Run for Boston

Running is the great leveller. It breaks down the artificial, man-made barriers that are erected to divide us. Running refocuses us on our common humanity, and the incredible potential of these frail bodies we inhabit for 80 or so years.

When we cheer a great runner across the finish line, we are not just celebrating their victory, but the victory of the human spirit. When we take part in events like the marathon, it is not just about 'me' but far more about 'us'. We are celebrating life together.

In a sad way, it doesn't surprise me that something as good and as inspiring as a marathon, and the Boston Marathon in particular, has been chosen by people of ill-will to make a statement about their hatred and the barriers they wish to build between people.

But the same spirit that takes a Kenyan champion and the middle-aged, suburban back-of-the-packer across the finish line of the marathon is the same spirit that will see runners in solidarity around the world refusing to succumb to fear and hate and doggedly pursuing our vision to celebrate life in our chosen sport.

My thoughts and prayers go out to all those affected by the tragic events in Boston today. Let us pause, pray, reflect and then tomorrow, lace up our shoes and keep on running.

From beat up runner to CrossFit athlete

I've recently read T.J Murphy's book 'Inside the Box: How CrossFit Shredded the Rules, Stripped Down the Gym, and Rebuilt My Body'.

I found the book fascinating, because like the author I was starting to experience burnout and injury with my long-distance running and desperately needed a way to train that addressed weaknesses not dealt with by running and mitigated against overuse injuries common to endurance athletes.

 

If you're a distance runner looking to mix up your training, or improve your functional fitness but are not too sure about CrossFit, Murphy's book is a great place to start.

Here's the Amazon blurb:

 

"In Inside the Box, veteran journalist and marathoner T.J. Murphy goes all in to expose the gritty, high-intensity sport of CrossFit®.

 

"Murphy faced a future with a permanent limp from one too many marathons. Desperate to reclaim his fitness and strength, the 47-year-old signed up for his first CrossFit® workout with nothing to lose. Anaerobically blasted by each workout of the day, Murphy discovered a sweat-soaked fitness revolution that’s transforming bodies and lives.

 

"CrossFit is the sport of fitness, a radical new approach to exercise that is turning the traditional gym workout upside down. Every day at thousands of CrossFit gyms across America, fitness seekers of all shapes and sizes flex their inner athlete by racing to finish fast-paced workouts. Each workout mixes weight lifting and gymnastics into an explosively effective and addictive new way to lose weight and carve out a new physique.

 

"Inside the Box is Murphy’s journey through CrossFit. From staggering newcomer to evangelist, Murphy finds out how it feels, why it’s so popular, whether it can fix his broken body."

 

 

Learning to love the Concept 2 Rower

When I was an undergraduate in the early nineties, I spent more time on the water rowing than I did in lectures. I had taken up the sport after high school, but it was the first sport I'd competed in where I seemed to have an innate natural ability. I loved it. The commitment I made at the time to row competitively saw me on the water for 2-3 hours a day six days a week, with cross training 2-3 times throughout the week. It was a huge time commitment and one I would not be able to sustain once I began post-graduate studies.

It was during this time that I began my love/hate relationship with the Concept 2 Rower or the 'Erg' as we referred to it. For rowers, it really is an awful device in comparison to actually being out on the water, but very useful in its own way for precisely measuring speed and power over time. Once a week we'd do a 2500m time trial on the erg, and it was something we used to dread doing, despite loving the competition within my crew to out do each other.

It's been 20 years since I was last on the water, and in that time I've continued to use an erg as part of my training. I even owned one for a number of years. It was always a fantastic low-impact cross training tool for running.

I also love that CrossFit recognises the enormous benefits of rowing, and that the 'erg' features so strongly in the program mix. That said, I don't think there is nearly enough attention paid to developing the correct rowing form and maximising the benefits of this device. One of the most frustrating things I continue to see is people who are otherwise highly competent in other training areas thrashing about on a Concept 2 in a sloppy and inefficient way.

Learning and mastering the correct rowing form on a Concept 2 will help this device in giving you one of the best whole body workouts you could ever hope for, and one that incorporates full range functional motion through the ankles, knees and hips that cycling and swimming simply can't.

There are plenty of good videos demonstrating good form available on the web, so it's worth investing the time watching them and applying the principles next time you're at your gym or box. There's a few things to keep in mind concurrently, much like in improving your running form, but like running, it will eventually become quite natural.

