Soul in Sport: A Primer for Endurance Athletes
by GRP Runner, Stephen Kerr
For some, the word 'soul' brings to mind an emphatic, feeling-infused approach to life. It can be seen in various characteristics; impassioned involvement, an active sense of play and humor, or simply a little twinkle in one’s eye. In the words of modern philosopher Thomas Moore, soul is “not a thing but a quality or dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart and personal substance.” Such descriptors are equally apt when applied to our relationships with the sports we love. What skier doesn’t revel in the multi-sensory depth of skiing in season’s first good snow? Show me the rower who isn’t committed to the meaningful underpinnings of synchronization among their crew. And is there a runner who doesn’t know the feeling of testing their resolve lacing up rain or shine, ready or not?
Qualities such as these are the ones which carry meaning beyond the sport; they illuminate our deeper character and transcend age and experience. Listening to elder athletes share stories of their triumphs and battles, sacrifices and flow-state moments, provides a hint that there is much more to our interest in sports than the numbers, the goals, the comparisons. Undeniably, those numbers and other ‘quantifiables’ play a role too. To provide a fuller picture, we can categorize the more heady goal-oriented aspects of sport under the term ‘spirit’.
Soul and Spirit in Relation to Sport
“Soul and spirit are two directions a meaningful life can take, two elements in our basic make-up as human beings. Spirit aims high toward perfection, future bliss, order, a sense of the cosmos, high states of contemplation and being. Soul is embedded in ordinary life and consists of intimate emotions and relationships, home, family, sexuality, the imperfect life, shadow or dark qualities, failure and loss.
“Soul makes us human, while spirit gives us transcendent vision. Both are necessary and valuable, and each are best when the other is present.” - Thomas Moore
Like soul, spirit has everything to do with sport. Spiritual endeavors are characterized by striving, growing, and bringing the theoretical into reality. Delineated goals of race performance are spiritual. Achievements involving numbers, like the sub-2 hour marathon, or the 1-2-3 race podium, gain their aura from the spiritual striving required to reach them. The process is encapsulated in a question; “can I make my dream into reality?”
Competitive athletes occasionally find themselves disconnected from the broader meanings in life when chasing their goals. Often, we can see this at times of injury, when many struggle to reclaim a sense of purpose in the absence of ‘productive training’. For anyone yearning to strengthen their grounding, soulful life with their athletic ambitions, I recommend the following metaphor.
The soul-spirit dynamic
Much like the tree which sends its roots deeper to support its growing trunk and crown, we must ground ourselves deeper into soul practice as we stretch and strive toward ever greater achievements and manifestation of lofty goals.
The parallels continue:
Tree roots are known not only to draw nutrients from the soil, but to interface with their surrounding plant communities through finely tuned ‘senses’.
In young trees, the breadth of the roots in proportion to trunk diameter averages 38:1. This means the roots spread 19 feet from the trunk of a tree with a 6-inch diameter trunk. When we hear of/experience the fervor with which many elite athletes approach food, sleep, community, and other grounding soulful parts of life, is it any wonder they can perform at such a high level?
The growth cycle is seen clearly in leaves, which renew each year as energy is stored in the roots and trunk for dormant seasons. A handy analog for the necessity of recovery periods, yes? When the leaves of last season’s culmination have fallen, we return our energies to building our stores of inner strength and purpose back up. If we rest well, our next season will have deep reserves to draw from.
Potential Downfalls of Soul-Spirit Imbalance
An imbalance between spirit and soul can present many challenges. Taken to the extreme, a strong spirit with a weak sense of soul can leave a person cold, impersonal, seemingly robotic. This might be a person who is highly intellectual and goal driven. They may be quite brilliant, but they may also lack emotional color, humor, comfort, or social awareness. A journey into the more existential ‘whys and wherefores’ of life may behoove a person facing imbalances like these. They may benefit from reflections on the common human nature they share with others. Sources of levity like comedy or fiction can also help here, increasing our self awareness and contextualizing our own struggles into a larger picture, interwoven with our communities. The phrases ‘no man is an island’ and ‘it takes a village’ come to mind here.
The flip side, an excess of soul and dearth of spirit, may render a person uncontrollably tied to extremes of emotion, or to pleasure and pain. The bodily experiences of life may dominate. Someone faced with this imbalance may rely on their association with others in lieu of their own identity. They may seek sensory stimulations like sweet and salty foods to the point of excess, or may live vicariously through book or TV show characters, or podcast talking-heads. They could lack practice thinking critically in an individual way about the world around them, and consequently may feel imprisoned rather than empowered when face-to-face with their problems. But perhaps this person has not found their own drive to change and to grow. When we find ourselves in a place like this, solitude and personal reflection may help us clear our minds and allow us to map out steps (baby steps, as they often are) towards greater goals of individuation.
