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The first time I saw a shooting star was several hours into a nearly 18-hour swim from Newport, Vermont, to Magog, Quebec, in 2011. We'd launched the 25-mile adventure in the cool water of Lake Memphremagog at midnight, smack into a 20-mile-per-hour headwind.
The struggle to make progress amid the chaos of that chilly September night meant I zoned in on my swimming in a way I hadn't before, and suddenly, I realized hours had passed since my last fully coherent thought. I was so in the moment, swimming along meditatively while managing the waves and uncertainty around me, that I had lost all sense of time.
I looked up at the sky. A streak of silver flashed across the dark dome. In that glorious moment, I felt at one with the universe. Swimming was no longer just a physical experience, but a spiritual one.
It turns out I'm not alone. This phenomenon is documented in a recent study, "The Church of the Sunday Long Run: Endurance Sport as an Alternative to Institutional Religion?" conducted by Dr. Kathleen Mroz, assistant professor of theology and religious studies at Emmanuel College in Boston.
For the study, Mroz interviewed 63 people who self-identify as either long-distance runners or triathletes. She asked whether they felt their participation in endurance sports bore a relationship to their feelings on institutional religion. The responses Mroz received were eye-opening, she says.
"The conversations were a lot deeper than expected," Mroz says.
Mroz, a runner who joined a triathlon group in 2018, noticed a pattern among her circle. Whenever the concept of church and spirituality would come up during a group workout - as it does when there's a theologian in the mix - several people would share that they don't go to church anymore.
"This is where I pour out my heart," Mroz admits. She was pained by the decreased enrollment many religious organizations have seen in recent decades. In 2020, the number of Americans belonging to a house of worship (church, synagogue, or mosque) fell below the majority for the first time, according to a poll conducted by Gallup.
Mroz wondered whether something else - perhaps endurance sports, which have enjoyed rapid development in recent decades - was filling the theological void theoretically left by this growing absence of organized religion.
"I started thinking maybe I should actually talk to some more people, and then it took off way bigger than expected," she says.
She started with her immediate circle of triathlon friends, and as word got around, she conducted some five dozen interviews. Some of the quotes she included in the study show that many athletes feel quite spiritual about endurance sports, and many use their time engaging in it to ruminate on some of life's biggest questions - prayer, perhaps, by a different name.
During the study, Mroz heard stories of endurance sport shepherding athletes through just about every life situation -- from commemorating the anniversary of a loved one's suicide to moving forward in recovery from substance abuse.
Many interviewees clearly saw the overlap between sport and religion, but many also insisted the experiences are fundamentally different. For example, one participant told her, "Church... is more of a grounding experience, while running is more of a coping mechanism and form of escapism. No one can reach you on a run. You can come [up] with solutions to problems without even trying."
Another noted that a fellow runner and Vietnam veteran "started running with us because the weekends are when his friends commit suicide. He realized he could run and just be with people without having to talk about it, and he credits running with why he is alive."
Yet another respondent put it simply: "Religion is a mess and causes confusion. Running is simple."
Religion is a mess and causes confusion. Running is simple.
Mroz is careful not to suggest that endurance sport is a religion per se, but to argue that for some people, endurance sport functions as an alternative or supplement to institutional religion.
This is true for Father Thomas Elitz, a recently ordained Jesuit priest who's also a marathon runner. "I know that running calms me and keeps me level-headed about things," Elitz says. "Compared to before I started running, I find myself a little less stressed and a little more even-keeled about my life because there's some kind of meditative aspect to it."
He says these feelings are especially powerful when he's running at dawn or dusk, "at those transition times," when he can be particularly contemplative while immersed in nature.
"There's a tranquility and a peace to it that I just enjoy," Elitz says. "The scripture of St. Paul talks about peace as one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit and living into that while running is accepting a sense of peacefulness."
A shared sense of purpose and community is also a key feature of both religious groups and endurance sports groups. Mroz notes that community aspect is a big part of why she fell in love with triathlon in the first place: "Beyond just getting the training and learning the skills, we were also really helping each other through a lot of tough stuff."
One respondent in Mroz's study said she felt a sense of communion after falling into step with another runner she didn't know on the trail one day. Suddenly, she was "running two miles with a man she had never met before, 'talking as if we had known each other our whole lives. Nowhere other than running can I connect so easily with a stranger... Runners have an implicit trust and affinity.'"
Dr. Andrew Davis, professor of Old Testament at the Clough School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College and a long-distance open water swimmer, says he's also had spiritual experiences during swims.
"The way I think about swimming and doing a long race is really coming from a place of spirituality. I connect with the experience in the same way I connect with other experiences of spirituality," he explains. "It's the same feelings and experience that I have going to church or meditations. They go hand in hand for me."
Davis says he thinks this shared experiential connection between swimming and spirituality comes down to the fact that "a lot of swimming, in particular, feels meditative. I think because you're restricting your sensory input," it can trigger the same effects as a silent retreat might. "You're just quiet for seven or eight days and that experience of quieting yourself down, your body, your senses, really brings you to a place of receptivity and openness to the Divine in a way that we just can't get to in our everyday lives because there's so much sensory input."
