Month: November 2013

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Running and Praying

I wanted to write a bit more about running, after what I wrote in my last post. It is becoming important to me, in ways I never anticipated.

I started running again about 3 months ago. “Again” refers to the fact that I always liked to run when I was younger: I was on the track team in middle school and high school, and I jogged in college and early married life. I’ve tried to pick it up again over the years, but it was hard and time seemed short. It was easy to find excuses.

This summer, it seemed like I was surrounded by runners. Everywhere I turned, people were talking about running, or their children were running, or their spouses were running. I started to think about it again.

I had heard about the Couch to 5K app, and I decided to try it. Looking at the first few workouts, I thought it seemed easy enough: lots of walking, short time periods of running. I started with my dog, since I typically take her for one or two long walks each day. This did not work well. (See my earlier blog post about the human-canine running experiment.) She is not a running dog, or at least not with me.

The first couple of runs with the app were so difficult. I felt every step jarring through my body: my old, out-of-condition bones and muscles protesting. One wouldn’t think that adding in a few short periods of running would be so difficult. It was. My neck, back, hips, legs, and feet ached.

I gave up after a couple of tries. It was too hard.

But I still kept hearing about people running. At lunch one day, a teacher (whose mother had recently passed away) said, “I remember when my mom couldn’t walk, so I run for her.” As I listened, I could see my mother, in those weeks before she died, when she could not walk, much less run. Then my daughter was complaining about gym class. “We have to run a mile,” she whined, “and the teacher is going to time us.” “A mile?” I said, “That’s not very far.” Then I realized that I couldn’t run a mile in one stretch. Ok, I thought, I can give it another try.

I did. It wasn’t easy to start again after two weeks off, but I did. This time, I didn’t run with the app, I just set shorter goals: run a block, walk two blocks, etc. To my surprise, I could do it, and it didn’t hurt so much afterward. Soon after this, someone mentioned to me that one could use the indoor track at the community center without being a member. As the weather was starting to turn colder, I decided to try there.

It’s a small track: 14 laps to the mile. It doesn’t have much cushioning, but at least it is lighted, climate controlled, and I don’t have to worry about gravel or glass or other hazards on the sidewalk. Better yet: almost everyone I see when I’m there is at least twenty years older than I am. I may not be fast, but I am faster than they are.

So I started again with the app. The stretches of running grew longer, and I was able to run for most of them. I know that I wasn’t pretty. My face turns red when I run, and I am sure that my rear end does not look attractive in spandex. I haven’t looked, myself. But I felt myself growing stronger.

Then something happened. One morning, a couple I’ve seen in church came in. She had a stroke about a year ago. She comes to church in a wheelchair or with a walker, and she and her husband came in that morning with a walker. As I jogged past them, I saw him help her remove her coat, and then they pushed the walker aside and started walking. She held on to the rail with one hand and carefully walked, raising her left foot with special care. I could tell that was the side affected by the stroke. Her husband walked with her, holding on to her for support and encouraging her with quiet words.

It was so beautiful and so humbling.

As I watched their slow progress around the track, I started to pray for them. I prayed for healing for her and strength for him to continue to support her as she healed. I prayed in thanksgiving that I was able to run, and I offered my last lap—at a sprint this time—up for them.

Two days later, I woke up tired and didn’t want to run again. It was cold, and there were snow flurries in the air. I didn’t want to drive to the community center, much less run outside. Then I remembered the text I had received the day before: my cousin’s wife had entered hospice care. I wrote about her two days ago: Jeni, whose cancer had come back and was taking her away from her husband and two kids. I remembered the couple at the community center, too.

I drove to the community center and ran. This time, I prayed the whole time. I won’t say that it was easy, but it was a little easier. I didn’t think so much about myself as I did about Jeni, and the lady with the stroke. There were other people there that morning, too: driven indoors by the cold and snow flurries. A few of them were jogging, but most were walking. I prayed for them, too: people I don’t know and who have needs of which I’m not aware. I thought about the people on our parish prayer list, and I prayed for as many as I could remember, as well as for my family and friends. Every time I started to get tired and wanted to quit before my stretch of running was over, I remembered all of them: Jeni, the elderly couple, the teacher whose mother died, my mother, everyone else.

