Sabrina Little | Run in Such A Way

Little:

When you’re sitting in your chair and you’re like, oh yeah, just continuing what you’re already doing, and you’re sitting and you’re comfortable, that sounds super easy. But perseverance is one of the hardest things you can learn to do, like staying in place for something hard. But in cross country you feel the difficulty in your legs and in your lungs, and when you are persevering, you want to do anything else. You just want to quit. You just want to do literally anything else. And so one thing that’s really valuable about sports is that it acquaints you with the difficulty of the virtue.

I am Sabrina Little. I’m an assistant professor in the Chase Center at The Ohio State University, and I’m also a trail and ultra runner.

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump.

As an ultra-distance runner Sabrina Little has won multiple national titles and a couple of times held the American record for the farthest distance run in 24 hours. But records and medals aren’t what ultimately drive her to run. For Sabrina, running isn’t just about performance — it’s about formation. The discipline, strain, and repetition of distance running have become a laboratory for her to think about character and what it means to live well.

Outside of competition, Sabrina is a philosopher and ethicist. In her recent book, The Examined Run: Why Good People Make Better Runners, she brings those two worlds together. In our conversation, we talk about how sports—and running in particular—can cultivate virtues like perseverance, patience, and joy. We also explore how modern science and technology are reshaping athletics, raising important ethical questions about optimization, fairness, and what counts as genuine excellence.

Sabrina was recently a speaker at the January Series, an annual lecture series at Calvin University, just down the road from BioLogos. We had the chance to sit down with her in person which was fun and inspiring. It might even make you want to go out for a run. 

Let’s get to the conversation. 

Stump:

Well, Sabrina Little, welcome to the podcast.

Little:

Thank you so much for having me.

Stump:

So we are recording this at the end of January in Grand Rapids, not the greatest weather for these last few days, but you’re speaking at Calvin University’s January series. And each year we at BioLogos take a look at that speaker list and decide whether we’d like to try to interview any of them. And a few months ago, Colin sent me this list with bios and I’ll confess I didn’t know your name then, but after reading your bio and seeing that you’re a philosopher and a long distance runner, I immediately said, “Go get her. I want to talk to her.” So before we get to the philosopher and runner identities though, you have other identities. Give us a little autobiography. Where’d you grow up? What was your family like?

Little:

Yeah, so I’m from Northern New Jersey. I am a middle child. And Northern New Jersey is, when I say that, people think of an industrial landscape or something like that.

Stump:

And mobsters.

Little:

Yeah, land of petrochemicals, mobsters, I don’t know, but it’s actually the Northwest corner and it’s Appalachian. So the Appalachian Trail ran through the back of my high school and my parents were big into outdoor things, so we did a lot of hiking and running and that was really formative for me. Yeah. So I ran, I played soccer, basketball, did cross-country, swimming, just kind of ran the gamut athletically and really kind of found my place in distance running and it sort of took off midway through college. I guess the most central thing about me is that I’m a Christian. I was raised in a Christian home and was really discipled or mentored by my mother in my faith. And yeah, I mean, hopefully everything I do testifies to the love that I have for God, and also it orders my days. So spending time in the Word is something that I’ve really treasured and prioritized throughout my life.

Stump:

And then how about philosophy? How did that become your vocation?

Little:

Yeah, actually it came through faith too. In high school, I just had a lot of questions about faith and my mom kept me supplied with a lot of apologetics, and I remember I read John Lennox’s, God’s Undertaker. It’s about science and faith, and I was reading a lot of things in that arena. I didn’t know them as philosophy. So when I went to college, I ended up just sort of falling into a philosophy class for a general education requirement and I loved it. I love participating in a tradition of inquiry and asking these deep human questions and I found the just Catholic intellectual tradition. So I started reading Augustine and Aquinas and doing theistic ethics more seriously, and I’ve been doing it ever since.

Stump:

Nice. So we are BioLogos, which means I’m contractually obligated to ask you about science. Is there anything in your background, either positive or negative interactions with science that were significant or noteworthy?

Little:

Yeah. Well, I do remember in college, just my first year bio, a professor was, like he made some comment to the effect that like, “If you believed that God had any sort of hand in the formation of the world, that it was just a silly position, that no one held that anymore.” And—

Stump:

Where’d you go to college, by the way?

Little:

Well, I went to the College of William & Mary.

Stump:

All right. It’s a little surprising, isn’t it?

Little:

Yeah. Yeah, I mean it was just kind of like an offhanded remark, but considering I was getting that from science and I also had someone who was effectively an elder in the church that I went to growing up saying, “Well, philosophy, academia is, it’s basically for heathens and you shouldn’t be asking those questions. You should accept things.” So I was getting it from both sides and it kind of made me uneasy. And the only thing that really kept me grounded, well, I guess two things. One was that my mom was similarly inquisitive and I didn’t question the testimony, her own testimony. I knew she loved God and I knew she had questions.

