Every morning, around the crack of dawn, a community of believers rise from their groggy slumber, shake the kinks out of their legs, and pull on a comfortable pair of running shorts and muddy shoes. With ritualistic precision, they stretch sore muscles and self-massage the aches of overuse. Pre-run nourishment is approached with extreme caution and attention to detail; every food and beverage is considered for its possible effect on the runner’s gastrointestinal comfort. Bread is consumed, as is water. Without them, the experience will not be fulfilling or complete. The runners have their deities, their prophets: posters of Steve Prefontaine, Bill Rodgers, and Billy Mills adorn Spartan walls. Eventually, the runner steps out the door, starts his watch, and begins a search for ascendance, for betterment, for the ability—through hard work—to climb up among those idols and hit the milestones of athletic achievement all while attaining an endorphin fueled euphoric state. Running, among this community, is analogous to spirituality.
According to fictional elite runner Quenton Cassidy, in John L. Parker’s Again to Carthage:
It’s not something most human beings would give a moment of consideration to, to consider that you are better today than you were yesterday or a year ago, and that you will be better still tomorrow or next week or at tournament time your senior year. That if you’re doing it right you are an organism constantly evolving toward some agreed-upon approximation of excellence. Wouldn’t that be at least one definition of a spiritual state? (198).
Although churchgoers of a more orthodox nature may disagree with the classification of sport as spirituality, religion is a term that is being constantly redefined. Religion, suggests David Chidester in Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture, can be understood as “a generic term for ‘ways of being a human person in a human place’” (vii). Religions around the world offer people “an engagement with an alternative reality, a true meaning of existence, a ground of being, or an ultimate truth is a part of human nature,” and in today’s modern world, as people move away from orthodox practice of classical religions, new manifestations of this search for meaning arise in apparently non-religious activities and forms, one of which is the sport of competitive distance running, a non-religious activity filled with customs, rituals, and language that acts very much as a religion (Nye 13).
While hobby-joggers and fitness enthusiasts might legitimately claim a religious or spiritual connection to their own running, the community and culture of the sport is most intriguing at the level of truly competitive high school, collegiate, and elite athletes that are more knowledgeable, talented, and dedicated to the intricacies of the actual sport and its accompanying culture than the average weight-loss jogger. They might be cousins, but the competitive athlete and the casual jogger exist on different planes and must be analyzed differently. Similarly, the scope must be narrowed to American distance running. Distance runners in the West are a tight-knit community of counter-culture, mid-major sport enthusiasts. In other running locales such as the dominant East African nations of Kenya and Ethiopia, the running experience is highly different based on socioeconomics and lack of other sporting options. Running as a means of livelihood likely takes on an extremely different nature than running as a hobby or spiritual experience.
With that in mind, competitive American distance running can be analyzed as what Chidester terms an “authentic fake,” which he defines as a pop-culture activity that “[does] authentic religious work by negotiating what it means to be a human person in relation to transcendence, the sacred, of ultimate human concerns” (viii). Like classical religions, distance running is a communal activity, a cultural activity that provides a lens with which to relate meaning and importance to life’s daily minutiae. By this definition, running, among other sports and pop cultural phenomena, does “religious work.”
Running, like religion, has its own subculture of images, revered athletes, remembered races and places, all enshrined with particular symbolic importance. Steve Prefontaine, who died in a car accident in 1975, while holding the American records at every distance between 2,000 and 10,000 meters, serves the American running community as one of the most obvious Christ figures in all of popular culture. Any true student of the sport, any high school running disciple, can quote at least one of Pre’s many canonized quotes, such as, “To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice The Gift.” Entire websites are devoted to collecting the brash and charismatic runner’s timeless quotes and dozens of photographs and video clips from Pre’s short career. Two feature films are dedicated to telling Pre’s life story, albeit through a heavily Hollywood and popular media influenced lens. His face adorns posters on the wall of almost every would be Olympian suffering through high school and college, and he still serves as an inspiration to the current pros and retired athletes who reference his influence in interview after interview.
In The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice, David Morgan writes:
A sacred gaze is the manner in which a way of seeing invests an image, a viewer, or an act of viewing with spiritual significance. The study of religious visual culture is therefore images, but also the practices and habits that rely on images as well as the attitudes and preconceptions that inform vision as a cultural act (3).
Distance running, in America, is viewed through a sacred gaze heavily influenced by the life, death, and marketing of Steve Prefontaine. To young runners who are just getting into the sport, Pre shapes their opinions of racing, training, and the running lifestyle beyond any research, reading, or logic; he functions as a totemic symbol. According to religious theorist Emile Durkheim, a totem “is simultaneously the symbol of both the god and the clan [society], because both the god and the clan are really the same thing” (Pals 100). By viewing Prefontaine through an air of worship, distance runners are at their core worshipping the ideals of the sport, worshipping a perceived example of the perfection of their own society, and therefore the society itself. In our modern distance running culture, both beginners and professionals live among the saturation—via popular opinion—of Pre’s accomplishments, braggadocio, and ideals, marketed for the willing public by Nike.
Nike, the shoe corporation founded by former University of Oregon cross country and track coach (and legend) Bill Bowerman, has not forgotten their first athlete, Bowerman’s protégée, Steve Prefontaine. As the movies, quotes, posters, and stories became an integral part of the American running lifestyle, Pre was resurrected as the ultimate marketing tool. His distinct mustachioed, long-haired appearance and his Christ like place in the running cultural lexicon make him the perfect spiritual marketer. Shoes are named after Pre; documentaries are made, add campaigns are organized, all on the name of the dead former pro. “Pre Lives,” claim the advertisements that show clips of his competitive career, his American records, and his brash front-running style that continues to poison the appreciation of racing tactics among the Nike/Prefontaine influenced American running youth.
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