Running uphill

Even if you’re not a runner and have no interest in ever being one, I hope you will read on today, because today in my writing about running, I suspect that I am writing about more than running: about practice and discipline and being weak and being strong.

I started running in college for exercise and continued because I enjoyed it, because it was a way to process thoughts, to calm myself when stressed, to feel the breeze blowing and muscles working and sweat dripping. I love being alone with my thoughts and sometimes a deer or a bird. I love the way the synergy of all my bodily muscles seems to loosen and work out the tangled knots in my mind. (And I love a big spaghetti dinner.)

A couple years ago, I started signing up for occasional races, because it motivated me to run regularly. I raced for the sake of the training. Before my first half marathon, I’d never run more than five or six miles, but as I trained, I found that I enjoyed the long runs of eight or ten miles; I enjoyed the sweat and the sore muscles and the pounding and the time to think.

Even as I came to love long runs and harder challenges, I never liked hills. When I moved to the mountains, I found ways to avoid them. I always ran paths along residential roads and rivers, flat and meditative, where my lungs and legs and arms and legs could reach a perfect rhythm. If I had something interesting enough or confusing enough on my mind, I could lose myself for a while and forget that I was running at all. I liked this state of semi-consciousness.

I disliked hills. When you are running uphill, there is no way you can forget that you are running.

My philosophy was that hills should be about 100 or 200 yards maximum; that hills are something to get up and over as quickly as possible so you can move on with the rhythm of the run.

Then I ran a crazy 200-mile relay race across the Smokies. In my last 6-mile leg of the relay, I had to run uphill for the first three miles. I was exhausted and weak and cranky and I honestly walked up most of the hill, which did not meet my 200-yard maximum, which could not simply be gotten over. And then after climbing endlessly, I suddenly turned a corner and there ahead of me was the crest of the hill, the Appalachian trail crossing, and the panorama view of the mountains in all its clear-skies spring glory. The next three miles were downhill.

After that, my hill-running philosophy changed slightly. I figured hills were something to be got over, but they could be rewarding. I figured I should start doing some hill runs once in a while, up the Blue Ridge parkway near my house, where I could reach an overlook and exult in the view paid for by my hard work.

As I began to run up the parkway, the end goal kept me going. I knew I could stop when I reached the first overlook (or eventually the second, or the third). I knew I could see mountains, and then I could turn around and coast back downhill.

Slowly, though, something changed. Running uphill never became as meditative and rhythmic as my trail runs, but it stopped being entirely about the destination. I learned to look down at where I was, rather than up at the insurmountable hill. I learned to enjoy the feel of my body pushing hard against gravity.

Depending on the grade of the incline, I’ve gotten now to where I run upwards for one or two or maybe even three miles without stopping, even if there’s no great view as a payoff. I’ve gotten to where I can be on the hill, body pushing, mind spinning, and find a new kind of rhythm—not the rhythm of losing myself in my mind and floating off into meditation and forgetting about the run; but the rhythm of feeling it all in my body, feeling the struggle, the reach, the exertion of every muscle; feeling that I am strong, I can do this, I can keep going.

There are some days when I am too tired, and I stop early and walk to catch my breath, and collapse on the floor when I get home again.

But with each new day I pray that it is true: that I am strong, I can do this, I can keep going.

New Year's Repetition

I make the same New Year’s resolution every year. 

Read the Bible every day.  

I think I have been trying to read the Bible regularly since I was about 12. It almost certainly started as an attempt to do the right thing, to be a good person, a good Christian. Reading the Bible was one of those things I thought I was supposed to do. But over the years my motivation evolved. There were times when I read out of a desperate longing to know God. Or out of a felt realization that I would be happier, more centered, more whole if I focused my life on following Jesus. There were also times I intentionally did not read, for fear or exhaustion or despair. 

I think back over my years of resolutions, which have each been beautiful in their own way. 

Photo by Thomas Mathie

I remember New Year’s 2005: I was 18 and confused about identity and life and relationships and meaning. I would lie on the floor of my dorm room, picking strands of hair out of the carpet I never vacuumed, and reading the existential parts of the Bible. There is nothing new under the sun; all is vanity and chasing after the wind. I would lie there for an hour just reading, and thinking, and putting off the homework and friendships that were so confusing. I remember my affliction and my soul is downcast within me, yet this I call to mind and therefore have hope: because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed. Tears were coming down and I was taking solace in the universality of these words from long ago. Answer me quickly, O Lord; my spirit fails. 

Then there was New Year’s 2007: I was studying abroad, in Tanzania, slowly recovering from the weight of loneliness and fear and doubt and guilt. I would wake up early from jet lag those first few days in January, climbing to the hostel roof as the sun was rising, and read the beautiful words: There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ, for through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set us free from the law of sin and death. The banana and mango trees stretched vastly before me; the Tanzanian people were singing and laughing; I was rediscovering God’s love; I was recreating myself. I was unafraid. I was free. 

Or New Year’s 2009: The year I moved back to Maryland, I lived with my parents for six months, commuting an hour and a half, struggling to find my niche back in my hometown, lonely. On December 31, I moved into a community house closer to work, cut my commute to 20 minutes, found new friends to surround myself with in the evenings. Buoyed by the new community, and on the strength of the first gut-wrenching laughter in months, I began to read the Bible again, reverently and joyfully in the mornings while sitting in the ugliest, comfiest easy chair you’ve ever seen. One of my new housemates noticed, and thanked me for my example, and began to return to the morning Bible reading herself. I thought, it is only because of her and these lovely people that I have the energy to care again, to take up this discipline myself. I thought, how beautiful that we help each other grow closer to God, that we need each other. How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity.   

Next week I will be sharing my story of belief lost and found again. My story of the year that seemed to redefine my faith and the way I read the Bible and the way I related to Christian community. It was 2006, but sometimes it is like I am still feeling the aftershocks. This past year was definitely a valley for me in terms of my daily discipline of Scripture reading. Maybe it is because of laziness or loneliness or exhaustion, or maybe it is because the questions of 2006 are still nagging me, or maybe it is complicated.

It’s not that I value the Bible less than I used to. It’s just that sometimes I feel like I have read it all before, and it is hard to hear it in a new way.  It just that is has become heavy: heavy with the scholarly and political debates; heavy with images and standards I no longer have hope of measuring up to; heavy with words that made me feel like I should easily snap out of fear, doubt, sadness, when I couldn’t seem to. It’s just that I am so tired. I am no longer the bright-eyed teenager who is sure that I will one day perfect myself, perfect my faith, be the person God wants me to be. On some days it is like I have given up. 

The Bible is so rich, though—rich with stories and challenging words and a call to experience more out of life. It is full of journeying and honesty and compassion and love. Full of reminders that we don’t have to perfect ourselves. That grace and mercy are available. It is a text that is alive with the presence and mystery of God, alive in a way that means my relationship to it must always be changing. And that is why each year is different. That is why I can never read it how I used to read it. I can only step forward into a new and beautiful era.

So I have said it yet again: let me read the Bible every day. I am starting to explore an Anglican Book of Common Prayer that I found in my grandfather's house. I am starting to learn its liturgies and songs and prayers and readings. A little each day, plodding at first, until the discipline comes to life again. It takes work, but that is okay. It will become natural again, in the same way that running 8 miles becomes natural after a few weeks of grueling training. In the same way that conversation with a loved one because natural again after a few days of being reunited. This year, it seems right to read the Bible not in gulps as I once did, nor to pore over it in analysis mode (that will come next year in seminary), but just to let the words sing, a few at a time, with poetry and the Spirit and truth.