And then also seeing, like reading Augustine and seeing his questions or Aquinas kind of systematically walking through things. Clearly these things are not opposed to reason and it would be odd if God had a hand in creating humans and also he gave us brains that we’re not supposed to use. It didn’t make sense to me. But yeah, I did feel a little bit uneasy about it in those early days just because I wasn’t being encouraged to ask questions apart from what my mom gave me.

Stump:

I might come back to asking a little about science and training for running here in a little bit, but let’s get into the running part. And part of what we’re going to talk about is running in virtues, and we’ll start maybe with me pushing you a little out of the comfort zone of the virtue of humility and ask you to talk a little about your running career because it’s really fascinating. And you’ve had some US titles and even some world records. Tell us a little bit about your running career, how you got into it and what kinds of things you’ve accomplished in it.

Little:

Yeah, so I played a lot of sports growing up, but the one through line was that I was competent at distance running. And I mean, my soccer coach told me, “You’re not making this team because you’re a finesse player. You’re not great with the ball, but you can outrun anyone out there.” So I mean, it gave me a chip on my shoulder, but also it directed me to spend more time investing in distance running. I went to the College of William & Mary, which again, amazing experience. I’m so glad I went there. Had amazing friends and professors and I discovered philosophy, but I went there also to run cross country and track and field. And after my freshman year of college, my mom actually, she’s I mean all through this conversation, but she was in remission from cancer. So I ran 100 miles as a fundraiser for the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition. And it was just what my brother calls a harebrained scheme. 

I just mapped 100 miles through my town. I was curious about whether I could do it and the next day, so after I did it, it was in the newspaper and people were saying this was one of the top five times in the country this year for the 100-mile distance. And I just thought, other people do this? I had no idea that it was a sport or that there were other people invested in it. So that fall I went back to the cross country team, but I sort of, like my curiosity was piqued at that point and being in Virginia, I don’t know if many people know this, but it’s a very active trail in Ultra scene. A lot of very old school races are there, races that have been on the scene for decades, and I just started to dabble a little bit.

So I would pop out and do 100 miler or pop out and do a 50 miler and then tell myself, oh, I’m going back to the team. But I just was really enjoying the experience, like running 100 miles, it doesn’t fit neatly in your imagination. You don’t know if you can do it. There are a lot of variables and you’re just out in nature, which I really enjoyed. So I found something that I really enjoyed. I found something that sponsors were starting to reach out, and so I went professional and I continued doing that. And I did run professionally for I guess seven years on a full contract. I mean, it’s sort of like being a professional trail and Ultra runner. It’s like being, you’re a starving artist of the athletic world. It’s not like a really vibrant sponsorship scene.

Stump:

I didn’t see you on any Gatorade commercials or anything.

Little:

No, no. Yeah. And I mean that’s changing a little bit. It’s rising in visibility, but at the time it was more modest contracts and so I just kind of did it alongside of my academic career and it was effectively a jobby, right, like a hobby job that I was grateful to be compensated for. And I was grateful that companies were investing in me, but I always saw it as the fun thing that I did on the side

Stump:

And a couple of national titles in what?

Little:

Yeah, so five national titles. I’m trying to think. So one was the 24 hour, three of them were the 100-mile trail, and then one was the 50-mile trail. I qualified for five US teams. I won a silver medal in the 24 hour and I broke two American records, so 200 kilometers and then also the 24-hour run. So it’s been kind of a wild ride. It still seems like, again, the second identity that I just forget on a daily basis that it even happened. But yeah, running has taken me a lot of really fun places and I do think of it as kind of one of my vocations.

Stump:

So everybody I’ve talked to about interviewing you and saying that you held the American record in the 24-hour race, right? Said, what is that? What is that like? So what is that? A 24-hour race, what time does it start and you just run for 24 hours and see how far you get?

Little:

Yes, exactly. Yeah, so it’s conceptually simple. Right. You have 24 hours and you can fill it up with as much running as you possibly can. So you try to get as far as you can, but difficult in execution because then you are running for 24 hours and you’re just there with yourself and your thoughts.

Stump:

What time of day does it start?

Little:

Yeah, so I mean it’ll depend on the race and some of them are longer courses on mixed trail and some of them are just on a track, right, running in circles and whenever it starts is when it finishes. So it could start at nine and then it would go to nine the next day. And I really like repetition. I like kind of physically committing to a task and then I just get a lot of thinking done.

So I remember it being really productive when I was working on my dissertation because sometimes you’re just trying to plow through things that are difficult for you. And just having that release of knowing that I was going to spend 24 hours away from my laptop and things would just come to me. I would figure out the way that I should present ideas. And it was just, the best way I can think to describe it is that running is intellectually catabolic. You’re breaking down things, you’re synthesizing things and putting them together. It’s a really good complement to academic work. So that’s why I like it and it’s not hard for the first 12 hours, but like it— 

Stump:

So tell us about the race where you set the record. What time of day did that one start? What was that course like?

