The Botswana Athletics Association (BAA) is lacing up its regulatory sneakers and hitting the ground running in the fight against the proliferation of road races. In a bid to protect athletes and create a smooth calendar, the BAA is teaming up with marathon organizers to establish a memorandum of

agreement.

According to Larona Koosimile, the BAA’s sports development officer, the association is concerned about back-to-back marathon events have been cropping up like dandelions in the springtime. As a result, the BAA is sprinting against the clock to ensure that all marathons and halfmarathons comply with their regulations by next year.

“We want to approach marathon organisers and come to an agreement on how we can create spaces in between their events, we cannot have marathon events every week of two weeks,” Koosimile stated. He said that marathon events should at least have a six-weeks period in between to allow proper preparation of runners and their safety because they take marathons as a job. “Marathon runners take these events as an opportunity to make money and most of them want to participate in every event that comes up which is not good for their health, and it can cause seasonal injuries, heart attacks and death

during or after marathons,” he noted.

He said that BAA is working towards moderating marathon events and separating the actual marathon of 42.2km and half marathons like 21km and 10km. “There is a difference between marathon and half marathons, in order to produce world class marathon runners, we have to separate the two events, we cannot be entertaining fun runs and mixing it with marathon,” Koosimile added.