SPIRITUAL FEELINGS AND THE RUNNER’S HIGH
What does it feel like when you can sense a spiritual presence while running? Ryan Hall, in his memoir Running with Joy, calls it “supernatural running” when he can he can feel God in his body and the sport doesn’t require any effort or work. Religious runners talk about “transcendence,” leaving space and time, and entering almost a celestial plane. Imagine being out on a jog and feeling like you could run all the way around the world. Whether it’s credited to a supernatural power, many runners from widely disparate backgrounds have described something like this. It might come while achieving a personal best or turning a corner and seeing a rainbow or pushing a running stroller with your newborn for the first time. The way Hall describes it, it sounds like heaven. For DuChene, the experience is no less emotional, but she’s able to separate body and soul. She feels like she’s honouring God when she’s working to her utmost potential, but she doesn’t receive any supernatural assistance on race day.
“I feel God when I run – feel his pleasure – but when I’m working, it hurts, like anyone else. I don’t feel like there’s these angel wings lifting me up and I’m f lying through the sky, that’s not me,” says DuChene, who, like Korir, points to early childhood trauma as the solidifying moment of her bulletproof, lifelong faith. “I lost both of my parents to cancer and I know that I can come home someday and my house could be gone and I could lose everything.” But she takes strength and confidence from the stories of perseverance in the Bible.
It’s easy to point out a correlation between the spiritual nature of running and the runner’s high. When we feel good, is it because of a higher power or out-of-body source? It’s a matter of
personal interpretation. Laurier Primeau, 43, is the head coach of Trinity Western University’s track team, a Christian school in Langley, B.C. A former Canadian hurdler and middle-distance star, Primeau is a faith runner, but he also believes that his athletes don’t have any natural advantage over secular students. However, he has experienced something that resembles divine intervention during a race. At a meet in Ottawa to qualify for the 1991 Pan Am Games in Havana, Cuba, Primreau was running the 400m hurdles – and getting killed – when suddenly, everything changed. “I started to pick off the field one by one and when I crossed the line, I didn’t feel fatigued. I threw my hands in the air, not because I won, but because I was jubilant and thankful,” says Primreau. He calls himself an average runner, but wound up finishing the race with the seventh-fastest time in Canadian history. “I remember being in last place at 200m and then feeling an overwhelming calm. It was the only time in my life while racing that I remember feeling the presence of God.”
It’s hard to imagine a team of teenage Christians not asking God to help them on race day. I’ve never done as much as a 10k fun run without praying, just a little, to hold my pace at 7k. However, Primeau, who also coaches Canada’s Paralympic athletes, insists that his team’s relationship with God isn’t like that. They run to pay God tribute – not to ask for things. “Our belief isn’t centred around becoming better or stronger,”
Primeau says. “We use running as an avenue to express our faith. I hope no one on our team believes in God so they can run better, like some kind of reward.”
You can run to find peace, lose weight, raise money for cancer or get away from the children, but chances are, if you spend enough time by yourself running in circles, eventually, however brief ly, you might come to feel something divine or spiritual. Michael Del Monte is a 26-year-old filmmaker who hopes to get his documentary tR ANscend into the Sundance Film Festival. He travelled to Ethiopia to understand the connection between elite runners and God. In his view, after earning a master’s degree in theology and holding the Ontario university record in the 1,000m, there’s something beyond natural talent and science to explain a faith runner’s success.
“Believing in something greater than themselves seems to allow these athletes to overcome hardships and uncertainties,” says Del Monte. He’s especially interested in marathon runners because circumstances that can’t be replicated in practice add an extra level of unpredictability to the sport. In the making of tR ANscend, Del Monte spent time with many runners who have been at the top of the world marathon rankings for the past 20 years. “It is fairly unanimous that at some level, God plays a role in their training, racing and day-to-day life,” he says. “You don’t need to believe in God to become a world record holder, but you can’t ignore it, unless you’re being totally ignorant.”
Whether or not God exists, let alone whether or not God can help you finish a race, is an impossible question to answer. It’s personal. Certainly many Canadian athletes say spiritual belief is at least part of the reason for their successes. Other runners, like Shannon Loutitt, can barely give their finishing time without first attributing their success to God. Loutitt, a Métis runner from Yellowknife calls her races “honour runs,” and says that when she’s running, she’s acknowledging her forefathers. When she ran from Athabasca to Edmonton, a 160k distance that her great-grandfather once traversed as a messenger for the Hudson’s Bay Company, she says she could feel his spirit in her body. On her own, she could never travel such a great distance. But, buoyed with the strength of past generations, she made the journey – even after smoking for 17 years.
Do you think the divine helped her complete her impossible-sounding voyage? Or is it enough, if she believes that it’s true, for it to be so? Mohammed Ahmed, a Muslim from St. Catharines, Ont., who fasted for Ramadan after London’s Olympic Games, says he felt spiritually emboldened from the process. Will believing in God make you a better runner? Does it require prayer to finish the marathon? In the end, belief, like your stride, is ultimately something you need to find on your own.