Backing Off

Nearly 400 miles into my training for the Boston Marathon, I've been blessed with the endurance to move through twelve weeks of running, the grittiness (and occasional folly) to stride through a chilly January and snowy February, and the company of a training partner who has now officially made it through a winter of outdoor running for the first time. I've managed to tweak my schedule around two trips to Washington DC, and just last Monday, I caught up (while striving fiercely to match pace) with a good friend during a seven-mile pre-sunrise loop through the city and the National Mall.

Yet a familiar danger in my annual marathon preparation is the risk of overtraining or injury, which tend to be related. The latter can occur on its own– I've had my share of near-wipeouts on slick wintry surfaces– but the former is a more complicated matter. Pushing hard in pursuit of a new threshold– clicking through my weekly 800-meter repeats in 2:45, getting under 7:15 pace for a grueling, hilly 18-mile long run– can lead to a breakthrough... or a breakdown. I'm prone to shove my way across some boundaries of time or distance, and often self-critical when I consider backing off and admitting to some sobering physical and mental limitations. Ambition is a great motivator, but rather needy in terms of attention.

So it is with mixed feelings, but also a subtle sense of prideful prudence, that I skipped a run this week, in hopes of bouncing back for a scheduled 20-miler on Saturday. One of my knees had been feeling weird for an entire day– not seriously affecting my walking stride, but clearly telling me that all was not well in this crucial and majestic joint of bones, muscles, and tendons. Another round of snow meant that the track would be unusable once again, a source of mounting frustration. And the marathon lies a mere 24 days away... no time to be courting the risk of a long-term injury.

Frosty greenhouse reflections
College of the Holy Cross, Worcester MA

It's been a good exercise in patience, a virtue that seems appropriate for any number of contemporary situations that also seem to demand urgency. On the third day of spring, the Holy Cross campus remains blanketed with snow. Our nation's budgetary and political climate could certainly benefit from a change in season. Both Pope Francis and Justin Welby were installed this week as leaders of their respective global faith communities, each of which is characterized by great diversity and vibrancy, as well as voices clamoring for strong and positive solutions to troubling issues. I imagine that there are those people who would have wanted these and other changes to have been tackled swiftly and accomplished decisively. Yet there's a sense in which our responsibilities and motivations to labor towards worthy goals shouldn't be equated with the ability to achieve them entirely on our own.

Psalm 130 proclaims, "I wait for the Lord, my soul waits and I hope for his word. My soul looks for the Lord more than sentinels for daybreak. More than sentinels for daybreak, let Israel hope in the Lord." Though I haven't always embraced such waiting and searching eagerly, I have found that the faith it entails has played no less a role than my own determined efforts in getting to a desired point– a new season, a marathon's starting line, or the successful completion of a project. And I trust that the same applies to all situations in which Christ is laboring, inviting not only our participation, but also our patience.