This Run’s for Jack

Okay, Tracy, this update’s for you. 

So I have been blog-absent the past couple months, and for good reason.  You know you are crazy busy when you feel guilty sleeping/working out/taking showers/putting on makeup because by doing so you’re neglecting homework.  However just today I turned in the last of my three 3000 word papers to complete (along with 1000+ pages reading and 10 hours of Hebrew translation … yeah, came up a little short on those) my TWO HOUR A-quad class.  Yes, two hours.  Two hours of just as much work if not more than any four hour class I’ve taken in my program thus far.  But that is not what this blog’s about, so we’ll desist with the axe grinding.

Actually, as much as I felt overwhelmed with the workload in that class, I’d have to say it’s one of the best I’ve ever taken.  Probably the closest to my hermeneutics class in undergrad, it’s given me a lot to think about.  And write about.  So hopefully that will come soon.

But on to this blog.  This blog’s for Jack.  So for the past year I’ve worked part time as a test prep tutor, helping high school students improve their ACT and SAT scores.  This summer I was assigned to a wonderful family that I immediately clicked with over a mutual love for running.  It turned out that Sharon had lost her husband to Melanoma four years ago and had since started a running charity to raise money for Melanoma research and awareness.  Teams raise support and then run in marathons and half marathons all over the country, and in the fall, the charity sponsors a local 5K race called “This Run’s for Jack.”  One afternoon tutoring session, Sharon came up with a handful of old race shirts and a stack of brochures, encouraging me to run this year’s race and anyone else I could convince as well.

Over the summer I had trained for the Chicago Half Marathon in September.  Training went well, although it took up a lot of time.  However, race day was kinda sucky.  It was hot (for Chicago in September) and humid, and the course was really boring.  I’m not a fan of there-and-backs, and running one alone sans music is really not fun.  I didn’t meet my goal, although I did beat my first half marathon time from a few years back.  Anyway, I was glad to see the day come and go and was thankful for the added time in my schedule … remember the whole guilt trip for working out?    But the thought of a 5K was appealing; workout-wise, it’s good for me to have goals I’m working toward.

So I ran a couple miles here and there, just figuring the 5K would be a fun race.  I convinced my cousin to run with me, knowing that she’d push me come race day.  However, the week before I got a message on Facebook announcing the results of a 5K some friends of mine in Oklahoma did.  They did a great job, a couple of them placing in their age divisions.  And here’s where my competitive spirit raised its pretty head.    One of these people who happened to place, I happened to have dated, and suddenly I happened to want to beat him.  I told my cousin as much, so that was our goal for race day.

So fast forward to race morning.  My plan was to get up early and take a pre-race shower.  When I told my roommate this, she looked at me like I was completely ridiculous.  What is the point of showering right before you’re gonna get sweaty and gross, you might ask.  I’ll tell you the point, friends.  It’s hot water.  It’s a miracle waker-upper.  And it doesn’t hurt to look clean and put together at any gathering with potentially available physically fit males, either.    So the whole shower thing was the plan, but at 7:11 that morning I woke up to a text message from Jayme asking where I was.  The late night scary movie with the roommate the night before proved to be my undoing as evidently I had slept through my alarm.  Frantically I raced around, throwing on clothes and grabbing a piece of cinnamon raisin bread and some gatorade as I head out the door, however forgetting my super-fantastic GPS watch.

Anyway, we fortunately made it to the race site with time to spare, and Jayme was able to pick up her packet with no hassle.  And then we raced.

Glen Ellyn in the fall is incredibly beautiful.  The course meandered through neighborhoods with elegant old houses and trees with leaves of every fall color imaginable kissing in the middle of the street.  Without my watch to tell us how far we’d gone and how much time had passed, we were left guessing until we saw the clock at mile one.  I was a little worried because I thought we’d started too fast and didn’t think I’d be able to keep up that pace.  We ran up some difficult hills and made up some time on a fabulous long downhill just before rounding a lovely little lake.  We circled back to the park where the race began and strided in that last .1 of a mile.  And let me just tell you how thankful I am for my speedy little cousin, because we finished over two minutes under our goal.

