Welcome back to Breakfast Club, a newsletter about life in motion.
I’m delighted to introduce a monthly mini-series of short interviews with writers from around the sport of running.
Interviews consist of just 5 questions.
We’ll feature a scribbler or wordsmith to learn about their work as it relates to running.
We’ll highlight different types of writing, from journalism, to copywriting, to longer-form essays and scholarship.
Our first featured writer is Dr. Sabrina Little, Assistant Professor in the department of Leadership and American Studies at Christopher Newport University.
Sabrina received her Ph.D. in Philosophy at Baylor, after an M.A. at Yale Divinity School and a B.A. at William and Mary.
Sabrina also writes a column for iRunFar, The Examined Run, about character education and ethics in the context of trail and ultrarunning. Enjoy this interview, a 7-minute read.
1. First, tell us how you came to study ethics and philosophy. What led you to pursue the philosophy of sports as a research interest?
In high school, I read some philosophy (Plato, Machiavelli, Locke), but I first encountered philosophy as a discipline in college. I loved it right away. It suited my competencies; I am analytical and left-brained but really enjoy reading and writing.
In philosophy courses, I felt like I was part of a tradition of inquiry—asking big questions that people had been asking for thousands of years. That seemed really cool to me. I could be thinking about justice in conversation with someone from 375 BCE.
I was particularly taken by ethics—and especially virtue ethics. In virtue ethics, we inquire about human nature, the excellences (virtues) and deficiencies (vices) of persons, what makes a life a good one, agency, the emotions, the nature of suffering, and material preconditions of a happy life.
I find that these ideas have a natural kinship with running.
First, virtues are acquired by deliberate practice, and athletics is a domain in which we set out every day and ‘practice’ or aim to improve. In athletic practice, it is easy to take on-board virtue development as a goal alongside physical development, by paying attention to your habits of attention, how you are disposed to act, feel, and so forth.
Virtue ethics also raises abiding questions about flourishing and suffering that I have been both chastised by, and found solace in, during my time as a runner. It has helped me to understand the difference between productive and unproductive forms of pain, and between ordinary suffering and disorder. It also taught me to inquire about suffering’s impact on my existence in more global terms—considering the entirety of my life—rather than only now, in this limited time when I am still competing at a semi-competitive level in the sport.
I love philosophy, and I love sports. But, for a long time, I did not love philosophy of sport. When I think about running too much, it becomes less enjoyable for me, so I was cautious about inviting athletics into my research. But some advice I was given by a colleague was to do philosophy that is close to home because you are more invested in it and see it more clearly. So, that is what I am doing when I write about virtue development in athletics.
2. What does it mean to study virtue ethics in relation to sports?
There are three main ways we ask questions about what we ought to do, morally speaking.
We can look at the results of our actions (consequentialism).
We can look at duties and responsibilities (deontology).
Or we can look at the kinds of people we are—character, virtue, and vice (virtue ethics). This is the work that I do in virtue ethics. I study virtues and vices—traits that contribute to, or detract from, a flourishing or happy life.
There are lots of interesting questions for a virtue ethicist in running:
How do we become excellent like the people we admire in sport?
Admiration is an emotion that inclines us to imitate the people we appreciably perceive. But imitation is not the same thing as being excellent ourselves. How do we progress from the admiration of an excellent person, to having those excellences ourselves?
Are there certain virtues that are performance-enhancing?
Virtues are constitutive features of a good life. They are not about peak performance as runners. However, there is a set of virtues—perseverance, prudence, patience, resilience, etc.—that both sustain performance and support a good life.
Are there certain vices that are performance-enhancing?
There are certain traits, such as envy, pride, and selfishness, that may make us more successful performers athletically, but which detract from a good life.
For example, pride’s greatest secret is that it is always under threat. If you are proud, you don’t want to lose or to be shown that your inflated sense of self is wrong. That means it may make an athlete a more successful performer. But it is also a vice—a trait that makes someone a bad neighbor, friend, reasoner, etc.
What is virtuous competition?
In our culture, when people ask if you are “competitive,” they often mean ‘do you have to win,’ ‘are you undone by loss,’ ‘is the way you participate in sport at odds with charity.’ Strictly speaking, these things are not competition, which just means ‘striving together.’ They are describing envy. So, one question I am pursuing is what virtuous competition, apart from envy, might look like.
There are many more! These are just some of the questions I have been writing on recently in my forthcoming Oxford University Press book, The Examined Run.
“If the body and the mind are entangled, then we need to care about how we move through the world physically.”
3. What's it like being an athlete in academia? How do you square a life of the mind with deep thinking about the concerns of the body?
This is such a great question! I used to be nervous when my professors asked me about my running because I thought it was an indictment of my scholarship—that I did not have anything interesting to say or that I was not serious about my work. Now I realize they asked me about running because it is an absurdity—to go race a 100-miler on the weekend, or something like that. Runners ask me about philosophy, and philosophers ask me about running.
Thankfully, in graduate school, I had a supportive department with a few outdoorsy professors—gardeners, yoga folks, bikers, and rock climbers. My dissertation advisor ran track at Wheaton College many decades ago. One Thomist (a philosopher of Thomas Aquinas) who was not particularly outdoorsy conceded that, with his hylomorphic metaphysical view of persons (the view that our bodies are the form of our souls), he should probably invest more time inhabiting the world in an athletic way. If the body and the mind are entangled, then we need to care about how we move through the world physically.
My professors did not think less of me for being a runner. Maybe they would if it compromised my schoolwork, but I never missed a deadline and I worked very hard in school.
The reality is, I can’t write all day or run all day. Both enrich the other. I am a terrible thinker when I try to ignore my embodiment. I need to rest, eat well, and get a run in. I see running as an asset for living a well-ordered life, and it benefits my scholarship.
4. What's your favorite workout to do before an approaching deadline?
Before a writing day, I love to do 60-75 minutes of cutdown miles. It’s just hard enough that I’m not able to think about my writing task while completing it. It’s short enough that I’m not too tired. And it has enough speed in it so that I’m firing on all cylinders.
You can tell when I’m writing a lot because I start to do this every day. I tell people not to follow my training because I am often running to write instead of running to race.
5. Finally, give us some book recommendations. What would you recommend to learn more about virtue ethics? And what's something non-academic you recently read and loved?
I tend to pick an author and read everything they write. I really like Walker Percy, Tom Wolfe, and Haruki Murakami. One of my favorite books is Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy. He has a quirky way of illuminating the human condition.
For accessible virtue theory texts, I recommend The Character Gap by Christian Miller. It is about how we actually behave, morally speaking. He looks at helping behavior, lying, and harming others, engaging psychological research. It is so good.
I also recommend The Virtues of Limits by David McPherson. And I would not be a good philosophy professor if I did not tell you to read Plato’s Republic. I have taught it about 8 times. Every time I read it, I love it more. It’s a dialogue about justice, education, city, and soul.
Sabrina Little’s book The Examined Run will be published this year from Oxford University Press. Follow her writing on iRunFar and Twitter.
Weekly run
Breakfast Club meets every Thursday for an 8-mile run:
When and Where: 6:30am at Lake Temescal in Oakland, CA
Pace: ~7:00 to 7:40 pace with a few hundred feet of climbing
Tweets of the week
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