Long before the Kenyans owned the steeplechase, IT BELONGED TO THE CRAZIES. Men (alas, it was always men, until recently) who craved a brutish challenge and had little regard for their own well-being, the story goes, would race from one town’s church steeple to the next, hurdling all manner of wet and dry obstacles along the way. Those early steeplechases, in Ireland, tended to involve horses, at least to start. In one of the earliest documented human steeplechases, held in 1838 in Birmingham, England, the competitors had the good sense to spare their families the shame of association, and adopted pseudonyms: The Spouter edged Neversweat over a mile-long course, with Sprightly, Rustic, and Chit-Chat trailing behind.
A dozen years later, at Oxford’s Exeter College, a chagrined jockey named Halifax Wyatt,…
