Running Log: October 20th - October 26th

This week in training. . . 

October 20th:

No running. There were certain areas of my body that bore the brunt of my efforts on the long run the day before which required a day of tender care before returning to the road.

October 21st:

5 miles, 40 minutes: Back from the day off to the let the chafing heal. The human body is really something: Saturday I felt like death and had to waddle around for the rest of the day. Sunday I felt mostly fine. Monday I felt terrific. The legs were a little stiff but I opened up at the end.

October 22nd: 

4 miles, 30 minutes: Ran fast today. Mostly unplanned. I run at 5:30 and it is very dark and very unusual to see another person. But this morning I rounded the corner on to another street and there on the other side of the wide road was another runner who had been running straight. And he was running fast. So I beared down a little more than normal to put some distance between us. I felt great. The weather has turned back to gorgeous fall days. It was in the 40s when I ran this morning. Absolutely perfect running weather. I have always said that my favorite conditions require running in shorts, a t-shirt, and with gloves on my hands. I have had two of those days in a row now.

October 23rd:

5.5-6 miles, 45ish minutes: Boy, it will be nice when I have more accurate metrics on these runs. But part of me is convinced that going sans technology is a good thing for my running right now. I am not running to a distance or speed which is probably safer when you are building a base. In any event, today felt good again. Nothing new to report.

October 24th:

No run. Planned day off. My instinct is to run every day, but I need to pace myself. Plus, I got to sleep in until 6. Scandalous. 

October 25th:

4 miles, 32 minutes: Clara worked today which means I need to finish my run by 6:15 so I can shower before she leaves. Cold, crisp morning. Cold and uncomfortable for the first ten minutes or so but then the body adjusted nicely. Saw a gaggle of runners from the university doing some morning easy running. Some mornings the accountability of a partner would be nice. Ran fine, just not much pop.

October 26th:

4 miles running, 10 miles biking: Clara worked today which pushed off my long run for the week to Sunday. I went to the Y with the kids in the morning and tried to run on a treadmill. I forgot how terrible they are. Just awful. I would rather run in the coldest cold than on a treadmill. I ran four miles and then rode a stationary bike. I just can't bring myself to lift weights. People talk about running being boring, but all that weightlifters do is pick something up and put it right back down where they got it. I cranked up the resistance on the bike and let the quads burn.

Weekly Total: 22.5 miles

Ghosts Trying to Hold the World

Any parent in the world will easily relate to the following:

"Parents in love with their kids are all amnesiacs, trying to remember, trying to cherish moments, ghosts trying to hold the world. Being mortals, having a finite mind when surrounded by joy that is perpetually rolling back into the rear view is like always having something important on the tips of our tongues, something on the tips of our fingers, always slipping away, always ducking our embrace.

No matter how many pictures we take, no matter how many scrapbooks we make, no matter how many moments we invade with a rolling camera, we will die. We will vanish. We cannot grab and hold. We cannot smuggle things out with us through death. . .

But this shouldn’t inspire melancholy; it should only tinge the sweet with the bitter. Don’t resent the moments simply because they cannot be frozen. Taste them. Savor them. Give thanks for that daily bread. Manna doesn’t keep overnight. More will come in the morning."

N.D. Wilson, Death by Living (107)

I constantly find myself trying to capture moments with Owen and Eleanor. Trying to remember the first time they did this or that thing (the feeling is more intense with Owen since he is older and therefore more active). Yesterday in the afternoon I was putting my shoes on to go out to the backyard and play with him. He already had his shoes on so he ran out back without me. I was watching through the open back door and he took off running after our chickens who had escaped their enclosure. When we first moved into this house and took over care of the chickens he loved to chase them across the yard. He had this sort of manic glee in his laugh as he chased them up and down the yard. It was cute, but not good. Poor girls get flustered easily. I was about to holler at him to stop when I realized what he was doing. He wasn’t chasing them arbitrarily for some sort of sadistic pleasure; he was putting them back in their enclosure. Just like daddy does. He had his arms out to try and corral them and ran down each one and forced them back to the fenced-in area. He shut the gate and grabbed the brick that we prop against it to keep it shut. By the time I got outside the job was done and he was standing proudly asking to play football. He wanted us to have the yard to ourselves.

