Latter-day Saints (Mormons) Just Dominated the Boston Marathon

An interesting chapter in religion and sports

Given my somewhat checkered career as a high school distance runner, I am happy to say that I think my running career peaked about ten years ago, when on a whim I ran the Labor Day half-marathon in New Haven and finished just ahead of—or maybe two or three people ahead of; we basically crossed in a clump at the same time—Amby Burfoot, winner of the 1968 Boston Marathon. Of course, at the time that I edged out Burfoot, I was about 40 years old and he was about 70. So that tells you all you need to know about my relationship to the world of elite running. Elite runners have to give me a 30-year handicap.

All of which is to say, I still follow running from a distance (so to speak). When I checked the results of yesterday’s Boston Marathon—run, as ever, on Patriots’ Day, a great Massachusetts holiday that I got to observe as a child growing up in Springfield—I of course went looking to see if any Americans finished near the top. The last American to win a non-wheelchair division in major marathon was Des Linden, in the women’s division in Boston, 2018. It’s been a rough few decades for American harriers, and I am always rooting for us to roar back.

So yesterday brought good news: in the men’s division, three Americans were in the top 10: Connor Mantz, Clayton Young, and Ryan Ford. I can’t swear by it, but I think that’s the best American showing in a major marathon in some time. I began Googling these gents, and I noticed that two of them, Mantz and Young, were alumni of Brigham Young University, a Latter-day Saint (“Mormon” is not the preferred term) school; and indeed, both are members of the LDS church.

Connor Mantz

And what’s more, the top Canadian finisher, Rory Linkletter, also went to BYU, although he is not a member of the church.

But The XC blogger makes a case that LDS culture helped Linkletter, too, thrive:

In the ninth grade, several years following a parental separation, he discovered distance running. By grade 12, it became his world. When it was time to choose a university, nothing else mattered. He identified Brigham Young University as the ideal institution for someone who wanted to completely devote himself to the Church of Running. So he moved an hour east to Provo.

“My heart was set on the sport by then,” he says. “I wanted to be somewhere I could run fast, without distractions.”

There is a unique ingredient to running success at BYU. What differentiates it from other top NCAA schools is not that they are situated at altitude (it’s at 4,550 ft.), or that the coach, Ed Eyestone, is a former Olympian and NCAA champion. The difference exists in lifestyle—all students at BYU are forced to follow the Church Educational System Honor Code (commonly referred to as the Honor Code.) The code is the only one of its kind in Division I, and comprises a set of standards that align with values of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

The standards are strict, and collectively form the antithesis of how most of us remember our college days. At BYU, students are not permitted to have a sip of alcohol, coffee, or tea for the duration of their education. Sex is forbidden, swearing and gambling are punishable, and students are ordered out of opposite sex dorm bedrooms at all times. Just to complicate matters, strict bans exist on facial hair, and beards are not allowed—a real shame in cross-country season.

I have no grand theory here. I don’t know if celibate runners run better. It’s always just interesting when one community attaches to a particular sport and begins producing champions. We’re in an age of Slavic basketball greats, Caribbean baseball greats, East Asian female golf greats. And, apparently, Latter-day Saint distance-running greats.

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Running in the ’90s

Years ago, I wrote a piece about what it was to be a runner in high school. It began like this:

There is a lie that cross-country coaches tell their distance runners. “Running is a team sport,” they say. “Even though it can seem like you are out there by yourself, you have to train as a team, support each other as a team, work as a team. Running is not a solitary sport.”

A big lie. Running, like swimming events, like weight-lifting or gymnastics, is a solitary sport. That you might interact with other people during training, that there might be social aspects to practice, is rather beside the point. Training for an athletic contest is almost by necessity social—any exception will tend to attract very weird participants: consider competitive eating—but the fact that the runner sees other people now and again, even every day, does not change who he is, or what he does. He is a loner, and he runs alone.

I say “he” because my subject is the specific kind of boy who takes up running, and he is very different from the girl who is his counterpart. This boy, whom I know well, is just not good at any other sport. He may have tried baseball, but could not throw; he may have tried soccer, but could not kick. He is not coordinated or strong or big. So he runs.

No American eight-year-old thinks it would be cool to be a distance runner someday. If he becomes one, it is not the realization of a dream, but the acceptance of reality.

You can read the rest here. (It talks a lot about Michael Cera in Juno.)

By the way, I didn’t have a photo handy of myself running in high school, so I asked AI to make one, and gave them a photo of what I look like now. De-aging me, AI turned me into a Catholic with curly hair:

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