Little:

Yeah, so that one was in the Netherlands. It was the world championships, and the course was honestly horrendous. It was cold rain the whole time, and it was a mix of pavement and brick and we were, I mean, it’s just kind of like an otherworldly experience. I remember running around this loop and there would be people, like the announcer was not in English, of course, so I had no idea what position I was in. A couple of my teammates got hypothermia because it was that cold and rainy. And I remember being so mad at my husband because he forced me to stop a second and put my raincoat on, but it probably saved my race. I was just, was like, I’m not going to slow down because every second you’re thinking I could’ve gotten a little bit further.

Stump:

Okay. So do you stop and rest at all during this 24 hours?

Little:

I mean, not if you’re trying to compete.

Stump:

Because when I did the math, it’s like what, nine minute miles? Because you made it 152 miles.

Little:

Yes.

Stump:

So do you just run that pace the whole time or do you…

Little:

So yeah, anytime you stop, go to the bathroom, the clock is still running. If you stop to grab food, if you have to put your jacket and pants on, things like that, it all eats away at your time. So it was probably eight something, eight minutes something seconds, and then yeah, just whatever stops are included.

Stump:

So you broke the American record in that race by how far? What was the previous one?

Little:

I think, so I had set it at 147 miles and change, and then one of my American teammates got it to 149 and then I got it to 152 and it’s since gotten a lot faster. And I think part of that is shoe technology. Part of it is the competitive landscape has changed a little bit, but at the time I was the first woman, American woman, to break 150. I think I was in the top seven or eight in world history at that point. So it seemed like a considerable mark, but now it’s just, everything gets better. That’s just the nature of sports.

Stump:

And do you have sights on trying to reclaim this record ever? Or what’s your professional running career going to look like from here on out?

Little:

Yeah, good question. Well, I have a five-year-old, a three-year-old, and an eight-month-old.

Stump:

Oh my.

Little:

So getting outside is a major accomplishment for me on a daily basis. I’m still running every day, but as far as leaving my husband with the kids for 24 hours like, it seems like the wrong choice at the moment. So I’d like to see how close I can get to an Olympic trials qualifier in the marathon. Just to make it to the trials I think would be a really fun challenge. And then it’s like two hours and 30 something minutes, which is not too long to be away. So that seems like a manageable challenge at the moment. Maybe in a few years I would like to return and try a 100 kilometer race. I think I have unfinished business in that event, but for now it’s all family and all hands on deck.

Stump:

Wow, very good. I could keep asking about this sort of thing for a while, but we should talk about some other things, namely, you’ve written this book about running and philosophy that I want to work up to a little bit. Let’s start with some other pairs besides running and philosophy. I’m curious how you’d respond of how these compare to each other, how they’re similar and how they’re different. And the first one I’m going to ask about is sports and religion. Are there some commonalities there between practitioners as well as, I don’t know, maybe even fans and sports and religion in terms of community? Or how do you understand these two pretty significant cultural forces in our world and how they compare?

Little:

Yeah. I think there’s a lot to say there. I think a lot of people lean into sports if they’re absent any kind of religious commitment. One of my favorite essays is, it’s Roger Federer as Religious Experience. And so it’s David Foster Wallace and he writes about the cathedral of the central court and how when Federer hits the ball, it’s like a liquid whip of the racket and all these things that are kind of gesturing at something transcendent. Right. And I think in sports we often have excellence on display and there are ways in which some kinds of excellence seem ineffable or approaching that, like by analogy, they seem transcendent. And I think that’s something that you get in sports that kind of points at something beyond it. I mean, also there’s that famous line from Nietzsche, like what new games will we invent? What sacred festivals of atonement? I’ve been to maybe one or two football games, but the way it’s kind of liturgical, like everybody stands and claps and hollers and it’s this sort of corporate almost worship experience.

And there, I mean, I don’t want to speak ill of other sports because I’m a distance runner obviously, but sometimes in those big fame industrial complex sports there are like God-like pretensions, the way they dance around and act like a demigod or something like that. I think there’s a lot of hero worship that happens in sports. So these kinds of comparisons I think are apt. There’s this sort of, like watching sports, it’s semiotic of something beyond it, right? We’re clearly crafted in such a way that we’re worshipful and we’re going to worship in different arenas, and I think sports is definitely one of them.

Stump:

For people who are themselves Christians, are there competing allegiances ever for those who are also either in sport or fanatics of sport? Do those kinds of allegiances, sort of rituals that you talk about there and the feeling of community and even the anticipation of something transcendent. Can those compete with each other you think?

Little:

Well, I think that they can, right? And it’s the kind of, like so Tim Keller talks about making good things into ultimate things. I think that there’s a kind of way you can occupy sports as a fan with integrity in a way that doesn’t consume you. Right. There’s actually a really interesting literature on fandom at the moment and ways in which being a fan can be morally productive and one way in which that’s the case is you invest in something over which you have minimal control. And a lot of our loves are like that. Right. I love my children so much and I’m so invested in them and they go to school on a regular basis and I have no idea what they’re doing. And being a fan can be like that. I’m cheering for, I guess, so now I’m at Ohio State, so I have to be a Buckeye, it’s kind of the law and I could cheer or something and they’re going to be the ones on the field performing.