So this is how I run now. I know it’s good for me, because I have lost a few pounds, and my legs look a little less flabby. I like feeling stronger, too, and the first time I ran a mile in one stretch, I felt proud. (I told my daughter about it, too. She rolled her eyes.) It still isn’t easy to do those long stretches, but I try not to think about myself as much as I think about others. I feel like I’ve gained a gift in learning that running can be a form of prayer.

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Thanksgiving and death

I’ve been thinking about thanksgiving and death. Thanksgiving because the holiday is tomorrow, and because one of my son’s assignments last week was to write one hundred things for which he is thankful. It was a fun assignment. I helped him a few times when he became bogged down. (“Do you remember in preschool when you were supposed to draw a picture of something for which you were thankful and you drew spaghetti?” His list includes “spaghetti.”)

I’ve been thinking about death because my cousin’s wife passed away last week. She was only 38. She had breast cancer. She thought she had defeated it, but it returned in her lungs and then in her spinal fluid. She was happily married, a hardworking preschool teacher. She had two children, close in age to our children. I didn’t know her well, but every time I saw her, she seemed happy, bubbly, fun loving. She loved my cousin and their children, and they loved her. It was not right or fair or just for her to die.

I’ve been thinking about death, too, because my sister-in-law has lung cancer. We only recently found out about this. She had surgery the week before last, and the results were not encouraging. Then, after a few days at home, she had to return to the hospital, because of complications. She’s been in ICU for nearly a week, just trying to keep breathing, to keep living.

So it’s pretty easy to start my list and say I am thankful that I am alive, and that my husband and children and brother and sister and father and most of my family members are still living. I am deeply thankful for that. And I could continue and come up with a list of a hundred or more things and people for which I am thankful. Spaghetti might be on the list. Books would be, and many more things and people.

As I think about it, though, Thanksgiving is not just about giving thanks. “Whew, I made it through another year, and these folks are still with me, and we can walk and have jobs and a house and a car…” Don’t get me wrong. I am deeply grateful for the ordinary—and extraordinary—blessings in my life. But I’ve started to realize that thanksgiving—not just the holiday but the process of giving thanks, everyday—is not so much about the blessings as it is about what I can and should do with them.

I’m alive and I can walk. That’s really a pretty big blessing, and I have started to use my walking and running as a kind of prayer. I can run and walk and others can’t. I pray for them, and I offer my time and my energy to God for those who are in need. Does my exercise make a difference in the world? It is certainly good for me, and it could help me to be a better, stronger person, who might be able to do more good in the world. Then it might matter. I believe that prayer matters, too, and in those times when one can’t really do anything else but pray, I might as well run or walk as well.

I have time to relax. I should be using this time for something more than trolling the internet or poking around on Facebook. I love to see and hear about my friends and their families, but let’s face it: sometimes it’s just wasting time. So I’m trying to use my time doing something that seems more productive or at least less unproductive: writing this essay, reading a book that has some meaning, picking up some of the mess around the house, spending time with my family.

I have food in the pantry, while so many are hungry. What I choose to eat—what I choose to buy from the store—matters. This is simple common sense. I know what I should eat and what I shouldn’t, but I often choose to ignore my conscience in this. But if I am truly thankful for what I have, then I ought also to be a good steward of it. This means taking care of my body and financial resources, along with the planet. So what I choose to eat and purchase really does require more thought.

I could go on, but these are some of the things I’ve been thinking about, as I consider thanksgiving and death. Jeni didn’t have a chance to live beyond 38. I’ve already had more years than that, but have I contributed as much to the world as she has? I don’t know. I do know that I have many faults, among them a tendency to be crabby. I admired her happiness and joyful spirit, her willingness to do things for others. Since I have been given these days of life—for which I am thankful—perhaps I can try to continue her work by trying to be happier, more generous, more thankful.