And as if that wasn’t enough, it turns out that we placed!  Jayme got 3rd in the women’s 20-24 division, and I got 2nd in the women’s 25-29.  So it was a pretty good day for us; now if we can just convince our family to run in the Amarillo Turkey Trot with us on Thanksgiving Day …

Pre-Race

Post-Race

Two Reasons I’m Thankful for Summer Hebrew

This time last week I was driving to Aurora with Sharon for a celebratory Sonic slush.  Occasion?  I was done with summer Hebrew.  Even though I was iffy on the grammar/syntax portion of the final, I figured I at least passed (although a couple days later I had a dream to the contrary).  After four weeks of classes, four days a week, four hours a day, I was totally deserving of a cherry lime slush w/ extra real cherries.  And it was Sharon’s first Sonic trip.  And it was happy hour.  And it was great.

Now that the class is over, and I’ve had a week to somewhat relax (except for the whole working three jobs and leading small group), I’ve noticed a few positive changes in myself as a result of summer Hebrew.  #1 – I am a workout fiend.  #2 – I am a morning person.

For number one I can thank Hebrew vocab.  Every day in class we had a quiz focused heavily on vocabulary.  For each class we had about 40 words to memorize (assuming a base of 200), so that by the end of the four weeks we had memorized over 600 words.  So almost every day after class, I would go home for a light lunch before heading over the SRC to kinesthetically learn vocab.  I’d hop on the elliptical for an hour which was pretty much the perfect amount of time to learn 40 words.  With a quick review the following morning before the quiz, I was usually pretty prepared.  So thank you, vocab accountability quizzes, for contributing to my fitness.

For number two I can thank Hebrew homework.  Okay, so to make a long story short, I am not so great with Hebrew.  I took three semesters in college and did okay, so I figured even four years later I didn’t need to start completely over.  Well, I did.  Instead of beginning again in first semester, I jumped back in at the second and was way behind.  I played catch up all spring, never really catching up.  So going into third semester this summer, I was a little apprehensive.  The first night of homework we were assigned, I didn’t finish.  I stayed up late, got up early, and still didn’t finish.  In the following days and weeks I got faster at translation, which helped, but there were still several nights that I would be too tired to finish.  I figured that if I got up really early the next morning (and considering my class STARTED at 8:00 this meant REALLY early) I could work much more efficiently than late at night.  And I did.  But that meant several mornings of getting up at 5:00-ish, even a couple mornings before then.  All of that to say, that even after a week of no early morning obligations, I don’t think I’ve slept in past 6:30 a single day.  Which is CRAZY for me, because I am such a night person and have been since childhood.  My parents had a terrible time of waking me up in the mornings.  “Five more minutes,” was my early morning anthem.  I think I even had a pair of pajamas with the phrase written on them.  However, on those rare occasions that I have gotten up early, I always love it.  Early morning runs, early morning prayer, early morning road trips, whatever.    I love, love, love early mornings.  It’s just the waking up part that I hate.  So for the past week I’ve been trying to go to bed decently early so as not to alter my new early morning wake up inclination.  So thank you, Hebrew homework, for giving me a reason to get up in the mornings.

Ha … I thought I was back to blogging at the end of the semester, but Hebrew sure kept me from it.  I can’t actually give all the working out credit to Hebrew; another post on that is soon to follow.  The mornings, though … all Hebrew.  How long is it supposed to take to form a habit?  21 days?  Yep, got that one down after week three. 

Get in Shape, Girl!

My friend’s husband recently wrote a blog about his health and fitness goals for the upcoming year which made me realize I had yet to write about my own as previously promised.  Now there’s a bonus incentive, however, because if I link to his post in this post, I might get a free book.  Yay.

Anyone my age or a little older perhaps may remember the following:

Oh my word, did I LOVE anything and everything “Get in Shape Girl!” as a child!  I had the leg warmers, the arm bands, and the weird hula hoop with a bar across the middle … I’m still not sure exactly what I was supposed to do with it.  All that to say that even as a child, I was excited about physical fitness.  Granted, I may not have always loved PE or sports (that came a little later), but at thee years old I was in dance classes and kept it up through my senior year of high school.  I played sports in middle school as an alternative to PE and happened to fall in love with volleyball which I played through my senior year as well.

And then came college.  All the sudden, life was totally different.  There was no more volleyball or dance to keep me active.  There was cafeteria food and late night Taco Bueno runs.  The cumulative effect was not good.  I started gaining weight my freshman year and didn’t stop until the middle of my senior year when I finally got serious about becoming active again.  I started doing step aerobics while home over Christmas break, and continued with a class at OBU that spring semester.  I started using the elliptical while I read magazines.  I built up my endurance in fun ways so that when I started running with some friends the following year, I didn’t have to start at ground zero.  Running has since become my favorite form of work out, which is odd in that I used to despise it.

