NPR News: "How One Kenyan Tribe Produces The World's Best Runners"

Submitted by Minuteman on Sat, 2013-11-02 03:01

Link here. Excerpt:

'The Initiation Ceremony

Manners soon learned that they were practicing for an initiation ceremony, a rite of passage that is all about enduring pain.

Elly Kipgogei, 19, remembers going through the ceremony at age 15.

First, he says, he had to crawl mostly naked through a tunnel of African stinging nettles. Then he was beaten on the bony part of the ankle, then his knuckles were squeezed together, and then the formic acid from the stinging nettle was wiped onto his genitals.

But all that was just warm-up; early one morning he was circumcised, with a sharp stick.

During this whole process — the crawling, the beatings and the cutting — Kipgogei was obliged to be absolutely stoical, unflinching.
...
Manners says that this enormous social pressure placed on your ability to endure pain is actually great training for a sport like running where "pushing through pain" is so fundamental to success.

"Circumcision," he says, "teaches kids to withstand pressure and tolerate pain."
...
Modernization Of The Kalenjin

After Kipgogei was circumcised, he wasn't allowed to go home. He was taken to a hut on the outskirts of the village to heal from the operation and he was told, whenever you leave this hut, you are not allowed to walk.

"So you're supposed to run and it's very fast. So you're running very swift, having the pain," he said.

Before the circumcision, Kipgogei was never a runner. Afterward, when he was done with initiation and back in high school, he decided to give it a try.
...
But Kipgogei is part of a new Kalenjin generation that's challenging old ways of doing things. He says when he has kids, his sons will be circumcised pain-free in a hospital. His daughters won't go through any such procedure at all.'

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Comments

Skeptical to say the least. Maybe the general "conditioning" (i.e., torture) of these teenage boys indeed steels them to ignore the pain and the damage done to their bodies (sound familiar, current/former contact sport/combat veterans?), so that could of course be a contributing factor. But enduring the pain of circumcision per se? I don't buy it. But whenever one seeks to promulgate circumcision, there's always an excuse.

"Circumcision makes for great athletes!"

If that were true... well, you know the rest.

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Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2013-11-02 14:10

I remember some years ago there was a NPR discussion about the boys who were emasculated in order to be choir boys for the Catholic church. The commentators seemed to talk about it as if they were amused and lightheartedly referred to them as the "castrati." Then they want me to donate to them after all that.

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Submitted by mens_issues on Sat, 2013-11-02 21:43

"[P]ain-free at a hospital"? Anybody who believes that any circumcision is pain-free is delusional. Even with anesthetic, its still extremely painful, especially when done on infants, since the synecchia must be broken.

It never ceases to amaze me the stupidity the MSM is willing to publish.

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Submitted by xtrnl on Sun, 2013-11-03 00:48