And, And, And

To be clear, I would never deny the flesh and blood of my body: this constellation of skin and bone through which I experience the world. I would never suggest that our bodies are merely social constructions: figments of our communicative imaginations. I would never argue (despite mounting evidence among quantum physicists) that my body is not locally real - something that does not exist in the absence of observation. For all intents and purposes, if the tree of my body falls in the woods and there is no one around to see it, my knees still bleed. My body exists in time and space and moves through both, brushing elbows with other bodies. But in its trajectory, my body also collides with stories - stories that stick to me, embed themselves into me, change me. 

At the very moment of our conception, before we are bodies at all, we take on meaning. Certainly, on the other side of the birth canal, we are granted the opportunity, to some extent, to write our own stories. But in many cases, our stories write us. I do not only mean that cultural stories shape the ways we think and the things we believe about bodies, although this is true. Cultural stories teach us which bodies are valuable, productive, and moral, and we are left to either accept or deny these stories as truth or myth. I do not only mean that we store our stories in our bodies, although this, too, is true. After all, Cartesian ideas of the mind-body split have largely been replaced by the understanding that mental experiences are mediated through the body, and therefore the distinction between the two is difficult to find, if it exists at all. I mean that stories literally, physically shape our bodies, by determining - demanding, even - how our bodies are treated by others and by ourselves. Our bodies are not simply sentient collections of pure biological matter. They are products of the social systems they - we - are born into.

I grew up going to Sunday school. Not every week because my mother was a single mom and my sister and I kicked a ball around a muddy field on the weekends. Plus my grandparents’ church was a 45 minute drive down the winding country roads of southern Ohio, and I don’t mean Cincinnati, although those roads are winding too. I mean Corning, Ohio, a small town made up of 583 residents in the heart of Wayne National Forest.

Millertown Church is nestled off an old gravel road, although “nestled” makes it all sound very quaint in a way that it wasn’t, really. The small, white church with its many white parishioners looked just the way you’d imagine, with a tall steeple and a frayed rope which hung from the bell whose ring signified the start and end of service. After singing the Welcome Song for first-timers and hearing a kid-friendly preview of the sermon, my cousins and I (whom I later found out were not really my cousins, just the grandkids of my grandparents’ church friends) rushed down into the cold, damp basement for Sunday School. My grandma taught my class (there were other teachers, but I always took her class, even before I aged in and certainly after I aged out) and the cinder block walls were hung with inspirational bible-inspired posters (imagine Live, Laugh, Love but with a splash of Jesus). She taught me a rap to learn the books of the Old Testament, which I still know by heart but only through 2 Chronicles which, if you know anything about the books of the bible, isn’t very impressive. 

It was in her class that I first learned of Joseph’s coat of many colors, given to him by his father to signify his birthright and his future as the leader of the family. Of course, I knew of Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors, but I preferred Joseph’s because it wasn’t made of rags, and if we were going to be poor and listen to country music, I really would have liked Fancy’s dancing dress. But, sitting in that clammy underground classroom, feeling rich with the spirit, a coat of many colors was just what I wanted - to look on the outside the way I felt on the inside: vibrant, flowing, free. To tell my story, as we all do, with the clothes I wore.

It was also in her class that I learned of hairshirts - those itchy, shameful garments worn by penitents to punish themselves. I never wanted to wear a hairshirt. I learned a lot about sin in Sunday school, and recited the ten commandments every week (or, rather, every week we attended). I knew I was a sinner, or would be someday, but I never believed in a wrathful God. He’d forgive my sins and that would be that - Jesus didn’t want me to suffer, he wanted me to shine in a beautiful coat. When I grew older and aged out of my religious sensibilities, I learned that most of my friends - and even my church cousins - disagreed with me. Corporeal punishment was a rite - bodily suffering was a rule.

Cultural stories write upon our bodies in more ways than we can imagine. Grand narratives - those ideological, all encompassing stories that postmodernists claim to be so skeptical of - shape the way we understand, define, value, and treat our bodies. The gospel touches every part of a Christian’s life, with the body at its very center. Some even take the body of Christ in wafer form into their own bodies (though I was never allowed to take communion, as I wasn’t baptized, and had to sit alone in the pew as my fellow church-goers glared at me in disappointment and burped the blood of their savior). The Good Word teaches us that the body is a temple, and that we must glorify God by treating it as such. But it also tells us that only through suffering will we find salvation. 

When cultural stories touch us, we absorb them into our bodies. I don’t just mean that we wear purity rings and crosses around our necks or, in my case, a coat of many colors. The very actions that we take with and upon our bodies are influenced by these stories. Our bodies, as stories themselves, don’t just reflect these stories - they validate and reproduce them, like an oral history in motion. And although we often do vocalize these stories, we need not - simply wearing the hairshirt is an act of storytelling.

