Athletics for the 21st century

From here on, the primary judgment of all human institutions, professions, programs and activities will be determined by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually-enhancing human/Earth relationship.
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Thomas Berry, 1914-2009, The Great Work

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A storm is brewing and it’s going to be a monster. Scientists have seen it coming for decades and the warnings are now being written in fine detail across the pages of hundreds of sober, credible academic journals. The biosphere is on the brink of collapse, with runaway atmospheric warming, depletion of biodiversity and the degradation of habitat across the planet. Forests, soils, oceans, fresh water, wet lands, and rivers; all under extreme pressure from an expanding, high-impact human population. It’s no coincidence that societies around the world are under extreme stress and human mental health is in serious trouble. 

And so the obvious questions:

How does sport fit into this predicament?
Is it relevant or meaningful in some way?
Is it a mere amusement, a pastime, a distraction?
Or is it something with vast potential, a way to heal our society and maintain our resilience and creativity in the face of looming, unprecedented chaos and stress? 

The two faces of sport
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To answer these questions, it’s essential that we acknowledge the good stuff right at the outset. When sport works, it’s one of the most creative and honorable of all human activities. Athletes bring intense focus to their games and step up with powerful, inspirational, and even awe-inspiriting performances. At their best, athletic events are vivid expressions of beauty, spirit, and even transcendence. 

When sport works, it makes people healthier in both body and spirit. Team spirit and sincere coaching combine to make athletics one of the most meaningful practices in the modern world, and arguably, sport is one of the few things in the modern world that actually functions as intended. At its best, sports can unify teams, communities, and even, in the Olympic spirit, humanity itself. There are ample reasons to love athletics and we’d do well to keep this spirit alive for athletes and non-athletes alike. 

Nevertheless, there can be no denying the dark side, beginning with the overwhelming emphasis on competition and an ends-over-means value system. Even in the world of youth and amateur sport, outcome is now considered everything. Winning is paramount and failure is labeled a disaster, for both individuals and community. All of which adds up to a brutal, exclusionary, high-stress environment that wears down athletes, compromises their mental health, and shorten careers.
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Similarly, we now see a widespread emphasis on specialization and professionalization, most notably in youth sports. We start training our athletes at younger and younger ages, even before the body is fully developed, leading inevitably to premature injury and burn-out. Young athletes need diverse forms of play to develop naturally, but this opportunity is increasingly denied to many.
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Even worse, modern athletics has largely been co-opted by larger corporate and commercial interests. Sporting events may look authentic on our screens, but they are massively produced for maximum media viewership. In the process, the athlete loses her authenticity and becomes little more than an agent for generating profit. 
In this environment, sport often functions as nothing more than a cheap attractor, a lure for human attention. Beyond its ability to stimulate, it has no inherent meaning or value. In turn, this leads to an increasing emphasis on naked achievement, exclusively for the sake of personal grandeur. Larger meanings are ignored as athletes build their resumes in hope of ever larger payoffs. In the process, our athletic dreams contract into calculation and narcissism. 

Even worse than all that, modern athletics has almost nothing to say about the most consequential issue in human history: our ecological crisis. Today’s coaches and athletes rarely speak about the Earth or the power of the natural world. Oddly and tragically, modern athletics seems to operate in a kind of fantasy world, isolated from the very forces and processes that sustain our bodies, our lives, and yes, our athletic performance. 

All of which adds up to a disturbing realization: In the extreme, modern athletics can become irrelevant and even counterproductive in our quest to create some kind of functional future. So perhaps it’s no surprise to see a growing backlash against sports in general and the increasingly popular view that athletes are nothing but a bunch of spoiled, overpaid, over-pampered whiners. 

A path forward

So what’s to be done? How do we make sport relevant and meaningful in a world on the brink? How can athletics, in Thomas Berry’s words, “foster a mutually-enhancing human/Earth relationship?” How can sports contribute to a viable, functional human future?
Most of us already know what needs to be done, even if we’re not explicitly vocal about it. The formula is simple, if difficult to implement:
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• De-emphasize competition and specialization. Scale back professionalization. Emphasize play, even at the highest levels. Look for ways to limit the power of money and corporate influence. 
• Emphasize long term health over short-term glory. Stop the relentless sorting of people into “winners” and “losers.” Stop the glorification of winning, period. Put the focus on learning. 
• Prioritize mental and emotional health. In particular, adjust your training intensity to the optimal stress level. Pay more attention to people’s stories of adversity. Their explanatory style can tell you a great deal about how much stress they’re under. 
• Emphasize the team ethic expressed in the African social philosophy of ubuntu. “I am who I am because of who we are.” And “We are people through other people.” Repeat this often.
• Focus on what Cath Bishop calls “the long win” – meaningful, purpose-driven efforts, especially as they relate to wider perspectives of society, culture, and the planet. 

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Athletes as Earth advocates

Speaking out for the preservation of the natural world is certain to look and feel unfamiliar to many of us, but in fact, coaches and athletes are ideally suited to speak on matters of the biosphere, the planet and nature. We have credibility on this matter; we understand that our health and performance ultimately comes from our ancestry and our habitat: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat all comes from the land, the earth.

​We understand that without a functional habitat and biosphere, there can be no health, no athletic performance, and no glory. As today’s climate activists might well put it “There can be no championships on a dead planet.”  Speaking out for nature is a matter of social and ecological responsibility to be sure, but even more, it’s also a powerful way to live and train. Not only does the natural world sustain us, it also provides an enormous source of physical and psycho-spiritual energy that can make us better at what we do. Nature, we might say, is a super-power. When we identify with the living world, we become stronger and more resilient in everything we do, including our athletic performance. To put it another way, identifying with and speaking out in support of the natural world isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s also the smart thing to do. 

Preview of our September workshop

All of which leads to our upcoming TAP online workshop, September 5. We’ll open with some light movement and meditation, then we’ll explore the big picture ideas that shape our bodies and our practice, including… 

• the state of the human animal 
• historical challenges to the body and health, 
• culture and cognition
• neuroscience and training 
• stress education
• how to show up in the modern world 

I hope you can join us. 
​REGISTRATION LINK

Frank Forencich, 
https://humananimal.earth/​
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