The answer to such imbalances is easier to address when one is aware of the reciprocal nature of soul and spirit. Practicing integration between the two vantage points can allow us to thread them more closely together, and reap the benefits of wholeness.
Bringing Spirit into Soul
If you are anything like me, you take your sporting goals seriously. You may find yourself reading sports articles in order to glean any new insight you can find to apply to your own training.
Luckily, there’s no reason we can’t use our goals to develop our sense of soul and foundation. John Landy and Roger Bannister, who famously strived to run under 4 minutes for the mile, a barrier many believed was beyond human ability, exemplified the growth in soul one can find when achieving goals when they finally ran 3:59 (3:57.9 for Landy, second to achieve the feat). They brought a seemingly impossible notion into reality, and redefined their personal understandings of their bodies’ capability. Of his successful attempt, Bannister said “No longer conscious of my movement, I discovered a new unity with nature. I had found a new source of power and beauty, a source I never dreamt existed.” In actually reaching our goals, we are vindicated in the deeper meaning of the endeavor. Let us not forget that the peak of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is none other than ‘Self Actualization’.
This cyclical connection between spirit and soul can be a major source of meaning and power in one’s sporting aspirations. When you embody and achieve a goal you once only saw in the distance, you gain a new identity, and a deeper appreciation for your body’s capability. I had been running competitively for over 5 years before I won a race, and it was no contest; the psychological hurdle far outscaled the physical one. “Sure,” I’d think, “I had run worthy races before, but was I really race-winning material?” I never would have known if I didn’t keep at it, and my soul is all the richer for it. I can tell you I enjoyed my post race meal with a greater sense of peace after that first win, and my parents were just as delighted to see me vindicated in my efforts.
Bringing Soul into Spirit
And what about the reverse: enriching spirit by emphasizing soul? There exists another illustrative example from the world of running. It’s commonly known among US college running coaches that talented high school runners often face performance declines in their first year or two of collegiate racing. There’s a clear reason for this. In most cases, high school training will not provide a platform broad enough to support the rigors of collegiate training and competition.
College coaches challenge their new recruits to up the ante not by continuing their high school training, but by rethinking and reforming their foundation altogether. The coaches begin helping them deconstruct and slowly rebuild themselves in a new mold. They approach the dedicated young runners with the mind of a NASCAR pit crew, building them up to withstand the fatigue of higher volume training with more efficient training methods, more emphasis on periodization and recovery, and rebuilding dietary habits in a more wholesome direction if needed. The initial challenge of assimilating the new approach is taxing, and it will often take time for these runners to reach their former peaks again, but they will also have a much greater chance to surpass those peaks by far.
Bringing soul into spirit would be what happens when we analyze ourselves and look inwards with the intention of making an overhaul.
This is taking a good hard look at the mundane realities of soul, body, humanity, and breaking them down to their constituent parts with a spiritual, results driven, tinkerer’s approach. From there, we can better understand and integrate our ‘components’, physically, mentally, socially even.
Reframing our endeavors using these approaches can allow us to understand them better, and to get a stronger sense of some dynamics that often seem to work ‘behind the curtain’ of usual training approaches. Of course, we have no choice but to undergo this process at all times. It allows us to perpetually find and re-find our true selves as we age and change. But bringing it into our awareness will provide us with tools to take advantage of the cycles we find ourselves in, and to live them out more emphatically.
Such is the reciprocal nature of the spirit-soul dynamic. Both rely upon one, and feed into another. Spirit can be brought into the soul realm through self-transformation, and soul can be beckoned upwards into the rare air of striving to grow.
Nurturing Soul in Sport*
Nurturing the soul can be a grounding experience. Nurturing spirit can be an uplifting, empowering one.
*It’s beyond the scope of this article to delve into nurturing spirit, and anyway, it’s a topic much more frequently covered by our coaches and experts.
As summed up by an anonymous writer from the website of Arkansas-based Bailey and Oliver Law Firm (that’s the internet for ya), the doubly aforementioned Thomas Moore suggests “we should take care of our soul in three steps. First; paying attention. Stretch your imagination so the scene around you becomes artful. Second; accept what you see. Our whole world suffers when we don’t accept the light and the darkness. And Third; surround ourselves with objects, people and situations that are rewarding to contemplate.”
Let’s look closer at each of these three approaches to soul care in action:
Pay attention
“Stretch your imagination so the scene around you becomes artful”. Here is a habit worth forming. Instead of seeing the raw forms of our environment we may see movement and meaning, symbolism and intent. Take a scene from Östersund at the World Cup Nordic sprints the other weekend (spoiler alert): Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, one of the best in the sport, charges a swift climb toward the last hairpin turn to break away from the field for good. It all happens in about 5 seconds.