Even as I write this story, with the event barely 24 hours past I know I am missing things. I know I have lost some of the special grace of that moment. The way he moved, the way the sun slanted into our yard, the look of accomplishment, that perfect running stride.

Those moments proliferate when you are a parent. And you can’t keep hold of them. But you are constantly moving forward into a new moment. This morning he came downstairs and roared at me like a lion (a ferocious lion) because that scares me. Then he said “Hi, beautiful” to his sister and bent over and kissed her. 

"When the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell with it." 

His mercies are new every morning.

Running Log: October 13th-October 19th

I thought this would be a good idea as far as accountability goes. I feel like for the first time since we left El Paso my running is getting to a place where not only am I not ashamed of how I am running, but it has also regained some centrality to my life. To be a good runner you have to think of yourself as a runner. Otherwise you are just someone trying to keep the love handles at bay. So I thought I would post a weekly training schedule, including some brief thoughts on how I ran and what I can improve on moving forward. All of my distances are estimated at this point. Christmas money will bring a new GPS watch and more accurate data.

So, here it goes:

October 13th

No run today, though an eight hour car ride with two small children is an endurance event in its own right. We were in Fort Collins for a friend's wedding and the weekend included almost no exercise, save for the shock to my heart of the first (two or so) Rio margaritas in many years.

October 14th

5 miles, 40 minutes: Back at it on a Monday morning. So strange to be running in such pitch blackness all of the time. Felt rested and fresh after a weekend off. Springy stride, good even pace.

October 15th

4-1/2 miles, 35 minutes: No bathroom break, an anomaly in my early morning runs, allowed me to stretch out a bit farther away from the house. Beautiful weather.

October 16th

No run. Mama worked and I lost the willpower to get out of my comfortable bed at 5 a.m.

October 17th

5 miles, 40 minutes: Cold, cold, cold. First day wearing running tights. Tears in my eyes from the cold. And it wasn't even that cold. It is going to be a long winter.

October 18th

No run. Planned day off to rest for the Saturday long run.

October 19th

2-1/2 hours. 18-19 miles. This was easily the longest run I have done since the 50k I did in May of 2010 which, for those keeping track, was a long damn time ago. In short, I felt fantastic. I left the house at 7 and ran in the dark for nearly an hour until the sun came up. When it did I was several miles east of town and turned south down a dirt road. The sun was rising to my left and to my right was the full moon. It was perfect. Ecstatic. One of those running moments where you don't feel like you are running. I was just running and smiling and singing. Praising God and soaking in the beauty.

Which, unfortunately, didn't last forever. The following paragraph will relate in some anatomical detail the perils of long distance running. Proceed with caution. I haven't worn running tights very often and never for a long run. In El Paso I rarely ran before work because I didn't come home to kids so I would just go after work and it would be warm enough to wear shorts because, desert. On long run weekends it might be cold when I started, but it would be in the 60s by the time I finished. So I just had cold legs for the first hour or so and was comfortable the rest of the time. This past Saturday it was sub-freezing when I started (we got our first snow on Friday) and wouldn't warm up much as I trucked on. So I wore tights, which, again, I had never done for longer than 5 or 6 miles. Being a novice to tights I neglected to wear underwear beneath them, thinking that the elastic would work fine. Fifteen miles later it felt as if someone had taken sandpaper to my nether region. I was about to cry. I stopped on the side of the road in some trees and removed my tights and ran commando with my high school gym shorts the rest of the way. Which didn't help a great deal. The damage had been done. I ran until I was about a mile from home and then walked the rest of the way in awkward duck fashion.

But instead of dwelling on the negative, I will say that despite the third degree burns on my special parts this was the best run I have had in years. I felt great. Even when the injury was apparent I was still smiling. It felt so great to be out there. Before I about curled up in a ball on the trail I was thinking of extending my run to three hours. I never have done that in the past--made a long run longer. A wonderful feeling.

