Return to : Home

The Purest Sport

By Dwight Estey

09/10/2005 -- An athlete usually feels his sport is the best, the most unique. Baseball hangs its hat (cap) on the common perception that hitting a 95 mph fastball is the most difficult sport skill. Boxing revels in the moniker of being the “Sweet Science”. Then there is the dispute over which sport is the purest.

In this category, running, most specifically cross country, is the hands-down winner.

Running is the most natural and primal of athletic skills – inborn. Before language or any other vestige of advanced human behavior, man ran for survival. Since the creation of sport, more people have run than performed any other athletic skill. Other sports that require the ability to run are adulterated by the addition of arbitrary skills required to “score”. With cross country, running is not only its basis, it is the only required skill. You can’t get purer than that!

Athletes have to be taught how to throw, catch, strike, punch, block, flip and punt. Yet no one tells a child how to run. He just does it – because it is as natural as breathing. The toddler begins by walking. He soon learns that by leaning forward he is forced to move his feet faster to keep up. He runs. And when he runs he thinks to himself, “This is cool!” He may fall on his face a few times. No matter. When he picks himself up he tries it again. This the moment ‘an athlete is born’, for he has demonstrated the essence of all sport. True athletes rise above adversity to reach higher levels.

Watch young kids on a playground and what do they do? They run! And they smile while doing it. By third grade you see uncoached girls and boys running, many with great form. It may not be for any other reason than it feels good to move fast.

The fact that running is a skill both natural and accessible to all does not make the sport easier. It makes it harder because it exponentially increases the number of rivals for anyone striving to excel.

Perhaps the most common question asked of any runner is, “Why do you run?” The truest and most common answer being, “If I have to tell you, you’d never understand.” It is hard to put into words because it requires understanding why one might choose NOT to run. Life without running, is incomprehensible to a runner. Like that first step taken so many years ago, it is natural – it just has to be. After taking that first step, they just never stopped, never wanted to.

The question, “Why do you run cross country?” is far different. Adding a competitive component to a natural function changes its very - well, nature. Wanting to run faster than someone else, risking failure while enduring pain is not natural. There comes a point when the body sends messages to the runner that “enough is enough.” The cross country runner ignores the message. That might be the first and best explanation for why harriers are known as flakes and rebels. They don’t even want to listen to what their own body says! Never mind listening to some outside authority.

They may feel sick with nerves before a race and can be physically sick after. It is the price to pay for an addiction to constant movement. All for the high of competition.

The chance to play psyche music on their ipod and lay psyche jobs on their rivals. To feel the ground shake and to dodge elbows while surrounded by the thundering herd of over 100 other athletes bursting off the starting line – all holding the same goal – to cover each kilometer in less time than the rest.

Dogging the heels of that rival they’ve never beaten. Just holding on for as long as they can, shirt drenched, eyes stung by sweat, sucking huge quantities of air. This is payoff time! Where years of getting comfortable with pain allows them to endure without doubts of whether there are any limits to their human performance. To them, there aren't.

Competition drags them into a new zone. Where the mind and body desperately throw out messages that are ignored – because at the highest level of competition the athlete reaches down to a primal level of instinct. It is more than fight or flight, it is truly about survival. Losing at this level is akin to death.

At the primal level you aren’t allowed to quit.

And so much to gain by not succumbing. At this basic skill that can be performed by everyone, you might just be the best in the world – ever.

Burning lungs, narrowed vision, and legs that are dead tired don’t mean that you have to stop or even slow down. Not when victory is only steps ahead. That is what brings the cross country runner back each race. Knowing that another hundred-mile week means that it will be the rival that falters in those last few steps.

So next week it becomes another hundred miles of hills, out and backs, pickups, intervals, and blisters. The sport is not only pure – its strategy is simple.

Run, faster than anyone else - and never stop.