Below is one good video that was put out by CrossFit HQ this week.

Christmas: Dangerous but Good!

The (nearly) quintessential Australian Christmas picture.
Source: news.com.au

I love Christmas time for all the reasons most people in Australia do. I love the time off work to relax during summer.  I love the extra time I get with my family, both nuclear and extended. I love gathering with them all around tables laden with food and wine, not just once, but many times!

 

I love the sounds – incessant choirs of cicadas, kids splashing in a pool, boisterous laughter around the table and the collective groan at a particularly corny joke from a Christmas cracker.

 

I love the smells – roasting turkey, Christmas pudding, lemon juice on smoked salmon even sun cream and insect repellent!

 

I love the sights – beaming smiles on my kids’ faces, the reflection of the pool shimmering across the roof of our lounge room in the middle of a sunny day, proud grandparents bouncing babies on their knees.

 

There are also things I don’t like about Christmas.

 

I don’t like the crowded shopping malls – in fact I don’t like them any other time of year either, but they’re particularly loathsome in the lead up to Christmas.

 

I don’t like the pressure it puts on people to meet a particular social  ‘standard’ of generosity and hospitality, robbing people of the joy they can experience just spontaneously  sharing with and serving those they love.

 

There are also things that challenge me about Christmas.

 

Despite the attempts of western culture to ‘decaffeinate’ Christmas, it is at the end of the day, a chance to reflect on one of the most profound moments in human history – the incarnation.

 

That a man named Yeshua was born in Palestine around 4BC (trust the Romans to screw up the calendar!), that he became renowned through Judea and Galilee as a teacher and miracle worker, that he got up the noses of the religious authorities of the day because of one claim in particular that he made and was executed by the Romans sometime in his mid-thirties is beyond historical doubt. You will not find an ancient historian anywhere in the world regardless of their personal faith position who will doubt these basic facts of history.

 

It is celebrating or remembering the birth of this historical figure that is the basis for Christmas. This figure of Yeshua, or Jesus as we know him in English, looms large over history: more books have been written about him, more songs sung about him, more paintings done of him than any person who has ever lived. Yet he himself never penned a word, or ever travelled further than a couple of hundred miles from where he was born. He grew up in a small rural hamlet and swung a hammer in a carpenter’s shop before going on to say and do the things that got him into trouble with the powers of the day.

 

Why on earth do we remember him, why on earth should we remember him? Why do we squirm inwardly at the sound of his name, and avoid conversation about him in ‘polite company’? I know I still do!

 

He did something that not too many people do. He claimed to be God. This more than anything else got him into trouble with the Jewish authorities of his day. Sure they were waiting for a promised saviour, but this bumpkin from Galilee with the uncultured accent wasn’t him.

 

Now this is where Jesus becomes difficult to deal with. And what we are presented with here is what CS Lewis called a ‘trilemma’. Explaining this during one of his BBC radio talks in the 1940s, he said:

 

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God’. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

 

If Jesus was a cruel liar or a deranged lunatic, then Christianity is an evil hoax that must be denounced in the strongest possible way. But, if he’s neither of those things and is who he claimed to be, then it changes EVERYTHING.

 

The friends he walked the dusty roads of Judea and Galilee with came to believe he was who he said he was. They went on to claim that they saw him die and rise again, that he lived the perfect, blameless life we are incapable of living and died the death of a traitor that we deserve – in our place. They travelled as far as they could to tell as many people as they could about him. What did they stand to gain from doing that? Not much according to the historians. All of them except one was violently executed for doing so, with John surviving an attempt to kill him before spending the rest of his life in exile on a remote island.

 

In a society that relied heavily on oral traditions and verbal storytelling, they eventually realised in the face of mounting official persecution the importance of recording their testimonies about what they had seen and now believed. The oral account that Peter shared person to person, house to house, town to town about Jesus as he moved throughout the eastern Mediterranean was written down by his friend Mark when they were in Rome as a near verbatim transcript. The Gospel of Mark is one of four incredible accounts of Jesus’ life, written within the lifetimes of those who had witnessed it. They are the most astounding and influential pieces of literature ever penned.  Nothing comes close to them in their scope and simplicity, their power and their purpose.