He continues, " I feel like going for a swim, especially in the lake, is a mini-version of [a silent retreat]. You can't hear, your sight is limited to what's at the bottom of this murky lake, and you're just kind of shutting all systems down for a little bit."
Giving the body a focused, repetitive task like striding or stroking for a long period "gives our mind freedom, and the sprit also, to breathe and to blossom. So much of our consciousness in everyday action is being attentive to how our bodies are moving in space, so giving our bodies a task to do on repeat, I think gives our mind and spirit an opportunity to come to the foreground in a way that it's just not able to in everyday moments," Davis says.
That synchronicity of body and soul, working in harmony, is also part and parcel of why some athletes say they feel in touch with the Divine when engaging in endurance sports, but also a means of improving their corporeal existence.
As one interviewee noted, endurance sport has helped her heal a poor relationship with her body. "Madison described her first time running in a sports bra as a 'religious experience,'" Mroz writes. "As someone who lives in a larger body, Madison says, 'the feeling of rain hitting my stomach was so freeing. It was beautiful.' Nevertheless, she wishes that more people realized that endurance sport, for her, is not a means to lose weight but to celebrate her current body and what it can do."
A new and emerging field in theological research says here may be a neurobiological element to the numinous feelings some athletes experience when pushing to their physical limits. Neurotheology - the neuroscience of theological belief - has suggested these experiences may be based in the inner workings of the human brain, with some of the same regions that make sex and drugs pleasurable being involved in religious sensations.
Some research has shown the frontal lobe of the brain - what Dr. Andrew Newberg, a neuroresearcher who has investigated spirituality in the brain, calls the "attention area" of the brain - lights up when a person is meditating or having a spiritual experience. That region, which is also home to higher cognitive functions, is also active during exercise.
This overlap in location may account for some of the simultaneity individuals report, but there's much more study to be done before a full picture can be painted.
While endurance sport can fill a spiritual and community role for some practitioners, it's not without its drawbacks. Though some like to claim there are no barriers to entry for would-be athletes, plenty exist, from high cost of gear and entry fees to a lack of racial and ethnic diversity.
A misunderstanding or discounting of one's own privilege in pursuit of endurance sport can also be problematic. "Statements like 'everybody can do a marathon' or 'everybody can quality for the Boston Marathon if they really try' can be extremely toxic and isolating," Mroz writes, noting that one interviewee summarized this problem by saying "there is always some element of grace involved, it is not simply a matter of deserving or earning."
An element of selfishness is inherent to endurance sports, which can prevent some people from participating, Mroz reports. A hyper-focus on the body can lead to disordered eating and mental health issues are prevalent in sports such as triathlon.
Across the board, excessive involvement in these groups can lead to relationship tensions for some and addictive behaviors for others. Injury and illness can threaten a person's ability to fully engage with endurance sports communities the way they'd like, and the emotional and physical letdown that often occurs after completing a big goal can be a dangerous period for some athletes.
As one interviewee said, "in the end you have to go back to reality. Ironman is not fixing any problems. When it is over, what do you do?"
Still, many endurance athletes insist their circle is welcoming and open to all-comers, which some feel hasn't been traditionally true for some religious groups. And for disciples of the Church of the Sunday Long Run, meeting up with a group of fellow endurance athletes on a regular basis provides the grounding, the discipline, and the community they need to thrive.
Nevertheless, it seems there's something innately human about feeling awed or reverential when you're intensely focused on a particularly task - whether that's prayer or reaching the finish line. That state of flow can lead you to feel as though you're connected to the universe and operating on a higher plane, fully integrated with your own sense of purpose.
But is this the definition of God?
Perhaps for some. But Davis says for those who don't have an organized, Western religious background or a developed sense of spiritual life, "to explain it without the 'God' language, there's two countervailing movements that I feel when I'm swimming. One is self-transcendence and the other is humility."
By self-transcendence, he means "the experience feels somehow bigger than I am in my everyday life. The experience feels more capacious, bigger, more wonderous than the everyday stuff of our lives."
Concurrently, he says, it's "profoundly humbling, which is kind of the opposite experience. As soon as you feel like you're part of this bigger thing, you also recognize the smallness of yourself vis-à-vis that bigger thing. It's this paradoxical experience of feeling bigger than I am in my everyday life and recognizing how small I am."
I certainly understand what Davis is saying as I think back to when I spied that meteorite zipping along, light years above Lake Memphremagog more than a decade ago. The smear of stars surrounding it and the indigo sky that spanned 180 degrees of vision above the waterline humbled me, reinforcing just how tiny I was in that vast lake. I laughed out loud at the absurdity of my hubristic efforts to reach the far shore.
But continuing on felt like the full realization of my physical potential, and the only thing I was designed to do throughout that long moment stretching from dusk to dawn and beyond.
It was an intensely somatic experience, but also one in which I was able to bathe briefly in the light of the Divine - whomever and whatever that might be - lying just beyond the edge of our current understanding.