Lately, I wake up with the sense that each day is a gift. This is fostered by the prayer I hear each day that I go to work or volunteer at the school my kids attend. Every morning on the announcements, two students lead the other children in a prayer that begins, “Thank you, Lord, for another day in which to grow in love for you and for others.” Yes, I think. Yes. I have this day. It is a gift, and I have come to understand that the meaning of the gift lies not in what it does for me, but in how I can share it with others.

Everybody else may have figured this out a long time ago. I’m a slow learner, I guess. I’m just glad that I have learned it, but I hate that it has taken death to help me learn the meaning of thanksgiving—lower-case t—because it’s not just for the fourth Thursday in November. It’s for every moment that I have received.

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End of Autumn

Today was one of those November days when winter doesn’t seem too close. The sky was clear and the air temperature was more like October, although the weary sun could not climb as far into the sky as it could even a few weeks ago. The sun and leaves fell in showers, as the wind swirled out of a late autumn sky—the blue not so intense as September or May, a hint of cloudiness even in a clear sky.
And then tonight: winter storm watch. Wha??
I am spoiled by the mild autumn, the sunshine we’ve had for the past few days. How can we suddenly have to start thinking of snow? Again? Already?
We had snow into May this year, and summer was fitful and fretful until the end: a string of 90s in late August and early September that left us gasping at the largely un-air-conditioned State Fair. (One of the local newscasts referred to it as the Great Minnesota Sweat Together, a play on the Fair’s usual tagline.) It seems far too soon to have to think about snow, much less enough that we may have to shovel.
I’m not ready. I haven’t started digging in closets and drawers for snow pants and boots and warm hats and gloves. The mower is still closer to the garage door than the snow thrower. The snow shovel is gathering dust behind the spade, and the garden has not yet been put to bed for winter. Salt? Windshield fluid? Not topped off yet. And I must drag out my trusty Yaktrax, wherever I may have hidden them that day in June when I came across them while looking for a sun hat.
Winter is a fact of life in Minnesota, although the winters are far milder now than they were when I was growing up. Any Minnesotan over the age of 30 who has lived here long enough believes in a warming climate. They might not accept that it has been caused by humans, but they believe it. Most would love to tell you how much more snow we had in the winter of 1983-84 or the great Halloween blizzard of 1991. (Sadly, I was living in Arizona then, so my only stories of the Halloween Blizzard are of talking to my parents on the phone.) I am happy to tell my children that I had to walk uphill—both ways—to school through drifts of snow over my knees. (This is true: I had to walk over a hill, so portions of the trek were uphill both going to school and coming home. And the people who lived along this street did not always shovel their sidewalks.) My kids roll their eyes, but they don’t know what it was like to have to walk more than half a mile to school (up and over a hill) through high snowdrifts with a windchill of forty below zero. There were some days like that at the University of Minnesota, too. I’ll never forget walking across campus to an 8:00 class, passing other people just as bundled up in hats and scarves as I was. We must have looked like walking piles of winter gear. Those were the days before Thinsulate and fleece.
I know winter is real and (with apologies to George R. R. Martin) winter is coming. I know that. I should be prepared. The forecast of snow in November shouldn’t feel like slap in the face. But it does. After beautiful autumn days, it does.
As I was returning from my run yesterday (without the dog), I was struck by the sight of a red maple illuminated by the early morning sun. It glowed as the sunrise burned through and over the rustling leaves. It was a moment of almost heart-stopping beauty. Again, I feel the inability of words to convey the beauty of turning leaves, of autumn in Minnesota.
Today the strong winds pulled many of the leaves from the trees, and this evening many more branches stand bare, many more leaves lay in piles and drifts along the ground. The leaf piles are forerunners of the drifts of snow we’ll soon see, as winter returns with its own stark, less flamboyant beauty. So red, russet, orange will give way to white and gray, to weathered fence posts and the old gold of grasses amidst the snow. The blue will bleach out of the sky until some late January day when the sun grows strong enough to begin to climb back up to the northland. The lakes and trees will sleep until March and April wake them once more to the rushing, reckless green that races over the world come spring.
Winter is coming, and I have to say farewell to autumn.