For Phillip Espinoza, Running is a Spiritual Exercise
Mount Woodson
For Phillip Espinoza, Running is a Spiritual Exercise
Uber driver by day and amateur runner any time his foot isn’t on the gas, Phillip Espinoza started competing in ultramarathons in 2012 to lose weight, but quickly pivoted his purpose to honoring his Kumeyaay heritage.
In 2013 he mapped out a 90-mile spirit run, trying to follow the path his great-uncle Alfonso Soto once took when he ran away from Sherman Indian High, a boarding school in Riverside, back to his home in Mesa Grande.
“I stayed the night at Sherman in one of their sickrooms and re-created the experience, but from a place of healing and spirituality,” Espinoza says. “It was over three days, so roughly 30 miles a day. It was life-changing.”
Of course, running with the weight of the past on your shoulders has its downsides.
“For a while there was this tense, negative energy I was unknowingly putting into my endurance pursuits,” Espinoza says. “It was a reaction to transgenerational trauma, and a response to colonialism.”
He ran his first 100-mile attempt in 2014 in recognition of the epidemic of suicide among Native American youth. But by mile 50 he felt as though he had no energy left and dropped out. “I didn’t want to end the race, but I saw no other way out. That experience gave me a crucial understanding of suicide and compassion for those struggling.”
Today, his running practice—70 to 100 miles per week—has turned a corner. Distance running was long part of the tribal way of life, both as sport and as a means of traversing tricky canyon paths.
“These days we have lost that part of our culture, and I aim to bring it back.”
His other favorite aspect of the sport? Exercising his mind.
“Discovering new frontiers keeps me going. What will I learn? What will I have found out by the end?”