Religious narratives - particularly those of the Christian faith - are nearly ubiquitous in our highly globalized and colonized world. However, they are not the only stories that write themselves upon us. Sport narratives are especially capable of shaping our bodies and embodied practices. Of course, sports narratives share much in common with those of religion, and certainly those of war (is there a difference?). But stories of sport are particularly and uniquely capable of impressing themselves upon us, given that bodies are the tool (and the currency) of these battles we call games.

I was only 7 years old when I began skipping church for soccer, but even at that age I began to absorb and reproduce the stories I was told. I once had a coach who, seeing a player on the other team go down with an injury, exclaimed loud enough for even the parents to hear, “at least it’s not one of ours!” After all, even though everyone pretends that “it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game,” we all knew then and know now that it is absolutely about whether you win or lose and it is mostly about winning winning winning. I learned that, as long as none of my own teammates were injured there was no reason to worry, and in fact, that an injury on the opposing team might ultimately improve our chances of winning and that was the most important thing, not whether a child who happened to play on another soccer team but who sat next to me in science class was going to be alright. Later, I had another coach who, in the midst of a brutally physical high school varsity game, yelled out, “if they’re not calling it, why aren’t we doing it?”, as if the legality or illegality of an aggressive foul - or, more accurately, the likelihood of being called on it - was the determining factor when considering laying out another body. My teammate broke a girl’s arm that game. She needed a police escort off the field.

In sport, it isn’t just about how we treat and value the bodies of others - these stories, personal and cultural, also tell us how to treat and value our own bodies. This type of absorption and the ways we reproduce them, particularly in an environment where bodies are commodified, may be the most insidious of all. As a track and field athlete in high school, I believed that just by looking at one’s body, I could identify their event, and even who would win any given race. Of course, as an unusually petite athlete competing in the high hurdles, I believed I was the exception to the rule. Even when I saw other exceptions - hundreds of them - I never once questioned my belief that the way one looked determined the way one competed, and therefore that some bodies were more valuable than others.

In college, I moved away from short sprints and into the middle distances. This always felt like a romantic shift. The boy I loved in high school was a distance runner, though I later realized that I didn’t love him, I just loved distance running, and he was the embodiment of that lonely, laborious love. Distance running was alluring because it was lonely and laborious, and because that exhaustion wrote itself upon the bodies that did it. I don’t just mean the sadness that clouds the eyes of most distance runners; I mean, too, the ways in which the body changes as a result of all those miles. Muscles harden, fat burns, cheeks hollow, ribs protrude.

Running many miles changes the body. Running many miles also improves the body’s running. This does not mean that the body’s changes cause the improvements, though it’s easy to understand this logic, despite its fallacy. It’s easy to understand why so many of us believe smaller bodies to be more suitable (read valuable) for running. It’s easy to understand how this narrative proliferates, and why we would take matters into our own hands in pursuit of victory. Running writes upon the body, but narratives about running do so, too.

I’m one of the lucky ones. I never had an eating disorder, and though many around me did, this does not make me superior. It just makes me lucky. In a competitive environment saturated with stories of waifish success, the cards are stacked against us. Truthfully, I never felt I was tough enough - strong enough - to starve myself. Admitting this to myself now, it’s clear that I, too, was written upon by these myths. Because that’s what they are - myths. But myths can, and do, become our truths. We know now with unwavering certainty that low energy availability is unsustainable - that your bones will crack and your organs will fail and you won’t even be able to compete, let alone perform well. But knowing something and acknowledging it are two separate experiences, and we were all good at looking away, even from ourselves.

So many believe it to be an issue of education - of awareness. If only they knew what they were doing to their bodies. But we knew, better than anyone. When a bone snapped in my left foot, it felt like I stepped on a hot nail - localized and nauseating, it brought me to my knees. But when the doctor “couldn’t find” a fracture on the x-ray, I was relieved. Not because I thought my third metatarsal was intact, but because I knew it wasn’t. I kept my secret, and ran through it, knowing full well that my injury would get worse and that my performance would suffer. But if I could just be tough, maybe I could at least qualify for the conference meet, even if I couldn’t race, and wasn’t that something?

Though I managed, fortunately, to avoid the full grip of disordered eating, I couldn’t escape the larger narrative of performance (any quality of performance) over health. In the world of sport - or track and field, at the very least - a healthy body is one that can compete. This does not mean one free from injury or illness or pain. There is a widely-held misconception that elite athletes are the healthiest among us. Surely, elite athletes may be more fit than the general public, in terms of endurance or strength (when I visit the doctor and the nurse takes my vitals, they almost always ask if I’m a runner), but healthy, almost never. It was Quentin Cassidy - running’s golden, if fictional, boy - who said “the old Injury Evasion Fandango. Did it ever end?” It didn’t. It doesn’t. And although we all dance with injury, to actually be injured - to admit to it and to treat it - is the most heinous of sins. To no longer be able (read willing) to compete renders an athlete unhealthy. Unproductive. Useless. To be unwilling to tangle with pain - to overcome adversity - is to no longer be a real runner.  After all, “pain is temporary - glory is forever.”

