon the South African state and how this was resisted. It primarily focused upon those sports that were central to the anti-apartheid struggle, namely rugby, cricket, and football, and the boycotting of major sporting events such as the Olympic and Commonwealth Games. Bale and Sang's (1996) study of Kenyan running raises issues of colonial and developmental relations and suggests that the American system of university sports scholarships plundered Kenya's athletic talent. However, in this otherwise groundbreaking study, the researchers devoted only a cursory attention to female Kenyan runners.

Although a full overview of the political economy of sport lies outside the scope of this article, it is however worth noting several observations about the approach in relation to this particular investigation (for an exhaustive overview of this literature, please see Jarvie and Thornton 2012, Foster and Pope 2004, Nauright and Schimmel 2005). Firstly, notwithstanding the research highlighted above, relatively few studies of sport have sought to ask such questions in relation to non-Western countries. Secondly, while explanations of East African running success have prioritised forms of environmental determinism and high-altitude training, such analyses rarely considered the environment to mean the workings of capitalism, international political economy and wealth creation, or the unequal distribution of resources through running. Finally, even when cross-disciplinary perspectives on East African running have been produced (Pitsiladis et al. 2007), studies that have prioritised Kenyan women runners and their motivations for running have not been forthcoming. This investigation therefore fills lacunae within both the political economy of sport literature as well as the existing body of knowledge about Kenyan running. The study also recognises the importance of running in the social and economic landscape of Kenya's Rift Valley and suggests that without considering sport, a political economy approach to studying this society may not be complete.

Existing analyses of East African running success span physiological, anthropological and geographical explanations, yet questions remain about individual motivation and how this is linked to transformations in the international economic order. The article addresses these themes by building upon the above body of research and incorporating the perspective of African runners. It does so in a substantive and analytical way by drawing upon (i) periods of fieldwork conducted in 2010 and 2011, during which interviews were conducted with female Kenyan athletes about their running experiences, and (ii) a survey of some 250 elite Kenyan women runners carried out in 2003.2 The study also addresses the ‘need for research which traces processes of change over time using units of analysis that are capable of accommodating the dynamics of gender’ (Peters 1995, p. 261) with female runners' motivations and ambitions providing the starting point for an understanding of how successful athletes perceive the potential of sport to assure material security, opportunities to travel, and personal satisfaction.