But working out is only half of it.  There’s the food side as well.  I was a VERY picky eater as a child.  I went through a phase where the only thing I would eat was Chef Boyardee Beefaroni.  Go ahead, make the gagging noises with me now.    I hated most vegetables, too.  Thankfully, my parents didn’t keep much junk food in the house or I would have been an obese child, I’m sure of it!  Like I said, I was a pretty active kid and I would say around average in terms of weight.  I don’t ever remember thinking much about my weight until middle school.  I hit puberty early and looked older and more developed than most of my skinny-minnie prepubescent friends.  In 8th grade I started to think I was fat (which I absolutely was not), a self concept which wasn’t helped by a particular thoughtless comment about my weight made by a classmate.  Talk about the power of words.  I started counting calories and working out as much as I could, and honestly, if not for a fortuitous suggestion from my mother, I undoubtedly would have followed down the road so many other young girls have taken and turned to anorexia or bulimia.

Just before the end of my 8th grade year, my mom suggested we do a weight loss Bible study together.  The thought of dieting was not appealing to me because I just knew I would have to eat things I hated.  (My childhood pickiness hadn’t evolved that much.)  However, the premise of this diet/Bible study was that one could eat whatever he/she wanted as long as it was only done within the bounds of hunger and fullness.  And while I have since come to have serious qualms with this particular Bible study’s use of Scripture and oversimplification of nutrition, it could not have come at a more opportune time in my life.  I soon realized what a hold food had on me, idolatrously so at times.  I learned to eat smaller portions and stopped eating out of boredom, and as a result I lost about twenty pounds.  I started my freshman year of high school feeling good about myself and my appearance.  Volleyball helped me keep my weight within about a ten pound range, and even though I sometimes felt “fat” in comparison to other girls my age, I look back at pictures of myself in high school and think, “What the heck was I thinking?!  If only I could look like that now!”

So if college was bad for physical activity, it was worse for eating unhealthily.  I developed some really bad habits in terms of food choices and portion size.  I remembered everything I had learned in that BIble study but was unable and often unwilling to submit to its principles.  Food became more of a spiritual struggle for me than it had ever been.  As I gained more and more weight, I would look at myself in the mirror and not even recognize the person looking back at me.  I would see pictures of myself and not believe it was me.  I was a skinny person inside a fat person’s body, so for a good portion of my college days I never felt like myself.

Starting to work out again my senior year helped, at least in not gaining more weight.  I tried to only eat when I was hungry and then to make healthier choices, but it was extremely difficult.  My roommate and I did the South Beach diet for two weeks, and it was perhaps the longest two weeks of my life.    I have learned over the years that I am NOT a dieter.  If I don’t like something, I am not going to force myself to eat it.  I cannot deprive myself of my favorite things indefinitely.  After college I lost weight on and off through exercise, but nursed bad eating habits on and off as well.

A couple years later I saw a friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in several months, and she looked amazing.  She hadn’t been overweight before, but she had lost a little weight and basically just looked fit.  This was right at the peak of my dissatisfaction with myself in terms of weight loss.  I had come to learn that I could somewhat control my weight through exercise, but the poor nutrition choices I had been sowing into my life for years would someday catch up with me no matter how hard I worked out.  I wanted to be healthy, not just skinny.  For myself and my future family, I wanted to develop lifelong healthy eating habits.  After talking to my friend, I was excited to start her particular program because it focused on life change and not just weight loss.  I started eating small portions several times throughout the day focusing on lean protein and complex carbs.  I tried foods I thought I didn’t like and learned to love them.  I reintroduced weights into my workouts (which I hadn’t done since high school) and did varying intensity cardio training.  Maybe my favorite thing about the program was my free day.  One day a week I didn’t have to work out and could eat whatever I wanted.  I lost weight, had more energy, and felt so much better about myself because I was making long term strides toward health and fitness.  I felt like this was something I could keep up indefinitely because it didn’t feel as much like a program as it did a lifestyle.

That was about two and a half years ago, and I am still a strong believer in this way of eating and working out.  However, there’s the knowing and then there’s the doing.  I know that I am equipped to make the right decisions, but there’s still that mental (and for me, spiritual) battle to be fought.  This past semester I started back to school, and it was all to easy to fall back into my old college habits.  I kept up with running some, but by October the demands of school and work gobbled up any time I had for working out.  Grabbing food on the go was convenient, and I soon abandoned all efforts at making healthy food selections opting instead for what was easy.  And of course, the inevitable happened.  I gained weight.