Weekly Totals: 33.5 miles, 265 minutes

Praying With Owen

Every night after we have finished getting Owen ready for bed I hold him and both mom and I sing a song to him and then I pray before we put him into bed. The songs are generally some old hymn. I used to think that he probably wasn’t retaining much of what we sang to him, but then one night I stopped while singing a line from “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” and he finished it for me. Since then I like to pause in my singing to hear him chime in. And then we pray.

It is interesting praying with a two year old because he has no idea about who or what God is except that which we have given him through the stories we read him, the songs we sing him, and the way we pray when we tuck him at night. It is a sobering thought. And given how much he picks up on the words we use and the way we use them, it really means that I can’t just do this by rote unless I want him to think that is what prayer is. (Cute sidenote: whenever he hurts himself Clara has taught him to pray for God to heal his pain. So he will bonk his head and come up to me crying “God heal it.” God may heal it, but daddy still has to kiss it.)

We always pray and thank God for everything good he has given us and ask him to help us acknowledge all of the blessings that we routinely overlook. We ask him to bless Ellie and help us figure her out and help her to grow up big and strong; we thank him for mommy and how hard she works for us and how patient she is with Owen and Ellie and how much she loves us; we thank him for daddy’s job and ask him that he would guide daddy on what we should do in the future.

But the crux of my prayer is when I pray for him. I want him to know what my desires are for his life. What I consider to be important to his future and his happiness. I begin by thanking God profusely for the chance to be the father of this little boy, for what a joy and grace he is to me, and just how fun it is to play with him and read with him and eat popcorn and watch football with him. And then I pray that God would save him and pour out his grace upon Owen’s life and that my boy would grow up to give glory to God and treasure God in all things. When I pray for his character I pray that God would make him strong and humble (he used to laugh whenever I said the word humble and repeat it), someone who is soft-hearted but firm in his convictions, someone who lives a life of love for the people around him, and lays his life down for his friends and gives them life by his sacrifice.

I pray other things on other nights, but those are the things that are always there. That is what I want for my son. That is my vision for his life. And as I have prayed those things night after night for the past several months, it has become clear to me that when I am praying for my son I am praying for myself. I don’t mean this in a self-centered way. I very much am praying for Owen at night. What I do mean is that in order for these prayers to come true I need to model a lot of this stuff for my son. If I want him to be strong and humble, then I need to show him what a strong and humble man looks like. If I want him to have a soft-heart but firm convictions I need to orient my life in the same way. That is what I mean when I say that when I am praying for my son I am praying for myself. I am asking that God would make me that way so I can show it to him, not because it will save him, but that God may use my example to call Owen from darkness into light and from death to life.

Parenting is hard regardless of how you do it; praying those types of prayers for your kids only ups the ante as far as I am concerned. I am the most influential person in my son’s life and the question I confront every day is how I will use that influence. And by God’s grace it will be doing my part to help my requests to God become the reality of my son’s life.

On Spanking (Not the Type You Might Think) and Liberty

Occasionally I will run across an article that almost perfectly encapsulates our modern ethic on sex/sexuality which can be neatly summarized thus:

Sexual desire is self-validating.

When Woody Allen cheated on wife Mia Farrow with her daughter (not his, from another relationship) his mea culpa was "the heart wants what the heart wants." In other words, Allen is no more responsible for his desires than he is for the fact that he chose to act on them. Intelligent people in our culture take that statement at face value as inherently justifying, even if the result is a bit icky to consider. 

So Jason Webb, writing for Salon, does his duty to promote the interests of the spanking fetishists in this world, that long oppressed sexual minority. Here is an excerpt to paint the general picture of what is going on here:

"At times, spanking was an obsession, and one made all the more torturous for the shame I felt harboring it. For more than 20 years I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought that if, by chance, someone else felt the same way, then they’d be a dirty old man with a grubby overcoat and bulging eyes. But I couldn’t help it. I didn’t choose to be kinky in this way, any more than a man or woman chooses to be straight or gay. The way I saw it, homosexuals had their closet and I had mine. Only mine was a lot smaller, and I was the only one in it."

