Probably the most athletic students in the country (aside from the military academies), Notre Dame Students love to exercise. While they certainly love playing basketball (see #76), football, and dodgeball, lifting weights in The Rock or Rolfs, and taking yoga classes, by far the most popular form of exercise for Notre Dame Students is running.
Notre Dame Students are constantly running in different places across campus. They run on treadmills in their dorms and at The Rock. They run loops through the quads and fields around campus. They run on elliptical machines in Rolfs while watching TV and reading People Magazine. They run the roads to and through Saint Mary’s. However, most often students run around the two lakes on campus.
Running around the lakes is the single most common form of exercise amongst Notre Dame Students. They love to make the two-mile figure-eight around the lakes so that they can see all of the sites such as The Grotto (see #61), the reverse side of the Dome, and (of course) Carroll Hall. Sometimes through treacherous patches of mud that destroy their pristinely clean running shoes, Notre Dame Students will run hundreds (and sometimes even thousands) of miles around these lakes over the course of their time at school; with the lakes always looking the same and the route never really becoming repetitive to Notre Dame Students.
While running is partially about exercise for Notre Dame Students, it also has other advantages. Though Notre Dame Students like to be seen running so that they can show everybody how athletic they are, oftentimes their running is not very athletic. If they are running inside, they will make sure to spend more time chatting with friends they meet than they do actually running.
When they are running around the lakes, they will oftentimes make their running into a date and jog alongside their long-term relationship partner while neither really breaks a sweat (see #99). Despite the fact that running has all of these great advantages for Notre Dame Students, they will still need to have a more concrete reason to justify all of their running and working out, and they find this purpose via charity runs.
Charity runs like the Mara Fox Run, Finish on the 50, and the Holy Half Marathon give students the justification for working out while also making them feel better about themselves by raising money for charity (and they usually get t-shirts for running them, see #35). These service-oriented students want to do good for the world, and these events give them a chance to put their running to a good use.
Furthermore, in running these events, Notre Dame Students get even more excited about running and invariably start talking about how they are going to run a marathon. Notre Dame Students love talking about running marathons because it shows their friends how much more running they are doing, and it also shows how dedicated they are to working out and raising money for charity (because Notre Dame Students prefer running marathons for charity). However, in the end most Notre Dame Students will eschew running marathons for leisurely runs around the lakes.
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