So I am once again at the place I was when I encountered my skinny friend, with a desire for health and fitness even amidst the stresses of graduate school.  It’s been three weeks in, and I had forgotten how much I actually like living this way.  I say living because that’s what it has to be … lifestyle change.  So here’s to Resolution #1: to make significant strides toward long term health and fitness … to “Get in Shape, Girl!”

I resolve …

1. To make significant strides toward long term health and fitness.  I won’t elaborate here because I intend to address this one blog-wise in the next few weeks.
2. To take a sabbatical from television.  Over the past few years I’ve watched less and less TV, although this year being back on a student schedule has allowed for much more mindless consumption, especially in the afternoon hours (think Full House re-runs and Family Feud … yeah, I’m not proud).  I don’t want to be ridiculous about this one, however; I plan to follow the spirit of the resolution rather than the letter, especially when it comes to social occasions.  In fact, I am already exempting Thursday nights because LOST is a million times more fun with fellow addicts … ooh, and The Office.
3. To read more fiction.  This flows naturally out of the aforementioned resolution, as I would like to spend more of my free time (haha … fellow Exegesis students laugh with me now) reading for fun.  I would especially love to go back and re-read the books I “skimmed” in high school and college.  I started “To Kill a Mockingbird” over the break in solidarity with my brother who’s about to read it for school this spring.  I had forgotton how incredible it is, and it’s only reinforced my desire to read more.  My junior year of college I went on a “Greek Retreat Weekend” with my Greek Readings professor and about ten other students.  One night at dinner Dr. Roark asked us the first book we remembered reading and loving.  After several people offered their responses, he said something to the effect of, “You don’t get enough real life without reading fiction.”  More than anything Greek related about that weekend, I remember his oxymoronic statement and have since been amused to discover its truth.
4. To give my best effort toward course work.  My first semester back in school after four years off was a good one, but I definitely know I can do better.  Work was especially hard to balance (and I’m sure will continue to be so), but I think with a semester under my belt I am much better prepared to give my best effort this semester.  This will include:  not missing any classes unless decidedly planned in advance, i.e. because of travel, etc.  (However, I will not skip in order to finish homework for other classes or because I forgot to turn my phone – and thus my alarm – off vibrate, as were the few occasions for skipping this semester), actually being early for every class (five minutes is my goal), getting to know and have a good relationship with each of my professors, and finally (and perhaps most importantly) getting research done AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
5. To put myself on a path for significant spiritual growth.  I’m actually collapsing several resolutions into one here.  In so many ways the past semester has been the best of times and the worst of times, and honestly my time with the Lord has often been of the worst category.  It’s not just my “quiet time” that I’m concerned for; I have not sought to walk in the Spirit.  I’ve drunk shallowly and thus lived shallowly, but I am beginning again to crave that intimacy and depth.  Ever since my freshman year  when Richard Foster’s “Celebration of Discipline” was assigned reading in my Intro to Minisitry class, I’ve been unable to escape the book’s opening paragraph: “Superficiality is the curse of our age.  The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem.  The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.”  I don’t want to fall into a legalistic agenda rewarded by check marks and gold stars; I want to BE different.  BE transformed.  So tangibly, over the following year I would like to:

• Read the bible through chronologically.  It is ridiculous that I am a graduate student in Biblical studies and have yet to read my object of study in its entirety.  For some reason I get sidetracked after making it all the way to Judges; I get through the hard part and then give up and go back to familiar NT passages.  I have started several reading “plans” beginning in middle school and up to this past spring, but have yet to complete any of them.  So hopefully by trying something new (the chronological approach) and by making my goal public, this will be the year.
• Study, but more importantly actually practice the spiritual disciplines.  I want to experiment with those I have been more hesitant to practice and go deeper in those I have more confidence in.  I want to glean wisdom from those who have practiced them both now and well into the past.  I want to become the deep person Foster argues is so desperately needed.
• Attend Wheaton’s theology conference this spring over Spiritual Formation.
• Go on a personal retreat.  After reading this blog a few months ago, I was reminded of this blog I read awhile back, and the combination of the two stirred up a similar desire within myself.  I don’t know what it will look like or when it will happen, but I’ve also felt the call to “Get thee to a nunnery.”

Alright, so those are my five … well, more like ten crammed into five.  I am a lover of lists, especially lists in blog form, so this was a fun one.  What about you, friends … what are your resolutions this year?