Extreme Sports and Religion: The Faith of Ultramarathon Man

Like most religion reporters, my mailbox is usually stuffed with the latest religion-book releases from publishers around the country; indeed, my children are often a bit resentful that I receive so many of these mysterious “presents” in the mail. New releases carpet a good section of my office floor, but in spite of their many fascinating titles — The Saint of Kathmandu, God’s Mechanics, Disciples of All Nations — I chose last week to pick up a paperback memoir my husband, Justin, had recently read, Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner by Dean Karnazes. On the one hand, the memoir was a welcome break from my RSS-delivered digital IV of religion information and analysis, providing some needed inspiration for my first 10-mile race this spring. On the other hand, I kept looking for the religion angle — what Terry Mattingly might call a religion “ghost” — and what I found surprised me.

Usually such ghosts come in the form of a memoirist’s religious upbringing, so on learning that Karnazes is from a Greek background, I expected some reference, however oblique, to the faith of his childhood. In Martha Beck’s memoir of angels and Down’s Syndrome, Expecting Adam, for example, Beck mentions only in passing that both she and her husband grew up Mormon, yet this fact offers some important context to her “non-religious” experience of angels.

What I did find in Karnazes’ engaging if self-congratulatory memoir was a description of a devotion to extreme sports that begged comparison with religious faith. Karnazes’ running story begins most dramatically on his 30th birthday, when he awakens to discover, with some dismay, that his life — happy marriage, corporate job that earns him a new Lexus — is empty. He ends up that night at a bar, drunk with friends and flirting dangerously with a married woman. He excuses himself for the bathroom and doesn’t return. Rather, he spends the entire night running, covering more than 30 miles wearing old tennis shoes, black office socks and baggy boxer shorts. He is nearly debilitated for the next several weeks, but he has also rediscovered the forgotten passion of his adolescent days: long-distance running. He writes:

In the course of a single night I had been transformed from a drunken yuppie fool into reborn athlete. During a period of great emptiness in my life, I turned to running for strength. I heard the calling, and I went to the light. …

Every devout runner has an awakening. We know the place, the time, and the reason we accept running into our life. … Most runners are able to keep a rational perspective on the devotion, and practice responsibly. I couldn’t I became a fanatic.

Does Karnazes use this born-again language to make a point — that running is his religion — or perhaps simply as a tongue-in-cheek writing device? Either way, his argument is quite serious, as the rest of his book demonstrates: running is the most important thing in his life, the center around which he orients himself.

Before you start relating to Karnazes’ affection for exercise, and reflecting on how great you sometimes feel during your three-mile neighborhood jogs, keep in mind that Karnazes is a true fanatic, and when he talks about running, he means marathon-plus. The most absorbing part of the book is his description of running the Western States Endurance Run, a mountain-scaling race that covers 100 miles.

Karnazes describes the starting line of the race before dawn, when a few hundred fanatics like himself are gathered to punish themselves for the next 24 hours. When the race organizer stands on top of rock to deliver Henry the Fifth’s Agincourt speech, it seems not hokey — that speech is surely one of the most over-quoted — but movingly appropriate: “‘He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, will stand a tiptoe above all others.’”

What follows is grueling chronicle of pain and suffering, as Karnazes runs his feet a bloody pulp and watches fellow runners fall to serious conditions like renal failure; death and serious disability seem like a real possibility — and that’s just the physical battle. After several hours of intense running, Karnazes arrives at the top of a peak and asks a fellow runner where the race goes from there:

He scanned the horizon to the west. “See that peak over there?” He pointed to a very distant mountain, maybe 20 miles away.

“Yes I see it.”

“Okay. Once we get there, the finish is seventy-five miles beyond that point.”

He was trying to be encouraging, I think, but the enormity of what we were doing gripped me. … It seemed unfathomable.

While pushing himself through the hours, running through the night, Karnazes repeats to himself what race veterans have told him: “You run the first 50 miles with your legs; you run the second 50 miles with your mind.” And to this he adds: “with your heart.”

Can running, or anything else for that matter, qualify as a religion?

I am usually skeptical, if not intellectually scornful, of claims that secular passions are tantamount to religious passions. The Harvey Cox claim that capitalism is the true American religion, for example, was far overblown: Saying “shopping malls are modern cathedrals” is making an analogy, not stating a fact. But if any human phenomenon were to convince me that secular activities can actually be religious activities in substantive ways, it would be the Western States Endurance Run. Indeed, such a run almost puts religion to shame: What modern faith makes such rigorous, terrifying demands of believers? What faith requires such immediate and prolonged physical suffering?

And for Karnazes, at least, the depth of his suffering is exactly what propels him to new, nearly ecstatic levels. At mile 99 in the run, he is in agony, able only to crawl along on hands and knees. Then he is almost accidentally run over by a car. All the suffering of the run flashes before him, and he stands up, telling himself and the surprised driver behind the wheel, “I can,” as he leaves to jog the final mile:

It struck me in the space of a few steps that the past as I knew it had suddenly ceased to exist. … This person who was staggering and crawling and persisting at mile 99 was a different being than the guy who had started the race just yesterday morning. I was more capable than I imagined, better than I ever thought I could be. This realization was like stepping into another dimension.

Accounts like these of such profound personal transformation, then, bring up a serious question about religion: If religion is not relevant here, not able to encapsulate this experience, then how relevant is it in the first place? In the case of Dean Karnazes, does he really need religion if he has running? The non-religious will say no, that’s a dumb question in the first place. The religious may say, okay, he punishes himself, but people of faith are known by their fruits. But Karnazes reports that running touches the relationships in his life as well:

The solitude experienced while running helps me enjoy people more when I am around them. The simple, primitive act of running has nurtured me. I’ve become more tolerant, more patient, and more giving than I ever thought I could be.

My conclusion, then? Probably good for a religion reporter to ignore “religion” books once in a while and read something uplifting for a change.

A special thanks to my cousin and long-distance runner Greg Useem for passing along this book.