Free Narrative Essays: The Shirtless Runner On Campus

The “Shirtless” Runners

On one of the humid Louisiana evenings, walking around campus, just managing to adapt to the Helter skelter of college life, I just found my day’s Prometheus. Running across the street, I see three guys with bodies that looked like they were molded by Michelangelo himself. These athletes, who are dressed up as much as Tarzan, toil in the sun indifferent to the onlookers passing by. I was confused about my thoughts at that moment. Was I jealous, amazed or inspired? I wasn’t sure looking at those perfect bodies that I had always wanted. These sculpted gentlemen with David-esque bodies, who are indifferent to the curious, awed and shocked eyes of numerous onlookers, run around campus toiling for various reasons; personal

or athletic, if any, add a unique zest to the ULM community.
If you take a stroll on the ULM campus on a pleasant summer day you’ll very likely encounter guys running shirtless.

They’ll be giving you a glimpse of their quad muscles flexing like that of a race horse, wearing a pair of running shoes and possibly some music on. If it’s a sunny day, they’ll almost certainly have some shades on. There are many areas around campus one can find a Shirtless runner in action, but most frequently they are found running past the majestic view that Bayou DeSiard has to offer and around the Malone stadium. If you are to spend a few hours on one of these two places, then you are sure to come across a shirtless runner. Whether it is the sweltering heat of the day, the cold chills in the morning or the cool, windy evenings, a shirtless runner has little regard for time or the environment around him. Time is just numbers on their watches for them. So if you plan to be one of them you’d better have the spontaneity you need, to go on runs whenever you have a two hour, one hour or even half an hour window of free

time.
Long distance Olympic Gold Medalist runner Haile Gebrselassie once said, “All athletes need three things: commitment, discipline and hard work.

Without that it’s hard to keep running.” Most of the shirtless runners who run on campus are members of the ULM Cross-country team and some of them are athletic scholarship recipients for whom their athletics is a major part of their life. So, being a responsible student athlete, they go through a rigorous training regime everyday which gets them quite sweaty which allows or in some cases forces them to go shirtless. Many members of the ULM Cross-country team run shirtless just as a way to stay cool during training. Like Jonathan Jeffcoat, an Atmospheric Sciences junior at ULM who is a member of the Cross Country team explains, “It’s not really about a body image thing. It’s just a way to try to stay cool.” when asked if he felt more confident running shirtless or with a shirt on. Issac Ndirangu, a Marketing freshman at ULM from Kenya who also happens to be in the Cross-country team had a similar view when he stated, “It depends on the weather really. I run shirtless if it’s a hot day. When it’s cold, I usually have a jacket on.” This attitude is shared by quite a few number of shirtless runners most of whom are on the cross country team. Bringing us to the conclusion that being shirtless isn’t that big a part of their identity but rather something that they just

do.
Not every shirtless runner subscribes to the same attitude though. There surely is a diversity in this subculture like in any group of individuals. There also happen to be shirtless runners who run shirtless not just because it is more convenient, but also to show their well-crafted abs aligned perfectly, where people usually have a bouncy flab of fat. Just like Lane Perilloux, a Kinesiology senior at ULM, who concedes, “I work hard to have a good body, so I feel good displaying it.” This clearly leads us to believe that not all shirtless runners feel the same about themselves being shirtless. There is also a completely different genre of shirtless runners other than the cross country runners. They are the sportsmen you see at the fields in the cool ULM evenings playing soccer, Frisbee, volleyball and other team sports. They tend to just so involved in the game that they don’t even realize they have gone shirtless.
“Human Body is the best picture of the human soul.” This quotation by Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is the reason why many shirtless runners do what they do. They work hard to have a good body or they have a good body as a side effect of their hard work, but they go shirtless because they feel good about themselves when they are shirtless. These unique ULM residents can add something new to the campus and have the ability to inspire another person with just a glance at their work, just as they inspired me.