For seven years, Sabrina Little tested the limits of human endurance — setting American records and winning world championships in ultrarunning.

Now, the philosopher and author is examining a different kind of challenge: how sports shape who athletes become. Little, an assistant professor in the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture and Society at Ohio State, has been named a new faculty affiliate of Ohio State’s Sports and Society Institute, bringing a perspective that combines athletics with virtue ethics.

Her path to examining the impact of sport began during her time at Baylor University, where she earned her Ph.D. and studied character education and virtue theory.

“I was seeing a lot of interplay between what I was learning about virtue development and how I was trying to become more excellent as an athlete,” Little said. “So I started to write on sports as it pertains to character.”

Little said different sports and environments cultivate different traits in athletes and shape how they navigate challenges.

“Distance running is essentially practice in long suffering,” she said. “So perseverance and patience are very relevant there.”

Little’s work, including her book “The Examined Run,” also explores how athletes respond to failure, particularly the role of negative emotions such as disappointment and guilt.

“I don’t think this is unique to sports,” Little said. “But I think there’s this kind of broad hedonism or hospitality toward positive emotions that makes it such that we don’t necessarily take the opportunity to learn from failures the way that we often should.”

As a former elite runner, Little was no stranger to the pressures athletes feel daily. She said over time, trusting herself and leaning into an emotion like excitement, rather than stress, shifted her mindset from high school races to competing on a larger stage.

“I would always cry before races, because I was like, ‘I have to win,’” she said. “Then at the world championships, I was like, ‘All right, let’s go. Let’s do this,’ like I trusted the work that I had done.”

Little no longer runs professionally but continues to incorporate the sport into her routine as she balances her scholarly and personal life.

“Running has changed over the course of my life,” Little said. “You need it to, otherwise your life will make sense of the narrative that you had in the past that no longer applies anymore.”

At Ohio State, Little views sport as more than entertainment for fans; it is a way to bring people together. She said solidarity and connection are among the outcomes of having something in common with others.

“When you think about civic life and having kind of a shared identity, even despite difference, those sorts of connective elements play an important role,” Little said.

Through her role with SSI, Little said she hopes to continue engaging students and a broader audience in conversations about the impact sports have on society.

“I really like the work that SSI is doing, just because I think that everybody has opinions about sports, right?” she said. “When I go do public talks about sports, or I raise the question about sports, people have experiences, and so it’s a really neat opportunity to engage the public with introspection.”