And so it’s a kind of practice of love, right, for things that really matter. You just have to remember this is not the ultimate thing. So yeah, I mean, being a fan, what do you get? You can admire people. You can see excellence on display. Hopefully you can look at the excellences and put them on yourself. Right. So maybe this athlete is so courageous. Well, I don’t have any linemen running at me. However, I can be courageous in my own context, like to be an imitator of the good thing that I see in others. I think that’s morally productive fandom. But yeah, I mean a lot of people do use fandom as this sort of desperate escapism or this thing that they’re inclined to worship. It kind of turns their attention in ways that are not productive, but I do think you can do it well.

Stump:

Okay. How about instead of sport and religion, how about sport and science? So you made some allusions to that and different individuals may practice this differently. You said you yourself are more on the art side of at least calorie consumption during the Ultra runs, but what’s the science of sport these days and how has that changed and developed in the last generation or something?

Little:

Yeah. I mean sometimes, right, I remember logging into Twitter or X or whatever it’s called, and I saw something, two tweets in a row. One said, “You need to be eating eggs. This is what you need to have in order to support your performance.” And then the next tweet was like, “Eggs are so bad. Do not eat eggs.” And so sometimes I think we can make these strong empirical claims, but a lot of the science, particularly when it comes to nutrition, is still very much in formation. So I kind of take it with a grain of salt. There are all these, I’ve been in the sport long enough to see certain trends come and go. And so a few years ago it was high fat, low-carb, like all the athletes were saying, I’m training my fat adaptation, and now it’s the high carb revolution. And so these things kind of go in cycles.

And so as far as it touches on performance, sometimes I keep it at a little bit of distance or I kind of trust my intuitions with respect to how I personally am going to act. But that said, sports are very much, especially at the highest levels, it’s 1% of difference in your performance is all the difference. Right. If you’re running the 800 meters for women, that’s one minute and 55 seconds is going to get you on the podium at a world championships, and if you are finishing 155.5, you’re not on the podium.

So I can see why there’s this focus on optimization and trying to maximize your potential and doing things like measuring your heart rate, wearing this pair of shoes versus this pair of shoes. It’s kind of an imperative of the job of athlete to take those things seriously. So I don’t know, I feel like I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth. There’s embracing the science but then also knowing that a lot of like, even over the past 10 years, we have seen dramatic shifts in some of the prescriptions that are given, and I think it’s important to be mindful of those changes.

Stump:

So I’m curious, with all the data that’s being collected now, and I’m wearing my Forerunner and as a very, very recreational runner, I sometimes worry that all the data that’s being collected and that I look at is somehow taking away from the enjoyment of running. If when I’m out for a jog and I’m so focused on, oh, I have to stay in zone two heart rate training for this next, as opposed to what you’re saying, you go out and you run and you think about stuff. Does the data, the science of that sometimes go in tension with the enjoyment of running for you?

Little:

Oh yeah, absolutely. And I think you can kind of drive yourself crazy. If you look at micro differences, for example, in terms of your heart rate variability, you will just drive yourself insane. These things, like looking at them in terms of long-term patterns and noticing shifts, like that is productive, but thinking about it on a daily basis, I think you can fix your attention on them in ways that are not valuable. Also, I’ve started to just work on the proposal for my next book and just kind of formulate what I’m thinking about. And one of the things I want to address is this kind of optimization culture that we have in sport and the ways in which it can compete with your virtue. So for example, when my attention is fixed on my step counts or my quality of sleep or things like that, I mean, there are nights that I am not sleeping.

Stump:

Eight-month-olds don’t tend to help that.

Little:

Yeah. My eight-month-old is really compromising my optimization at the moment, but that’s what virtue requires, right? So or compassion, right? We know that people who are caregivers are bearing that physically in ways that can compromise their longevity and things like that. And so if I’m thinking in terms of my internal age or my longevity score, well a good life and an optimized life are not necessarily the same thing, right, and we have limited habits of attention. And so if they’re dictated by whatever your step count is or your heart rate variability or things like that, I mean you can do that in ways that have cost for your character or for a good life.

Stump:

One more question related to science of things, and we’ll use this to start pushing toward your academic expertise of ethics more. Related to technology and running in particular. The big question lately has been shoe technology and is this fair? So describe a little bit the change that these carbon, what are they even called? Carbon-

Little:

Yeah, carbon plated shoes.

Stump:

Carbon plated shoes, the advantage that they give and how you think about that then as an ethicist of what’s too much. I mean, because certainly there’s a continuum. Just having decent running shoes is going to help you more than running in flip-flops, right? But where’s the line? How do you think about that as an ethicist?

Little:

Yeah, it’s a really hard question. The thing that I come back to is always, so first of all, the carbon plated shoes, yeah. So what do they do? They improve your performance. Reportedly some get four or 5% improvement over a certain distance, and that is so considerable. And so what’s happened since the earliest versions were released by Nike just prior to the 2016 Olympics is that we’ve seen world records fall in basically every running discipline, and yeah, you have to draw lines at certain points about how much improvement is okay. Because if you look at, I mean, a lot of things have improved over the course of human running history, right? So people used to run on dirt tracks and now they run on this synthetic material that makes them faster. And we have more advanced supplements and nutrition and training methods and so forth.