Webb no doubt believes that by conflating his "preference" in with the darling civil rights issue of our day, he will immediately have a sympathetic audience. "Even the homosexuals have it better than me," he seems to imply. Webb is liberated by a partner who will let him pursue his sexual desires as well as a dinner party of other freaks "spankos" who show him how normal and healthy his fetish is. The article ends with a charming anecdote about Webb spanking the "naughty server" at a spanko-friendly dinner he attended with the help of his "darling wife" who raised the skirt of the girl for him. I feel dirty even writing that sentence.

While reading this I couldn't help but get the impression that most of Webb's praise of the liberation of his desire is ostentation meant to cover up that last sliver of shame which he is doing his damnedest to expunge. I imagine he believes that writing this article will exorcise those vicious Judeo-Christian demons once and for all. Hopefully it was therapeutic for him. Perhaps he will launch a new video series about how it gets better for spankos once they leave behind all of their benighted moral structure.

The odd thing about our culture is not that there are sexual deviants. Those have always been amongst us, bless their hearts. The odd thing about our culture is that the deviants must now be validated by everyone else. You can't just let the freak flag fly (much less simply be quiet about the proceedings) and let the squares gasp in horror. Now, the squares have to make fetishists feel comfortable in their fetishes because we all know it is cruel to judge someone for fulfilling the desires of their heart, whatever those desires happen to be.

Again, in a very real sense this is nothing new. I mean, Caligula existed. And I am not kept awake at night in horror that there might be some spanking going on somewhere in my neighborhood. But it is a new thing to be asked to take something that looks suspiciously like beating a woman with a cane for pleasure and give it the cultural stamp of approval because, you know, inborn desire and all. So many moderns are as fatalistic about sexual desire as the most ardent Calvinist ever was about salvation.   

I don't have a great concluding thought, just thought this captured the zeitgeist nicely. Expect more previously unacknowledged sexual practices to become very important expressions of core sexual identity in the future. Rather than a sense of public decorum requiring people to not publish the details of their desire, expect more far too detailed accounts of subversion that we are required to accept and praise as further signs of liberation.

On second thought, allow me to close with Milton: 

That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,

And still revolt when Truth would set them free.

License they mean when they cry Liberty.

The Scariest Verse in the Bible

I don’t know that it is particularly useful to have a verse designated as the scariest in holy writ. I remember in college people asking me what my “life verse” was. I guess a life verse is the verse that means the most to your life, following the term logically. I never knew the answer to that question. I like a lot of Bible verses and didn’t have the temerity to label one the LIFE verse for my life. But the question of which Bible verse scares me to my core has been long settled. Maybe someday it will be usurped. Maybe lurking in the pages of, say, 2 Chronicles there is a verse I have long neglected that will sneak up on me with no John Carpenter score to serve as warning, and I will be cast into mortal fear but for now this one is holding steady.  Here it is, from the mouth of our Lord:

“Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its fruit. You brood of vipers! How can you speak good, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil. I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” Matthew 12.33-37

I was reminded of this passage as I read Alan Jacobs’s recent article that touches on the implications of Christ’s words in the context of our writing. Here is an excerpt:

“It is curious that Jesus speaks of the Pharisees’ accusation against him as a “careless word” — and disturbing that he clearly does not mean thereby to excuse them. Perhaps we would like to think that our careless words are more forgivable than our calculated cruelties, but it seems that we will “give account” for all our words alike. I doubt that we think about this often enough. There is sure wisdom in the Great Lenten Prayer of St. Ephraim, much used in the Orthodox world, which begins thus: “O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, despondency, lust for power and idle talk.” Idle talk! — how many of us would think to place, near the head of a long prayer to be repeated frequently in Lent, a plea to be delivered from that?”

The fact that Jesus had to make this statement shows the universality of this problem and its consistency through history, but I believe the danger is amplified in our culture. Twitter, Facebook, and blogs help us feel as if all of our thoughts need to be posted immediately. It is difficult to pause for reflection; someone might beat you to your observation. And Jesus is stark in the condemnation he issues to careless words. As Jacobs writes, we like to believe that our careless words—that curse word under our breath, the things we yell at a television during a sporting event, the unintentionally critical comments to a spouse or friend—are not all that big of a deal, especially when compared with our premeditated sins. But our Lord will have none of that. What comes out in those careless moments is not an aberration, but the overflowing of the contents of our heart. And that, frankly, is terrifying.

