It may be that, in a broad sense, ultramarathoners are driven by something more secular than spirituality—they could be hungry for meaning. Illustration by Keith Negley

Shortly after sunrise, on June 14, 2015, a Finnish man named Ashprihanal Aalto stood on Eighty-fourth Avenue, in Queens. At 6 A.M., he began running around the block. He passed a playground, some houses, and a technical high school. After half a mile, he returned to his starting point. Then he kept going—until, forty days later, he’d run five thousand six hundred and forty-nine laps, for a total of thirty-one hundred miles. Aalto was one of twelve runners attempting the world’s longest certified footrace, the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race. Eight of the runners finished the race within the fifty-two-day time limit. Aalto finished fastest and broke the world record by almost a full day.

The obvious question is why Aalto, or anyone else, would choose to run three thousand miles around a single city block. Even compared to other ultramarathons, the Sri Chinmoy is particularly**—**perhaps deliberately—unpleasant. The route isn’t picturesque or awe-inspiring; Aalto pounded the same stretch of pavement for eighteen hours a day, from 6 A.M. to midnight. Since 2000, he has run the Sri Chinmoy thirteen times, so the novelty of finishing the world’s longest race has surely worn off. All the same, some runners seem to find the experience deeply rewarding. What, exactly, is the nature of that reward?

Psychologists, when they think about motivation, often distinguish between two kinds of motive. There are extrinsic motives, such as money and accolades, and intrinsic motives, such as spiritual well-being. Plenty of experiences combine the two. But the runners and organizers of the Sri Chinmoy race are deeply committed to intrinsic motives. In fact, if you want to run, you have to explain your motivations in an application. (You also have to be an experienced multi-day runner.) Last year, the race organizers fielded twenty-one applications and accepted fourteen—the maximum number of runners they can currently handle. “We make sure runners who apply aren’t self-involved,” Sahishnu Szczesiul, one of the race directors, said. “We need to make sure they can get along with other people, and that they aren’t just driven by personal glory. We’re looking for runners who want to test themselves, and who are seeking to run the race for a sense of harmony and balance.”

As it happens, Aalto and all but two or three of the athletes who run the thirty-one-hundred-mile race most years are disciples of the late Sri Chinmoy, a charismatic Indian spiritualist who taught meditation in the West until his death, at age seventy-six, in 2007. Chinmoy attracted thousands of followers through his athletic feats, but he was also controversial: in fact, some of his former disciples accused him of sexual abuse. Chinmoy lifted weights and ran long distances, and he argued that athleticism was an aspect of the road to enlightenment. He had many rock-star devotees, including the guitarist John McLaughlin, who called his band the Mahavishnu Orchestra because “Mahavishnu” was the spiritual name Sri Chinmoy suggested for him. Chinmoy was a consummate showman. In 1988, for example, he started promoting a program called “Lifting up the World with a Oneness Heart,” through which he invited celebrities and high achievers to let him lift them up above his head, one at a time and in groups, on a specially designed platform. “I lift them up to show my appreciation for their achievements,” Chinmoy said. At the time, he was in his fifties. He lifted, among other people, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Muhammad Ali, Sting, Eddie Murphy, Susan Sarandon, and Helen Hunt.

Both because of and despite his outlandish stunts—at one point, he appeared to “lift” an elephant—Chinmoy had a real influence on the world of amateur athletics. He sponsored sporting events around the world, and taught his disciples to believe that they, too, could achieve spiritual growth through extreme athletic accomplishment. Beginning in 1980, he promoted a series of ultramarathons, each longer than the last; what began as a group of twenty-four-hour races became a five-day race, and then a series of races that lasted nearly three weeks. “Sri Chinmoy told us, a number of times, that we didn’t understand what he was trying to do with his races,” Szczesiul said. “He wasn’t just interested in athletic endurance; he preferred super-long events because they demand recovery powers beyond what’s normal.” Chinmoy emphasized the mind’s role in helping the body recover—in pushing athletes to show up at the starting line day after day, and to return year after year. (In a 2007 piece about the 3,100 Mile Race for Harper’s, Sam Shaw describes how Chinmoy visited the race: “gold-complected, resplendently bald,” and “dressed as if for a day at the public pool, in shorts and a cotton shirt,” he hands out strawberries to encourage the runners.)

Aalto has said that he runs to train his mind, and, in general, spirituality seems to drive many ultramarathon runners. Trishul Cherns has run the thirty-one-hundred-mile race three times, and he holds a number of Canadian ultramarathon records. “In my experience, the spiritual side of ultramarathon running is pretty much universal,” Cherns told me. “Even the world’s best multi-day runners have a strong spiritual side. And, for me, it’s a spiritual journey. I start out listening to music, and then I’ll zone out. It becomes an extended form of meditation.” Cherns is also a Sri Chinmoy disciple, but even non-disciples describe ultrarunning as a spiritual experience. Michael Bielik completed the so-called Grand Slam of Ultrarunning this year, finishing four prestigious hundred-mile races during 2015; in contrast to the thirty-one-hundred-race, which pauses from midnight to 6 A.M., hundred-milers continue without a break. I asked Bielik what he thinks about when he’s running, particularly during quieter moments in the middle of the night. “A lot of the time I think about being lucky,” he said. “Even as I’m suffering, I recognize that I’m lucky to be putting this on myself voluntarily.”

Unlike Bielik, whose spirituality is grounded in a feeling of gratitude, Chinmoy believed that running was the shortest path to “self-transcendence”—the capacity to overcome physical limitations with meditation and mental focus. I run four or five times a week, and, to me, that experience sounds a lot like the endorphin-fueled runner’s high that some people enjoy on longer runs. My runner’s high arrives, like clockwork, forty minutes after I begin running (a pity, since I rarely run for longer than forty-five minutes). In 2010, I signed up to run the New York City Marathon, in part because the longer training runs gave me an excuse to spend more time feeling that runner’s high. A couple of months before race day, I tackled a twenty-two-mile training run in the Blue Mountains, ninety minutes from Sydney, Australia. The route was hillier and the air thinner and foggier than I’d anticipated, and my runner’s high arrived far later than it usually did, around the two-hour mark. I felt strong, and, after pushing through exhaustion for more than an hour, suddenly elated. For the first time that day, I stopped paying attention to my ragged breathing; instead, I enjoyed the view of distant blue peaks across deep, green ravines with names like Govetts Leap, Megalong Valley, and Narrow Neck. I’m not a religious person, but that was, without doubt, a spiritual moment in my running career. It’s the only time I can remember feeling guided by something larger than myself.

I’ve yet to meet an ultrarunner who doesn’t find the experience to be, in some sense, spiritual. Still, billions of people have spiritual feelings without courting great physical hardship—and there are ways of understanding ultrarunning that don’t depend on spirituality.