And so technology is kind of interwoven into the fabric of athletics. It’s just going to happen. However, the thing that I keep coming back to with the shoes is there’s this one consideration in terms of whether you count as having doped or not in the sport, and it is spirit of sport. So if you get busted for doping, you’ve done two of these three things. Either your performance is enhanced, two is your health is compromised, three is you violate the spirit of sport. So those are the three, and then if you meet two of them, then that means it’s a banned thing. What is spirit of sport? It’s like dignity of human excellence on display, this sort of kindergarten spirit of athletics where you imagine children playing at recess, the heart of the activity. And I think that the issues should be banned on those grounds, that the spirit of the sport is definitely compromised because now you have to have… It’s not just everyone entering the sport and seeing how fast people can go.

The shoe tech is playing a considerable role in who is able to perform at the highest level, who is winning these races. And I worry about that. Right. Because it becomes something that is an element of privilege. We also know that the shoe tech affects athletes differently, and so some people are high responders and some people are low responders. And so it’s a bummer if you’re born and you’re not a high responder, it just means the rest of your athletic career is going to be compromised by wearing these shoes. So yeah, my concerns are performance enhancing for sure. Two, violating the spirit of sport, but at this point I don’t think we’re going to, it’s like you can’t put it back in its box. It’s like out there in the world. And so just doing the best to navigate a new landscape in which this technology is mediating all of our performances in ways that is not necessarily fair.

Stump:

I resonate with that concern about the privilege that comes with having access to certain of these, but isn’t that a continuum already that’s difficult to draw lines between of the people who are able to have coaches and go to good programs? And it’s not just we’re taking the entire populace and saying, let’s see who can run the fastest between here and there.

Little:

Yeah. And that is, I think the strongest argument that’s often given to me when I gripe about super shoes. Right. It’s like, well, there are other forms of privileges here. However, unless you want to stand on the starting line next to someone wearing rollerblades, there has to be a line drawn somewhere, right?

Stump:

Yeah.

Little:

So we just have to figure out where in that gray area we’re cutting things off and then not allow someone to transgress past that point. So how much will we allow the shoes to dictate the races? We have to draw a line somewhere.

Stump:

Let’s finally get to the topic of the day, which is this book that you’ve written, The Examined Run: Why Good People Make Better Runners. What’s the origin story of this book? I’m curious if it was difficult to persuade Oxford University Press to do a book on running and virtue.

Little:

No, I mean, Oxford University Press has been wonderful and they actually, so Peter Olin was my editor and he’s done a number of projects on virtue. So it was kind of continuous with the kinds of work that he was doing. So initially I was very resistant to bringing philosophy, my one vocation to bear on running, my other vocation. I just liked my two spheres to be distinct. In fact, on the first day of graduate school, one of my professors said, “You need to talk to this professor over here. He does philosophy of sport.” And I was like, “Well, okay, but I don’t.” I just wanted to do traditional questions and ethics, and I’m glad that I built my competency in the world of virtue theory and character development on its own before integrating, but it’s been really fruitful to think about my running in terms of the resources that I have philosophically and honestly, probably the best thing that I ever did as a philosopher was become a runner because running gave me a kind of vantage or access to what it means to become excellent. Right.

My work was in virtue development and every day in running I would put my sneakers on and I would try to become more excellent myself. And having that kind of perspective and access to the particulars of what it looks like to try to strain toward being better, I think gave me a lot of insight for my philosophical work. So a number of years ago, actually at the 2018 Trail World Championships, I remember the editor of this online platform for endurance running, irunfar.com. She asked if I wanted to be a contributing writer, and I kind of wavered on it a little bit, but decided to do it. And I used that platform to talk about my work in virtues as connected to running. And so the more I disciplined myself to think in those terms, the more I saw kind of a fruitful conversation between those two things. And ultimately, an editor actually from a different press reached out and asked me to submit a book proposal. I did that. It wasn’t a great fit actually for that press, so I took it to Oxford and a couple months later I had a contract.

Stump:

So it’s obvious why you wrote this intersection, this conjunction of running and ethics, but I wonder if you can give a defense in particular of why running lends itself to thinking about these questions, to developing virtue maybe even as compared to, I mean, we know you’re not unbiased in this, but compared to soccer or pickleball or any other sport, is running in particular something that lends itself to virtue?

Little:

Yeah, good question. Yeah, I think that a lot of things, a lot of the kinds of traits and habits of mind that make someone excel as a distance runner are also constitutive features of a good life. Right. So perseverance and patience, right, having a kind of emotional self-control, like being able to down-regulate heightened emotions. These are all things that help you to live a flourishing life outside of sport. And it just so happens that they are reinforced in the activity of distance running. I mean, the reason why I chose distance running is It’s what I know, it’s what I’ve done every day. It’s the world that I see out from. And so it probably wouldn’t have been fair if I had written about ice skating or something like that. I wouldn’t have had the same kind of practice space insight or community to draw on experiences and so forth.