We’re told, pain is simply weakness leaving the body. Pain is, of course, gain. These sentiments glorify the pain and shame us if we’re unwilling to welcome it into our training. I don’t mean discomfort - of course doing anything physical will require some level of discomfort. I mean pain that threatens, pain that persists, pain like a red flag, often ignored. I’ve heard this pain called a good friend, a consistent companion. I, myself, have called this pain God. But when we worship at the altar of this pain, we deal with the devil. Abandon all hope ye who enter here, for riding this pain, despite its misguided euphoria, is a one-way ticket to hell.

To be clear, no one ever said aloud “hurt yourself.” In fact, my coaches and teammates said things like “take care of yourself” and “it’s just running” and “think about your future.” They meant it, and I know they did, but it isn’t the whole story. Because those who trained through injury were praised for their discipline and those who lost their periods to over-exercise were admired for their dedication, while those on the arm bike were mocked for their efforts to maintain their fitness while taking much-needed rest. The lede is buried, but the message is clear if silent. These are the stories I took seriously, because to know them, even in their silence, made me an insider, a part of the team, a congregant. And to be held by a community who knows and shares your secrets is a powerful experience. I knew my whole season would be threatened (it was). I knew I may never race competitively again (I didn’t). But the pain became a beacon I believed would lead me to glory.

Though we like to think ourselves rational beings, human experience is riddled with unacknowledged contradictions. We like to smooth the rough edges of personal stories so they feel cohesive, whole, internally consistent. We like our stories to follow, from beginning, middle, and end. And though we may acknowledge the ways we change - our personal character development - we each alter our stories to prove that we too, are cohesive, whole, internally consistent. We reframe and retell our memories and experiences to others and to ourselves. The same is true of cultural stories. We bend and shape cultural stories to achieve narrative fidelity - to integrate ourselves with the whole of our culture. 

The problem with narrative smoothing is that any given story is just one node in a network of stories. Although one story may be internally consistent, the network is always full of opposing narratives - stories that inherently contradict one another. When these stories dictate our behavior - and, in particular, how we use and treat our bodies - our sense of narrative cohesion is shattered. Winning isn’t everything, and also win at all costs. Fuel your bodies properly, stay free from injury, but also sacrifice your body for the sport, for the race, for the bugles and drums.

These contradictions are written upon our bodies. To wear the hair shirt, to train through injury - these actions are narrative. They reflect those stories which already exist and reproduce them for others to consume, not by listening but by looking. The very presence of a body in a space is narrative because it can be seen, observed, and interpreted relative to one’s understanding of the culture and time. This embodied narration is a powerful, unwieldy mechanism of cultural production, one that is difficult to control given the vast contradictions of human experience and the flesh-and-bone visibility of our bodies in space. In many ways, through our bodies, we retell the very stories which have harmed us. Put simply, through our mere existence, we contribute to our own continued destruction.

It should be as simple as taking care of your body. After all, it’s the only one you get. But it’s not that simple. We like to think that, as athletes, our bodies are our currency, and they are, to some extent. But it’s more true to say that our participation is our currency. Scholarship athletes - or those on the path to scholarship - trade their participation for their livelihood. For some (for many), participation is more than an end in itself, it is also a means to an end: an education, a career, financial stability. Yes, I wanted to run. More than anything in the world. But my participation meant that the school would pay for my books and my tuition. I needed to participate, not only because I wanted to. It’s the same exploitation that keeps football athletes from reporting concussion symptoms: another phenomenon researchers cannot seem to wrap their minds around. The question asked by those outside of sport remains: why wouldn’t an athlete report symptoms of a traumatic brain injury? The question asked by those inside remains: why would they?

There is no end to this story, or at least no happy one. I wish I could say that, having emerged on the other side of sin, I’ve had a revelation - one that uncovers some divine truth. That I’ve managed to reconcile the paradoxes inherent to an enterprise run on bodies alone. I wish I knew the path forward, out of this darkness. But, in reality, I don’t know how to separate the contradictions from the experience of competitive running. Maybe someday, I’ll emerge from this false consciousness (if I ever come to believe in false consciousness at all). But today, I have no answers, only the shameful confession that I wouldn’t change a thing about my time in the sport. I only have my truth: that I fucking loved it. Forgive me, Father.

Upon completion of my final race, I wrote: “My hair is long, and my knees are scarred, and my feet are wrecked, and my heart is full.”

Maybe there is no end. There may be only and, and, and.