Running From Despair

An interesting article in The New York Times on American Indian runners. It begins:

SANTA FE, N.M. — On a cold Saturday morning last month, 16-year-old Chantel Hunt ran across a highway onto a gravel road where the snow under her shoes packed into washboard ripples. She ran around a towering red rock butte, past two old mattresses dumped on the roadside, and into the shadow of a mesa she sometimes runs on top of.

Chantel Hunt, 16, training for the national cross-country championships near her home on the Navajo reservation.
Hunt, a high school junior and a resident of the Navajo Nation, was on a short training run for the national cross-country championships being held Saturday in San Diego. Her team, Wings of America, has risen to prominence with an unlikely collection of athletes. It is a group of American Indians from reservations around the country, and a Wings team has won a boys or a girls national title 20 times since first attending a championship meet in 1988.

“You say Wings of America to anyone in the running community — it’s synonymous with the best Native American runners,” said Eric Heins, the cross-country and distance coach at Northern Arizona University, a program that has benefited from having Wings runners in recent years.

American Indians have especially high rates of youth suicide, Type 2 diabetes and deaths attributed to alcoholism, and extreme poverty is pervasive on many reservations. Wings of America, a 20-year-old nonprofit organization based here, has embraced the challenge.