Someone not so attuned to the imaginative side of their scene may not have seen that opportunity, but Klæbo is well versed in saddling these moments. Perhaps someone less trained, in his position, would see the situation for its mundane qualities: six skiers, all within contention for a victory or podium position. But with years of honing, the eventual victor was attentive to the imaginative view. He saw that a brief, well timed explosion of speed would give him the gap he needed to bolster his confidence and send him with relaxed momentum all the way to the finish.
Accept what you see
This is a paradoxical prerequisite to imaginative attention. Continuing our example… Anything can happen with a pack of six skiers a minute away from the finish line in a sprint final. You can be victorious or out-lunged at the finish, clinching a podium spot or falling in a tangle. But sometimes preconceptions can hold us from gaining clarity at key moments such as this.
An athlete may feel that everything is on the line, their validation and self worth at risk if they don’t perform well. In their struggle, they may miss a sliver-of-a-moment opportunity to make an inside pass that would propel them forward. Many athletes train themselves to frame each race as a step along the path, and remove the risk that muddles their gameface mindsets. With acceptance of the realities, a momentary failure (is it so risky to ski slightly less fast than another person, once?) is just another rock in the mountain of evidence that one’s identity is built through more than results. Without it, a result in either direction can rock the boat. An athlete’s first win may send them to rest on their laurels, only to be defeated soon after. In that loss, they may decide they’re not cut out for it, thus ending their progression of growth and actualization.
Surround yourself
“Surround ourselves with objects, people and situations that are rewarding to contemplate.” It all comes together here. Take the ski race, one last time. How many of the racers have long dreamt of being in this position: a final in the world cup series? I’d bet almost every one of them has. It takes a heck of a lot of work to reach such a high level if it doesn't bring you joy on an intrinsic level. Klæbo trains 100 hours per month, give or take. Few people give that much energy unless they get energy from it as well. The Nordic skiing community, the races in all their fervor and glory, even the skis themselves, are surely things of beauty and intrinsic worth to someone such as Klæbo.
Crafting your own approach
Assuming my guesses about Klæbo’s mindset are somewhat correct, we’ve had an opportunity to see what it might look like when an athlete brings soul into their practice. Emulating the approaches of others is the most natural step toward crafting your own soul-life. It’s something we’ve been doing subconsciously all our lives, as the traditions and concerns of our parents, idols, and friends inform our own. When it comes to a more conscious approach, we can observe and emulate the approaches of others, and adjust as we receive feedback in application. Maybe, in my next race, I’ll employ a Klæbo tactic and see if it works for me.
Bringing soul into sport is often a practice of seeking depth of meaning. Are my running shoes just rubber and fabric, or are they a trusty companion, my ticket to flight? Is my training log an extended alphanumeric formula, or is it a testament to all my dedication, and a key to the past and future? Is my post race snack a chemical concoction of nutrients for recovery, or is it a lovingly crafted scone with a side of chocolate milk, once-distant muses-turned-rewards of my every effort in the prior workout? The possibilities are endless, and the picture only becomes clear with attentive exploration and a little bit of creativity.
Some Final Thoughts
Unanswered Questions
The soul is defined as much by conscious things as it is by the subconscious. There are aspects to ourselves that we may not have the proper perspective to see, and there will always be some questions that remain unanswered. But that very unknowing is a place of true potential energy. It is what drives our curiosity to involve ourselves in the process of forming our own meaning. When we bring that unknowing into sport, we may surprise ourselves the way I did when I signed up for my first triathlon. I had never swum in a race before, but it became my favorite leg of all (not my strongest, though). And though my background was in running, I found my true strength in triathlon was in the transition sections. I still apply these lessons to my athletic endeavors today, though that first race was well over a decade ago and I had no idea what I was getting into.
Science can’t account for everything
Scientific approaches yield progression models for athletes; linear, logarithmic, or exponential growth, all laid out in rigidly comprehensive daily training structures. Spiritual pursuits such as these would have us driving toward our goals with no breaks and no considerations for anything ‘unproductive’. Thus, they are often shortsighted. Why? Because the human being is far more complex than we know. Science cannot answer every question we have, and as Star Trek has so routinely harped on, humanity is irrational. But there is strength in that irrationality, and there lies the importance of a soul approach, attentively crafted to compensate for science’s blind spots, and tailored to fit our individual needs.
A soulful approach to life, and by extension, sport, is not centered on growth, parabolic or otherwise. It is also about regression, or the ‘outbreath’ if you will. Soul is about more fully inhabiting reality, the shape of one’s existence. Where spirit builds a fountain, soul fills it with water.
~
I’d like to extend thanks to my GRP Run team for fielding my rather scattered presentation on this topic, and providing me feedback from which I could weave a (hopefully slightly) more coherent write-up here.