When Spectation is a Spiritual Experience.
How faith can inform perception and sports give us a chance to know ourselves better.
My parents are taking the baby for a walk, so my partner and I have an (unexpected) entire hour to ourselves, untethered from responsibility. Somehow the stars have aligned and I can catch some of the NYC marathon on TV. I sink into a chair in the basement den and I watch Brazil’s Daniel do Nascimento running with a huge lead, the elapsed time displayed on a digital clock affixed to the car that coasts behind him. Meanwhile the women’s race is led by a pack of four runners two by two, so close to each other but effortlessly avoiding collision. The announcers are quick to remind us that only three of them can win.
I walk up to the flat-screen, manually zooming in to decipher the street number in the pixelation. With my face up to the screen I see recognizable graffiti, a King Baby tag on a wall. (He really is everywhere.) This familiarity is the catalyst for an emotional tidal wave of nostalgia and longing. Longing for the daily walks around Manhattan. Longing for the group runs with some of the runners on our TV today. The streets look more familiar than the undersized roadways of our HOA. An alternate reality. I feel myself tearing up.
Running is such a strangely spiritual exercise. Meditative, with an emphasis on endurance. As someone raised Catholic, pain and hardship have some extra built-in value to me, and the idea of perseverance really resonates with me. After Nascimento takes a super quick break to use a porta-potty, the immediate question is “Can he recover?” A bit later he stops, and does some motions with his arms. As the announcers describe, he is trying to get his brain to convince his body to keep moving. I feel what I guess you would call empathy, and it’s intense. He recovers, but shortly after, he collapses near Mile 18. Christ Falls the First, and Last Time type vibe.
“If you fall during a marathon, you are not getting back up,” says one of the off-screen announcers. Nascimento lies on the ground as medical personnel huddle around him. Eventually Evans Chebet of Kenya passes him up and goes on to win the race on a very warm November day.
All of the fanfare and enthusiasm in this ESPN 2 production is more spirited than I could have imagined. Is this emotional catharsis typical of watching sports? I guess playing sports is church for some people, and watching sports is church for others. I’ve yet to find a religious community in Cleveland that feels like a solid fit, but I’m having a very spiritual experience this Sunday morning.
Throughout my day I see a social media feed filled with video clips of runners finishing the race and collapsing in the arms of loved ones, crying. A woman crosses the finish line and slowly makes the sign of the cross. Running is the real deal. It’s transformative. Nothing has been able to take me to a place where I engage with my mind and my body like running. I love this sport so much.
TYSM for reading,
S
Incoming
Inspired and influenced by these things:
Like everyone else, I’m a little burnt out on hearing about division in America. I almost skipped the 4 Forces episode of Akimbo today, but he drew me in by talking about the early days of television and how it was extremely likely people had been watching the same thing, and this created something in common for them. “Shared fictional realities” is the term he used.
I ran to my polling place today. On the way back I needed a quick run, so I listened to 15 minute head starts on NRC. Two statements stood out to me:
I don’t know if everything happens for a reason, but I know that we heal for a reason.
Perseverance isn’t about winning, it’s about knowing you’ll get back up when you lose. Seemed really appropriate for today.
I miss Snake Run so much. It’s a group run with multiple stops at different galleries around NYC. The art component is what made me feel confident enough to head out with a run club for the first time. Nacho and Jessica do such a good job with it.
An article about King Baby a blog post with an image of the tag.
I started singing this when I was taking my child for a walk today, and it makes me hopeful that when I return to the Karaoke stage it will be triumphant.