 

So a challenge for me at Christmas is to wrestle anew with the answer to the question: “Who is this man?”

 

It would be much easier for me to avoid it altogether and just focus on the obese old guy in the red and white suit created by the Coca Cola Company, or just on a harmless, voiceless baby in a nativity scene. But the baby grew up and became dangerous.  In C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lucy trembles in front of the lion Aslan. “Is he safe?” she asks nervously. “Safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good,” comes the reply. If ‘dangerous but good’ is true of Aslan, it’s also true for the Jesus to whom Aslan points,  a man at the centre point of history, who claimed to have the answers to the biggest questions anyone can ask.

 

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard encouraged his readers to live an 'examined life' in which they would seek the answers to a number of core 'why' questions including: "Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted? And if I am compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I want to see him".

 

Jesus claimed to offer the answers to all these questions, and his first followers claimed to have seen the director. Do I trust Jesus’ answers? Can I trust the testimony of his friends? Lunatic, liar or Lord?

 

I’ve made my choice, and the ramifications of this choice continue to play out in terrifying and wonderful ways. I’m weak, but in this Jesus I have a strong faith that provides a bedrock foundation for identity, an understanding of self-worth, perseverance in times of trial and a lens though which to perceive and make sense of the complexities of the world around me. Best of all, I don’t have to earn the love of God, he’s proven to me I already have it free of charge. To sound so certain is a bit of a post-modern sin. That’s fine, because I’m still a sinner. But, I’m actually no different from anyone else in this regard really – we all have an exclusivist, faith-based world view.

 

Christmas is a time when I, when  we,  can be challenged anew by all these things, (with still plenty of time for eating, drinking, laughing and merry-making with the most important people in our lives!).

Cheers and Merry Christmas!

Jaydub

Strong mind, strong body, strong faith

What do Ryan Hall, Don DeLillo, Rich Froning Jr, C.S. Lewis and Haruki Murakami have in common? Not much, but they have each in ther own way considered how faith and body, body and mind or mind and faith relate. So below, some people far smarter than I share some insights on aspects of the mind, body and faith nexus.

Strong Faith /Strong Body

Ryan Hall: “From my experience through my running career of weathering many lows and enjoying some really high mountain peak experiences, I have felt that the sweetest part of running is feeling God with me as I run, and the great thing about that is it isn't something that only one person or a couple of people can experience in a race. We can all experience it. We can all feel something that is even sweeter, available every time we toe the line and more lasting than winning or setting a record. Today, whenever I sign my name to an autograph I always write John 10:10 with it because it is the best part of following Jesus and having his Spirit in me – it makes life sweeter. My running is better, my daily life is better, etc. Following Jesus doesn't mean abandoning the fun things of this world; it means having more fun, being free from the worries of daily life, and experiencing things in greater, more fulfilling ways.” 



http://www.runnersworld.com/elite-runners/ryan-hall-faith-interview

 

Rich Froning Jr: “If I ever got tired and looked down at my shoe, I was kinda like, ya know, ‘This is nothing compared to what he went through for us.’”

http://journal.crossfit.com/2012/05/baileyfroningfaith.tpl

 

Strong Body /Strong Mind

Haruki Murakami: “The most important qualities to be a…writer are probably imaginative ability, intelligence, and focus. But in order to maintain these qualities in a high and constant level, you must never neglect to keep up your physical strength. Without a solid base of physical strength, you can’t accomplish anything very intricate or demanding. That’s my belief. If I did not keep running, I think my writing would be very different from what it is now.

http://www.runnersworld.com/celebrity-runners/im-runner-haruki-murakami

 

Don DeLillo: “I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours and then go running. This helps me shake off one world and enter another. Trees, birds, drizzle — it’s a nice kind of interlude. Then I work again, later afternoon, for two or three hours.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/the-art-of-fiction-no-135-don-delillo

 

Strong Mind/Strong Faith

John Lennox: "Faith is not a leap in the dark; it’s the exact opposite. It’s a commitment based on evidence… It is irrational to reduce all faith to blind faith and then subject it to ridicule. That provides a very anti-intellectual and convenient way of avoiding intelligent discussion."

http://johnlennox.org/

C.S Lewis: “If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

http://cslewis.wikispaces.com/Reason

Monday Meme

It's funny 'cos it's true.



Monday Meme (Two days late!)