So yeah, it’s a both and. I think athletics in general has a good kinship with virtue development because you’re practicing with intention becoming better in certain respects. You’re trying to stay in place, you are trying to deal with your anger or frustrations in ways that are productive, and that’s what the moral life is all about.

Stump:

Reflect a little bit on something you brought up earlier about some of the sports that tend to produce God-like characters and that connection to virtue that we might question while at the same time holding onto the fact that those are the rare exceptions of people who are involved in sport that rise to that level of popularity and maybe have very different sorts of pressures against their own virtue development. For example, often during the NCAA basketball tournament, there’s a commercial of all these college athletes that’s something like, and less than 1% of us will go on to earn a living in sport or something. That much more of it is that sort of nameless, faceless, we enjoy the sport, we work at it, we try hard. Is there a difference in that kind of atmosphere of virtue producing versus the ones that become these world-famous almost God-like figures?

Little:

Yeah, I definitely think that’s an important distinction. Right. So prior to and during my time in graduate school, I was coaching cross country and track at this small classical school where virtue education was curricular and it was part of athletics. And I acquired such an admiration and gratitude for the football coaches there, for the basketball coaches there, for the soccer coach there because I saw them doing really productive work in character development with their athletes. I think if you are, I mean, there are all sorts of opportunities in team sports for virtue formation that are not available for running. If you think about the opportunity to admire fellow competitors and or teammates even and be grateful for them when you’re sitting on the bench, right, like that’s not something, in cross country we’re all running, but there’s the being benched part of the equation in team sports or the collaboration, things like that that you get in team sports that are just not part of an individual venture such as distance running.

So yeah, I think that all sports can be a really productive formative space. I mean we can speak in more fine-grained terms about in some sports you may trained to respond in anger and there are questions to ask about that. If you’re playing hockey for example, there’s a lot of hitting that goes on. I think we should ask some questions about that. But in broad strokes, I think a lot of sports can be productively used for virtue formation. At the highest levels of sports, I mean, so when I think about virtue development in the context of sports, I’m thinking about the internal goods of the activity.

So if you want to excel as a runner or if you want to excel as a football player or soccer player or something like that, these are the kinds of qualities that lend themselves to that performance. Whereas when you get to the highest levels of sports, there are all kinds of perverse incentives outside of the sport, or not even necessarily perverse, but like money. Right. So there are financial incentives. There are also, there’s I mean vainglory, right, like wanting to be more marketable. So drawing attention to yourself and those kinds of goods that are external to the sport, I think can twist, like they can cause some of the undoing of the good character building things that can happen in the context of sport.

Stump:

In your book, you didn’t really try to hide the fact that you’re a Christian, a person of faith, but neither was that really what that book was about. And I wonder if you’ve thought at all of the relationship between these, this sport and virtue development and Christian faith and in particular as a high school runner, I was always drawn to this passage in First Corinthians nine where Paul talks about runners. And in the games, everyone who competes goes into strict training and they do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. And I’ve always thought of that strict training that he seems to be applying to the Christian life itself. And how do you think about the relationship between the Christian life and virtue development? Are those the same thing or do you see some differences there in what Paul might be talking about even?

Little:

Yeah, good question. So I am really a Thomist at heart and he talks about two kinds of virtues. He talks about infused virtues, so we know them as the theological virtues, faith, hope, and love, and those are gifted to you. And then there’s this second set of virtues which are just the cardinal virtues and these are virtues that, I mean you can kind of actively work out and they’re open to anyone, even people who are not Christian believers and it’s part of just this sort of natural province that you can work on your character in these ways that make you more excellent. But when you have faith, hope, and love, they kind of transform the character of the other virtues. An example of this is like as a believer, right, if you have faith in God, your courage, like you’re going to rise to the right kinds of risks, right? Instead of just rising to whatever risks. Right.

And so there’s a way in which the infused virtues becoming a Christian kind of transforms the rest of the character. As a Christian, we have two things that seem like on the surface to be intention, but I’ll explain why they’re not. And one is your salvation is gifted to you, your righteousness is made complete, and also you’re supposed to kind of, like sanctification is a process that you’re supposed to participate in. You’re not just supposed to passively accept grace and then do nothing about it. And the way that I think about, like it seems a tension, but I think it’s not. When I think about it in terms of marriage. Right. So I married my husband. It was something that happened in a day. I had a status change, right, like this immediate status change and also for the rest of my life I’m working out that relationship and figuring out what it means to be David’s wife, right? And I’m hopefully doing the daily work of being better at that kind of task.

When I was writing this book, I mean, yeah, so it’s not explicitly Christian, but some of the virtues that I describe, so for example, I talk about joy as a performance enhancing virtue. I think it’s something that can improve you athletically and Thomas Aquinas describes joy as a consequence of love, right? It is something that is a sort of internal tether to your good purpose and it makes you have this kind of despair resistance. Well, when Thomas Aquinas describes joy as a consequence of love, it’s not like love of anything, it’s love of God. Right. It is something that is rooted in your love of God. And so this kind of buoyancy is afforded to the Christian and so, right, so there are ways of describing these virtues in a way that makes them more solid based on their original context and their original contexts in the context of Christianity.

