long run

Since the week after the half marathon, I have been doing the same 6.2 mile two-loop long run each Wednesday or Thursday, usually getting slightly faster. Today I felt really draggy starting out (we did vertical kicking at swimming this morning, some of it with our arms in streamline sticking out of the water). I told myself that it would start feeling better after a mile, and it did. My splits were:

mile 1: 13:24
mile 2: 12:40
mile 3: 13:20
mile 4: 12:10
mile 5: 12:12
mile 6: 12:43

Mile 3 and mile 6 have the two steepest hills, so I'm particularly pleased with my time for mile 6. I did the route in 1:18:17, compared to 1:18:42 last week, 1:20:12 the week before, and 1:19:25 the week before that.

For dinner we had meatballs in tomato sauce over matchstick-cut carrots, parsnips and zucchini that had been briefly boiled. A lot more interesting than pasta, as well as low carb.

in the news

Rachel at Alas (a blog) has a good overview of the Duke University sexual assault story. There a blog that will provide updates and links at Justice4TwoSisters. Who says political correctness has won out on college campuses?

training for the Clemson triathlon

My next big event is the Clemson triathlon in May. I am particularly looking forward to it because it was my first race last year, and so I will be able to see very directly how much I have improved. I've been working more on speed recently, so I did the Clemson triathlon course as a bike test. I did the 10.75 miles in 43:20. In the triathlon last year my bike time was 47:38, but that included the transition from swim to bike. Take off around 3 minutes for transition and my improvement is only a minute or so. On the run I'm significantly faster in a race than even my fastest training times; I don't know if that is as true on the bike. My dream goal for the Clemson triathlon is a 20% improvement in my time; my realistic goal is a 10% improvement. I think I've got some work to do on the bike.

My mother was here this past weekend because my daughter was a finalist in a two-page script playwriting competition. My daughter took second in the 15 and under age group (she is not quite 13). My mother left this morning, but I feel like I missed spring break.

a bicycling poem

The Rider

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn't catch up to him,

the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.

What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.

A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

by Naomi Shihab Nye via NPR today.

Lenten reflection for March 22

Our church does a Lenten meditation booklet written by members and I wrote the meditation for March 22. The readings are: Psalm 119:97-120 * Psalm 81, 82, Genesis 45:16-28; I Corinthians 8:1-13; Mark 6:13-29.

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge. But anyone who loves God is known by God.
I Corinthians 8:1b-3

God is so much more than our human knowledge can take in. We don't even have the words that could describe God. There is more to God than we can know, even more than we can imagine. We can't figure out by our knowledge alone what God would want us to do. We can't know God's intention for the terrible situations human beings get themselves into.

But what we do have is love. When we love and are loved we experience what God is, even though we can't capture the core of that experience in words. Woven through this universe of matter and energy is a universe of love. Loving God is the closest we can come to knowing God.

We are always known by God. The Bible tells us so many times that God knows everything about us: the hairs on our head, who we were in our mother's wombs. So I like to think that the statement that "anyone who loves God is known by God" means that if we love God, then we experience God knowing us in a still deeper way. The more we love God, the more we are aware of God inside us, of God woven through our bodies and minds. When we love and are loved, we experience God knowing us and loving us and loving the world through us. We can find hope and courage in that even in situations we cannot understand.

Wanting

I've alway been afraid to want anything I couldn't have (that gives people power over you). So I was stunned to read Barbara Crafton write today:

Longing for something is not necessarily sad; it can be happy. It can be anticipatory. It can be energizing: here is what I might do to bring it close, this and this. I may never get my heart's desire, but I can decide just how I will long for it -- passively waiting for someone else to bring it to me, cursing the fact that I don't have it now? Or preparing for it, learning about it, tasting it deliciously, before it even lands on my tongue?

repentance

In Echo of the Soul: The Sacredness of the Human Body, Philip Newell writes:

Part of repentance is to discern within us the goodness that has become buried by evil. It is to identify deep in our mistakes and confusions the goodness that is a more authentic expression of our nature than our failings.

This names more strongly something I have been groping at. I've been trying to see that many of my mistakes and confusions have at their center good or necessary intentions or needs. The things I hate in myself deserve to be healed, not rejected.