Running, Discipline, and the Theology of the Body

Know you not that they that run in the race, all run indeed, but one receiveth the prize? So run that you may obtain. 1 Corinthians 9:24

From Aleteia

By Daniel Esparza

The Greeks called it kalokagathia — beauty and goodness as a single ideal. John Paul II called it self-mastery. Both were describing the same human truth.

I have been running for a couple of years now, training for a 20-kilometer race along the coast in November. The discipline of it — the long easy runs, the demanding intervals, the slow accumulation of miles that eventually makes the race possible — has taught me something I did not expect to learn from a pair of running shoes: that the body is a person to be formed.

Of course, this is nothing new. On the contrary, it is one of the oldest insights in the Western tradition — and one of the most consistently underestimated.

The Greeks understood this first

The ancient Greeks had a concept for which there is no clean English translation: kalokagathia — literally, the beautiful and the good, taken together, as a single ideal. The person of kalokagathia was simultaneously physically excellent and morally upright, because the Greeks did not yet have the dualism that would later separate the two. The gymnasium was a place where the formation of character and the formation of the body were understood as a single project. Athletic training and civic virtue, philosophical inquiry and physical excellence: the same discipline ran through all of them. Plenty of Platonic dialogues take place in gymnasiums. 

The Stoics carried this further. Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations are largely a record of self-discipline applied to the demands of empire, understood physical rigor as inseparable from moral rigor. Epictetus, who was a slave, wrote about the body as something to be trained with the same attention one brought to the training of the will. The body was the soul's partner — and a demanding one.

Paul's athletic metaphors

St. Paul, writing to communities scattered across the Hellenistic world, reached instinctively for athletic metaphors when he wanted to describe the Christian life. "Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way as to win it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things" (1 Cor 9:24-25). "I discipline my body and keep it under control" (1 Cor 9:27). "I run toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus" (Phil 3:14).

These reflect a culture in which athletic discipline was a recognized form of moral formation — and Paul draws on that recognition to describe what the spiritual life actually demands. The connection runs through the monastic tradition as well. Benedict's Rule structures the day around alternating periods of prayer, work, and rest — a rhythm essentially athletic in its insistence on regularity, pacing, and the long game. The desert fathers spoke of askesis — the Greek word for athletic training, which is also the root of "asceticism" — as the fundamental discipline of the spiritual life. You trained the body to train the soul, and the two were the same project approached from different angles.

John Paul II and the theology of the body

The most sustained Catholic reflection on the body in recent centuries is John Paul II's Theology of the Body — 129 addresses delivered at his Wednesday audiences between 1979 and 1984, later shown by researchers to anticipate many of the findings of contemporary embodied cognition — the branch of cognitive science arguing that the body is constitutively involved in thought, perception, and moral formation, and that the mind cannot be understood in abstraction from the physical organism in which it operates. The central claim is deceptively simple: the body is the expression of the person. "The human body includes right from the beginning the capacity of expressing love," John Paul wrote, "that love in which the person becomes a gift." The body reveals the person; what we do with our bodies participates in that revelation. "Self-mastery," he wrote, "is indispensable in order for man to be able to give himself."

That phrase — self-mastery as the precondition of self-gift — reframes the entire question of physical discipline. Training the body is the cultivation of a capacity for presence, endurance, and gift. The person who has learned to run through discomfort, to maintain rhythm when the body protests, to push past the point where stopping would be easier — that person has learned something about the will that no other training quite replicates. And the will, as every spiritual tradition knows, is exactly what needs forming.

A 2019 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that regular endurance exercise produces measurable changes in self-regulation, emotional resilience, and the capacity for sustained attention — precisely the qualities that the spiritual tradition has always associated with askesis.

John Paul II said it plainly: "Sport trains body and spirit for perseverance, effort, courage, balance, sacrifice, honesty, friendship and collaboration." He was an avid hiker, skier, and football goalkeeper — a man who understood from personal experience that the body trained is a body capable of more, in every direction.

Running as stewardship

The body God gave us is entrusted to us — to be maintained, developed, and offered in service. Training it is the responsible care of a gift. The race I am training for is 20 kilometers along the coast between San Sebastián and Irun, in November, in whatever weather the Basque Country decides to provide. I will finish it or I will not. But the training is the thing itself. The discipline is the point. That turns out to be one of the oldest and most reliable forms of the spiritual life — recognized by the Greeks, confirmed by Paul, deepened by the desert fathers, and articulated with new precision by a Polish pope who liked to ski.