Another one actually is, so I talk about humor and it’s not just like haha, telling funny jokes, it’s the kind of humor that Kierkegaard describes and Kierkegaard describes this sort of blithe humility and he says things like no one can laugh like a saint. Why is that? Because you are disemburdened from having to save yourself, right? You know that this work has already been done for you. And so you can face your infelicities, your incongruities, inconsistencies and meet it with a kind of lightness and then go and improve because you are grounded in the fact that you are already saved. And again, there are things maybe that to a different degree can do this for you, like being rooted in a strong community such that you know that your family’s going to love you no matter what or being rooted in maybe a desire or curiosity for improvement or something like that. But the more solid version is the version that comes from the Christian picture.

Stump:

Talk a little bit more then about the relationship of virtue, virtue development and bodily practices. I think sometimes as Christians we get tempted into thinking of minds or souls that float off and are separate from our physical embodiment and I don’t think that’s what Paul was getting at here for sure, but also just the connection of my body to the development of virtue.

Little:

Yeah, good question. So when I taught at the classical school, I already said virtue education was curricular, so it was something that we did in the classroom. We had virtue education moments and then we had the athletic side. And in virtue education what we did was we would talk about the virtues, we would define them for them, we would do stories and things like that, but basically they would learn things like prudence is right thinking plus action or temperance is not too much, not too little, just enough of things we love, things like that. And that provided a grammar, right, like a moral grammar. So you can see the world in ways that if you don’t have these words, it’s kind of like in history class when you learn new vocab words and you start to see the world in a new way. Right. It kind of gives you spectacles.

However, when I would teach virtue education, it was very clear to me just sitting in the classroom how easy the virtue sounded. An example is perseverance is persisting long in some good, it’s basically remaining in place or continuing to do what you’re already doing. And when you’re sitting in your chair and you’re like, oh yeah, just continuing what you’re already doing and you’re sitting and you’re comfortable, like that sounds super easy. But perseverance is one of the hardest things you can learn to do, like staying in place for something hard. But in cross-country you feel the difficulty in your legs and in your lungs. And when you are persevering, you want to do anything else, you just want to quit. You just want to do literally anything else.

And so one thing that’s really valuable about sports is that it acquaints you with the difficulty of the virtue and you can also see the sort of character gap between yourself and that excellence. Right. If you try to run for very long and you’ve not been practicing, you’ve got to stop and you see immediately this kind of gap between yourself and the excellence. So that’s why I think sports can be really valuable in character formation because it acquaints you with the difficulty and it shows you that hey, you tried to be excellent and you’re not.

Stump:

Let me push just a little further on this then into virtues and brains. Very embodied part of us, right? So, and introduce it this way. In the world of athletics, results are a function of at least two different things. There’s the training and discipline that you put in, but at least at the elite level, there’s also just some raw genetic ability, right? No matter how hard I train, I’m not going to become an NBA player and I’m guessing you wouldn’t become an elite high jumper at the Olympic level, right?

So it can be inspiring I think sometimes to see somebody who doesn’t have a lot of natural talent train really hard and do respectably and it can probably be frustrating to see someone with loads of natural talent who doesn’t train and wastes their talent, but that elite level with few exceptions, you’re going to find people who have a lot of natural talent and they work to get the most out of it. I’m curious what you think about virtue in that regard. Do some people have more natural talent for being virtuous? And so I asked this about brains, is there some genetic component of how predisposed I am to being courageous or how predisposed I am to having perseverance such that it might be easier for some people to develop virtues than other people?

Little:

Yeah, that’s such a good question and I have been thinking about this a lot in terms of like, so I’m raising my children right now and trying to help them love the good. Right. I’m trying to help them love God. I’m trying to disciple them. I’m trying to help them grow in virtue and I mean there are just some children who are, they struggle with tantrums more, like have kind of outsized anger versus others. It’s very, they’re more temperate in terms of their emotional dispositions. I think we all just kind of have a different set of dispositions and there are going to be certain things that are a little bit easier and certain things that are a little bit harder. I think that we all have just little weaknesses in certain respects.

Yeah, I mean when you’re looking at sports, I think I’ve been thinking about this in terms of perseverance for example, because I mean there are embodied features of these virtues, right? So as you said, you can be less physically adept in terms of persisting long versus some people are a lot better. There are also gendered issues there, like women just, there are limitations in what they’re capable of doing versus men. It doesn’t mean that they are less perseverant and there’s also aging, right? And so it could be the case that someone is truly excellent in terms of their perseverance and it is not going to show up physically. Right. So I think you kind of have to separate off the habits, the dispositions from what the physical outcome actually is.

