Before anything else: what this ring is allowed to say, and what it is not. The material behind it belongs to people who are alive, and some of it is not on offer.
The source material for this series leans on running practices belonging to Indigenous nations of the Americas. That raises a problem the other rings in this library did not, and it needs settling at the front rather than in a closing note.
Three things I am not going to do.
I am not going to write about “Indigenous running traditions” as though that were one thing. There are hundreds of distinct nations in the Americas with distinct languages, histories and practices. A sentence beginning “Native Americans believed” is doing the same work as “an African proverb” — attributing something to everybody so it can be checked by nobody. Where a practice belongs to a named people, I will name them.
I am not going to describe ceremonial practice or convert it into technique. A great deal of Indigenous religious knowledge is deliberately not public, and the appropriation of Native spirituality has been objected to formally and repeatedly by the nations concerned. A non-Native writer explaining how to run as prayer is exactly the thing being objected to. Ceremonial running exists, in many nations, and that is the extent of what this series will say about it.
And I am not going to write in the past tense about people who are here. Indigenous running is not a historical curiosity. It is Billy Mills winning the 10,000 metres in Tokyo in 1964; it is Wings of America, running youth programmes across Native communities for decades; it is Jordan Marie Daniel running Boston with a red handprint across her face and the names of missing women on her arms; it is Rosalie Fish doing the same on a high-school track. Those people speak for themselves and are easy to find.
Strip out what is not mine and something plain and useful remains: effort can be held as more than instrument, and how it is held changes it.
Most modern running is instrumental all the way down. The run is for the time, the weight, the fitness, the streak, the data. None of that is bad and all of it is thin, in the sense that when the instrument stops improving, the activity has nothing left to stand on.
The alternative is not mystical. It is the observation that you can run for reasons that do not depend on the run improving anything — because you promised someone, because it is how you think, because it is the hour that belongs to you, because somebody needs you to still be doing it.
The relevant literature is on how motivation quality affects persistence, and it is reasonable without being dramatic.
Activity pursued for reasons a person genuinely owns is sustained better and reported as more satisfying than activity pursued to meet an external requirement.7 The self-determination framework has decent support across a lot of domains. It is largely self-report and the effect sizes are moderate.
There is also work on self-transcendent purpose — goals aimed at something beyond one’s own interest — being associated with greater persistence on effortful tasks.6 That is a smaller literature and I would hold it loosely.
What neither establishes is anything about the sacred. They describe motivation, which is a different and much smaller thing than what the traditions this ring is borrowing from are actually about. Using them to certify a religious practice would be its own kind of disrespect.
The first: the instrumental frame is not a disease. People who run to lose weight, hit a time or beat a friend are not doing something spiritually deficient, and a good deal of writing in this genre is quietly snobbish about them. The numbers get a lot of people out of the door on mornings when nothing else would.
The second: manufactured meaning does not hold. You cannot decide that your run is now an offering and have that be true; the frame has to come from something real in your life, or it is a thing you say to yourself for about a week.
What does seem to work is smaller. Find the reason you would still do it if it stopped improving anything. If there is no such reason, that is worth knowing too, and it is not a failure — it might just mean this is exercise rather than a practice, which is a fine thing for it to be.
Note — against the snobbery
A lot of writing in this genre looks down on it. The numbers get people out of the door on mornings when nothing else would, and a frame you adopted because an essay recommended it will not survive the first bad month.
The practice for this first essay is a question rather than a technique.
This series discusses running practices belonging to specific Indigenous nations of the Americas. Where a practice belongs to a named people, it is named; where a source is an Indigenous author, runner or organization speaking publicly about their own tradition, that is said. Ceremonial and religious specifics that those nations have not made public are not discussed here and are not the author’s to convert into technique. General claims about running physiology and psychology are cited by author and publication, with links where a stable public page exists.
Effort can be held as more than instrument, and how it is held is what the effort rests on when the numbers stop improving.
What this ring will not do: homogenize hundreds of nations into one tradition, describe ceremonial practice it has no standing to describe, or write in the past tense about people who are running now.