A New Understanding of Athletic Beauty

Twenty-one and in the last quarter of my third year of college, I decided to drop my classes and take a short leave. 

I was overwhelmed, mentally fraying at the edges, and just physically exhausted. I was in treatment for bulimia, living with an ex (and other friends, mind you), taking my most challenging course-load to-date, working as a caregiver for a disabled woman, and my best friend in town had just moved across the country. I knew, in the thick of it, that if I continued on with my full schedule I would undoubtedly under-perform and possibly even fail a class or two.

Sometimes I forget that I took a quarter off because I attended classes for the first few weeks. I remember French Women's Literature and my introduction to Colette, the curious manner in which her writing hit my brain, the dread that arrived when I considered having to create countless pages of analytical work for that class. I was also briefly enrolled in a Lit class entitled, ever so ominously, The Body.

The Body was held in a large lecture hall with a European professor who spoke more languages than I can remember. He was intelligent, an Academic with a capital-A, and once humored us with a story about how during his research he read continuously for so many hours that he caused himself to go temporarily blind.

One book I still have in my possession from this only-started-never-completed The Body class is In Praise of Athletic Beauty by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. I have carried this book with me for the past ten years, an exception to countless Goodwill book donation purges, because of how it frames sport as divinely elegant and perceives the athletic body as god-like. 

"Nothing was more counter to the canon of Western beauty than the hundreds of extra pounds stored under the skin and very proudly displayed by Japanese sumo wrestlers. Yet during the minutes preceding their bouts, the ritualistic choreography performed by these athletes captivated him enough to make him forget how embarrassed he was by their monstrosity. When the wrestlers started pushing and pressing each other, when their sudden bursts of violence made them lose balance, when their colossal bodies stumbled and fell outside the ring, then it dawned on him why centuries ago sumo tournaments were organized in Shinto shrines to attract the attention of the gods" (Gumbrecht, Harvard University Press, 2006).

Gumbrecht paints athletes as otherworldly, exceptional, nearly genderless and transfiguring. Drawn to this perspective but never quite experiencing it, I couldn't bring myself to part ways with this book. Subconsciously I think I knew I would better appreciate his writing at another time. As I crack open the spine this morning, after participating in my first virtual 5k, I find a folded up pink sheet of paper from an ultrasound appointment two years ago; the lumps in my right breast were benign. The Body.

Taking up running has taught me many things I'd never considered - undoubtedly because I had yet to find a sport that spoke to me. I didn't know I could feel this physically strong, mentally focused, and tediously goal-oriented. I never quite appreciated the vast array of athletic bodies, primed to compete in their sport, distinctive in both subtle and glaringly obvious ways. In Praise of Athletic Beauty is being revisited at precisely the moment I have come to most know it to be truth: when you compete in a physical feat, by yourself or with others, a person can feel augmented. Your brain rewards you and your body follows. Your body performs and your brain rewards you. You're sucked into the depths of healthy obsession like the pulpy fibers surrounding the pit of a peach into the mouth of a willing patron.

The idea to start running came like most of my impulses: late at night when I'm alone and feeling worried that I'm not living up to my [admittedly fabricated] 'full potential.' Quarantine had me devising new [low-cost] reasons to get out of the apartment without breaking any universally accepted social distancing rules. I downloaded an app that was recommended on a listicle and planned my workout for the following morning.

Since that first run in May I have discovered and come to deeply admire professional female athletes on social media. I have found neighborhood joggers and wild ultramarathoners to respect and extol. I have hungered for commonalities and motivation. Michael Jordan in The Last Dance. Lorena Ramírez in Light-Footed Woman. Documentaries about the New York Marathon, the Boston Marathon, mentally unsteady teenagers training to run a race and learn life lessons, the strange practices of the 100 mile Barkley Marathon held in a Tennessee forest, the Michael Phelps produced Weight of Gold addressing the epidemic of suicidal ideation among olympians, etc. I have read the latest issue of Runner's World front to back and have 'running' tagged as an interest on my iPhone news app. I have Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running on hold at the library. I am searching for mental nourishment in a place I have never looked to before - the athletic canon - and it is gifting me wisdom, a clearer desire for self-acceptance, and a runner's high that can last for hours.

Where I used to generally dismiss sports as 'not my thing', I now crave insight into the lives of athletic greats. I hope for answers to questions I didn't know to ask.