“Aristotle was not a track coach,” Sabrina Little observed in her new book, The Examined Run: Why Good People Make Better Runners. But, if you wish he was, then here’s a book for you.
Little has a fantastically unique resume. As part of HOKA’s Project Carbon X in 2021, she attempted to break world records alongside her teammate Jim Walmsley. She’s won five US national titles, a silver medal at the World Championships and held American records in both 24-hour and 200k distances. As perhaps the most over-qualified track and field coach for children, she once coached at a classical school in the Texas hill country. She has a master’s degree from Yale’s Divinity School and, also, was once selected by the World Anti-Doping Agency for a solid year of drug testing. Now, she is a professor of ethics.
There is an old idea that sports mold character. Running improves our body, courage, perseverance, patience, confidence and gritty resilience. But, physical activity alone doesn’t shape character. This is a book on character education for the philosophically inclined reader. It considers running as a method of self-inquiry, character development and creating a good life in the Western classical tradition forged by Greco-Roman antiquity.
Moral character can be a performance enhancer. Beyond character traits we commonly think of as developed by sports – grit and perseverance – Little’s writing illuminates a huge stage of virtues that I had not considered before. There’s more than persevering through a long run—we tend to think of virtue in sports simplistically. And when we think about ethics, it is only in terms of naughty behavior: doping, cheating or offensive conduct.
Little provides concrete advice we can easily use to improve. She outlines four ways our admiration for others can go awry, helping to overcome envy and a feeling of helplessness or despair if we’re not the fastest runner in a race. She also talks about how to retain a sense of personal agency and power, so that we are not pressured into bad decisions, whether it’s in training, with a coach or outside of running. In a careful analysis of suffering, she points out that not all pain and suffering is helpful, but some can be beneficial. When are we choosing to suffer as opposed to dealing with aversion?
She examines the moral characteristics that also enable someone to “run far ‘quickly.'” Among this study is concrete evidence for changing our emotional reactions. “If there is anything that is going to derail a race, apart from low-quality training, it is your emotions. We have a lot of control over our emotions.” She recommends adding character development to our training logs—such as practicing emotional changes—and we can quantitively measure the results. We need to practice feeling a wide spectrum of emotions in order to change our reality. Think of the joy Courtney Dauwalter displays when under immense stress or pain. Her gratitude edges out thoughts of difficulty. Resilience and humor can overcome adversity.
These character traits that improve performance are balanced by performance-enhancing vices. Perseverance, for example, is not the opposite of quitting. Instead, it is a virtue in the middle ground. At the extreme, it becomes a vice of perseverance, a “death before DNF,” when we insist on getting to a finish line even when we should stop.
Her practical tips reach deep beyond the usual running books. What if we crossing a finish line doesn’t lead to the fulfillment we expected? She quotes a 2021 study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that found, “24 percent of athletes reported high or very high psychological distress following the Olympic Games.” How do we handle the selfishness of running, or just feeling selfish? Are the people we love limiting us? What about overtraining? What if we can train more, without risking fatigue or injury, by training our minds while our bodies rest?
A deeply philosophical book, I found that it required much reflection. Unlike most books, this one took me months to read. However, there is solid advice from start to finish.
There are performance-enhancing personality traits that we can all obtain. “We cannot buy them,” Little observes, “but we can all develop them.” These are free. In a culture of purchasing things that will make us look better, it’s refreshing to read about skill-development that reaches deeper into our skin.
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* Eat and Run by Scott Jurek, a memoir detailing the childhood that formed his character for endurance running.