Stump:

Am I pushing this comparison with athletics though too far? If I also observe, and I guess I’m wondering, because it sounds like you might be saying, well, different people will have different inclinations toward different virtues, right, but if I’m using the athletic metaphor, there are some people who are never going to be an elite athlete in anything. Right. And so even if I might be more inclined toward perseverance than I am toward love or something, are there some people who just aren’t good at virtue at all the way we might say there are some people who are just not athletic at all?

Little:

So I wouldn’t say that.

Stump:

Good.

Little:

Yeah. So for character, it’s like character is open to all of us, right, in a way that athletics is not. Right. I am five, four. I will never be LeBron James. That door is closed versus I can work on my patience. That’s not something that is beyond me. It’s not something that’s not open to me.

We all have room to improve with respect to our character and it’s kind of like, so this process of trying to become better in certain respects, maybe some of which are particularly hard for you. Patience for me is my Achilles heel. I just have a hard time waiting for things I like to do, right, and so I’m working on that in the same way in which like in the Bible we get this picture of you’re given the law such that you can see that you fall short. Once you try to become excellent, right, this kind of working out your salvation and participating in your sanctification. When you’re setting these standards and you’re looking at what excellence actually is, you realize how much you fall short. And it could be in one area of life or another or all of them, right, because we’re not. We’re not excellent.

Stump:

Good. Okay. Last topic, suffering. I really like your discussion of suffering in the text and we philosophers like to talk about the problem of evil and why there’s pain in the world, that sort of thing. But your discussion, you say the difficulty of a task is part of what makes the outcome worthwhile to us, but not all difficulty or all pain and suffering is equal, right? Talk a little bit about the kinds of pain and suffering we might experience and why some of that could be a good, could lead us toward a good and why others, maybe not.

Little:

Yeah. It seems like in at least the digital world of athletics, we sometimes speak of suffering as though it’s all one thing and it’s all good, right? Do hard things, suffer. Yeah. And some of our suffering is the result of our own imprudence, right? So if you have not been training and then you just lift up the heaviest weights, well you’re probably going to pull something and it’s not like, oh wow, good job. Or you’re trying to undertake some sort of athletic, like a really long race and you’ve not trained well for that. Yeah, you’re probably going to suffer and that’s imprudence. And that’s not the kind of fruitful suffering. I mean, interestingly, when you look at virtue formation, virtues are developed in the context of strain.

So for example, patience, the virtue that I said I’m bad at, especially bad at or I should say, you have to wait and waiting is uncomfortable or resilience. No one wants to have to become resilient. It means a lot of things have gone wrong for you if you have to be resilient or justice. If you’re trying to become more just, it means that you’re reckoning with things that aren’t fair or systems that are broken. All of these virtues are developed in the context of strain and you’re trying to respond in a way that is fitting, like with your emotions and your thoughts and your actions, you’re trying to respond well.

And so that kind of suffering, that’s internal to character development. That’s the kind of fruitful suffering I’m talking about. But I do think we need to become better about distinguishing, well like, say you’re on a run or something and you’re suffering well, is it pain, right? Then maybe retreat from that. Is this suffering the kind that’s going to edify me or is it something that’s undoing me? When I’m working hard in training and I push hard, is this the kind of strain that I can absorb or is it going to cross some sort of limit? So I just think we don’t really talk about those things, those very well. There’s also suffering that just happens to us versus suffering that we choose. There’s a lot of bravado around choosing suffering in our culture, but not all suffering is like that. A lot of it just happens to us.

Stump:

I laughed a little bit in your book when you were talking about being a coach and the student athletes wanting to choose slogans for their t-shirts that you didn’t particularly like the no pain, no gain kind of slogan or how about the commentary sometime of people who say in a race like this, whoever can suffer the most is going to be the one who wins.

Little:

Yeah.

Stump:

I mean, is that healthy? Is it good? Is it good?

Little:

Yeah, I mean that’s the question we should be asking. Is it good? Yeah, you need to be able to distinguish. And I don’t like, well, I don’t like that those slogans for a couple of reasons. One, it makes it really inhospitable to people, like trying to convince them that they should become runners when it says no pain, no gain and pain is weakness leaving the body. Right. That’s not a very hospitable stance. Also, there’s a lot of pride involved. Yeah. So there are a number of things wrong with those.

Stump:

But just in conclusion here, draw the connection there. Is it too far to say that training, the kind of pain that you willingly subject yourself to in training and that you learn to endure is directly transferable to my being able to bear up under other kinds of suffering, the bad kinds that do just happen to us?

Little:

Yeah, well, I think that there is a kind of practice there. Oftentimes in long races I want to quit and just having practice to stay in place and to commit to an arduous good and to see it through to completion, I think that gives you kind of maybe a reliable disposition to do the same or maybe just confidence that you can when you’re in situations that are similarly structured. So relationships that are hard or papers that you’re writing that you just want to go do something else. Having the practice of staying through that, difficult conversations, not running, right, like just staying in place, I think it equips you to be able to do that better.

Stump:

Well, thanks for talking to us. Would everybody be happier if they ran?

Little:

I’m biased. Just find the thing that you love, but yeah, running can’t hurt.

Stump:

All right. Well, I’m thankful for the conversation here today and for your wise words and…

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