Jacobs goes on to talk about how glad he is that he didn’t publish his first book until he was 40. He had felt like he could write well before then, but was grateful that he wasn’t given the opportunity. It is easier to say stupid things before you are 40, easier to be self-righteous about your beliefs and feel as if you have everything figured out.

And while Jesus’ words freak me out considerably when applied to my spoken words, Jacobs’s reflections have caused me to think more about it in the context of my own writing. It is one thing to be embarrassed about things you have written in the past, and I have certainly written things I am embarrassed about. It is another thing to write something uncharitable, to be condemned by words you haven’t just popped off while angry but actually taken the time to write down. Those words can be careless, too, and sometimes we have to say them out loud to realize how true that is.

I don’t think we think of the implication of our words enough. For someone whose hobbies outside of playing with small blond two year olds and running through the woods basically consist of reading and writing—being inundated with words—I certainly don’t consider that enough. Our faith enjoins us to be careful, though, to take every thought captive to make it obedient to our Lord so that we do not fall into the pit of careless words and idle speech. For, according to our Lord, it is not our prayers that show our heart, but the words we say without taking the time to reflect. And that is terrifying.  

The Old Books and the Quest for Knowledge

There is a great scene in Whit Stillman’s film Metropolitan where the two main characters are talking about literature. The girl is a big fan of Jane Austen whom the boy in turn criticizes. The problem is, though, he has never actually read Jane Austen, just Lionel Trilling’s criticism of her work. He defends this practice by saying, basically, that this way the critic does the work for you and saves you the time to read more criticism.

I remember watching this in grad school and thinking of how closely it approximated the way we were taught to approach literature in school—to be sure, read the primary works or at least one section that is pertinent to your paper, but the real place of intellectual engagement is with other critics.

But in the film, as in life, it is apparent that the girl’s simple admiration for Austen is a better way to live than the boy’s cold detachment. And, I would argue, it is more fruitful intellectually. Austen gave the girl both knowledge and delight. What Trilling gave the boy is the appearance of knowledge, without really knowing anything at all. He felt as if he knew Austen after reading Trilling, but all he really knew was Trilling. And Trilling is a poor substitute for Austen.

I am not saying there is not a place for criticism, just that it bears the most fruit if you are already grounded in the actual texts that come under the critical microscope, or you use those works of criticism as a springboard into further reading. Rowan Williams’s recent book on Dostoevsky sent me back to Dostoevsky, wanting to know more and wanting to read a couple of his novels that I had not yet read. This is great, but if you read criticism without any idea of the substance of what the critic is addressing, or read it to tell you what to think about a certain subject, then criticism can make you dismissive and arrogant, thinking that if this PhD I respect already dealt with this author then why bother?

C.S. Lewis, commending the reading of the old books in an article entitled “On the Reading of Old Books,” points out the following:

“There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about "isms" and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.”

I have long seen this to be true in my own reading life. I remember literally trembling the first time I opened the cover of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, practically in fear that I would not be able to comprehend a word. But of course that was not true. And I imagine it is certainly true that I learned a good deal more reading Calvin than I did reading about Calvin. Reading about Calvin is a bit like working one’s ways through the Gospels topically. You can learn a certain amount about prayer or some other thing (useful information, to be sure), but you also miss out on a lot, not the least of which is the notion that a subject such as prayer cannot be abstracted from the other teachings of our Lord. So if people want to know what Calvin said about a hot button topic, like predestination, they are far better served reading the entirety of his systematic theology than they are typing in ‘predestination’ at Project Gutenberg and excerpting whatever they happen to find.

Google and our broader world of technology have taught us to do the latter. There is nothing in our culture, including our education system, teaching us to embrace the former. It is a notably harder way, but infinitely more fulfilling and true to the actual complexities of life and faith.