Well, I figure I need to post something as I am keeping a blog here.
Here is another piece of evidence that we are moved to do what we do by virtue of being worshipers and that we are all in pursuit of some glory. What we do is an expression of what we want and what we want is a product of what captures our hearts affections.
I was reading on Geoff Roes blog recently, Fumbling Towards Endurance at akrunner.blogspot.com/. The guy kicks ass. He just won H.U.R.T 100 in Hawaii, widely considered in ultrarunning circles to be one of the toughest ultras out there. He set a new course record. He hadn't even focused on this race as a goal. It was a tune-up race for the upcoming season. What I'm trying to say is the guy is freaking hardcore and talented and fit.
When you read his blog, he runs by PRE, perceived rate of exertion, not hr. Several top runners do this such as Dean K., David Goggins, Karl Meltzer, and others. Well, I read his blog and said, I want to do that too. Just run. Forget all this hr monitor crap. I went over to Runningahead.com to the Swamp, a group of experienced runners to talk about it. Result? I went out yesterday and ran without my hr monitor alarms on that would normally signal me to slow down and keep my hr down. I did this for three miles, before I was tired. I then turned em back on and ran the last 2.5 slowly again. The point: I was captured by this guys training style and success and wanted to be like him. Couple that with frustration over the slow pace of low hr training and bammo, I ditch my normal approach and do something different. I became convinced however that if I want to keep running, I have to do most things slowly, and my hr monitor helps me run slow for now, so I'll keep it up.
Now, another thing to note. Those 3 miles of tempo running made my pace faster today. I've noticed this before when I did this. I will run slowly all weeek and throw another 1.5 miler in there next week as a tempo run to see what happens. I felt bouncy and light today, legs felt strong. 20:1 is the ratio of easy mile to tempo from Van Aaken but he doesn't advocate tempo runs till 2 years after base building. I will do it again next week and see what happens. Later everyone, or anyone that is an nobody has left any comments on the blog.
So, I've noticed a trend in my running lately.

Want to lose weight? Eat less.

A little bit on diet. I have been obsessed with diet and nutrition for a couple of decades now. My interest began in bodybuilding, to achieve a certain look. Occassionally I'll find a bit of paper with calculation on it for macronutrient ratios or for the correct number of grams or servings of carbs or protein. This was quite an obsession with me, though I didn't recognize it. I would eat every 2.5 hours to ensure I wouldn't canabalize muscle. This routine became quite binding. I would bring my food with me in a cooler to ensure I had enough when I needed it. My wife and brother in law still joke about how on a trip from Philadelphia down to South Carolina how at 4:00 am I pulled out a small tupperware container of lima beans and tuna to eat.
I read Gwen Schamblin's The Weigh Down Diet at some point. I had realized I was in a bondage to food prior to this. It used to concern me that I would not consider doing a fast for religious reasons out of fear of shrinking or losing muscle mass due to lack of food intake. After reading Gwen's book, I realized I was making an idol out of appearance. I was not serving the Lord, I was serving myself and bowing down to an image in hopes of what it could give me. In short, men would fear me and women would want me. The eating plan was just a means to an end, or the fruit of my desire to look a certain way. It was caring more about what kind of person I was and wanting to be devoted to the Lord that began to break the obsession. I wanted my heart to be committed to God and not to any thing. I wanted to serve Him, not me. I was equally enslaved to food as the most obese person; we just approached it differently for different reasons but both the obese' obsession with food and mine are equally self focused and equally binding.
1 Corinthians 10: 31 says, "Therefore, whether you eat r drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." I began to contemplate what it means to eat unto the glory of God. I believe, obviously, that we are created and that God gives us food to sustain us, to give us pleasure, and to celebrate with. It's not for nothin' that when God and man are reunited for eternity that God throws a party and a feast. Yet, this is not how I was approaching food. After reflecting, I figured that God put signals within our bodies to clue us in to when to eat, and when to stop. I began eating only when hungry, feeding my body when it was asking for food. I would trust that God would give me what I needed. I also stopped fearing all processed foods. I went on a burger binge it seemed like. Every time I went out to eat and was really hungry, a burger and fries just sounded RIGHT, and they tasted oh so good. Eating began to become an art. It's fairly easy to wait till you're hungry to eat. It's harder to know when you are full, or, rather, to STOP when your belly begins to tell you you have had enough instead of ignoring it and eating more because it tastes good. I have realized that I tend to overeat because I enjoy the taste of the food. In that, I am no differnt than the children of Israel in the desert when they were craving the garlic and leeks of Egypt. Their desire was enough to distort their perception of reality, to forget God, and to long to return to Egypt. Think about that. They were SLAVES, mistreated slaves at that. Their desire for tasty food warped their perception, literally turning them into fools, leading them to forget the redemption they had experienced and the God who had saved them and to long to return to circumstances that were oppressive and life stultifying. I am the same. Just one more bite, it won't hurt me. Yet, that bite is in service of me and my appetites, and definitely not to God's glory.
What about that phrase, to God's glory? I think it means when we live unto God, for his pleasure, follwing His will and not our own, we look different, attractive (not just physically but primarily in our character) and people notice, and they are drawn to God. We can then point to HIm as the source. We are to make Him look good in how we live. Following our hunger and satiety does that. It balances our weight and leads us away from the dangers of obesity and overindulgence. Exercise shoud be added to the equation as well as we were created in the garden to DO something, to move about. When we follow our hunger and satiety and exercise, our bodies will look good, we will be healthy, and God will look good through us for His wisdom in how we were created.
Weight loss can be accelerated as well with intermittent fasting. Our bodies are meant to store excess energy in times of abundance, or overindulgence, and to access that energy and burn it for energy when none is taken in in the form of food (God's wisdom on display once more). Through brief (24 hours) intermittent (1-2 times per week) fasting, our bodies are given the opportunity to access the excess and use some (burn off body fat) If we are doing resistance training a few times per week our muscle mass will be retained. In addition, research is showing that calorie restriction and fasting in particular offers many health benefits. Of course it does, it brings glory to God pointing out his wisdom in how we are made.
So, I have found some serious freedom in regards to food. The change began in my heart with wanting something else more than to look good, but instead to honor and serve God. It then worked it's way out into my behaviors and emotions. Of course, as we are all like trees according to Jesus ( Mt 7:15-21). What begins on the inside is inevitably displayed on the outside. Praise be to God for his Wisdom and for sharing it with us. I love to get very hungry, then try to find the best possible food to eat, indulging my tastebuds and praising God for his goodness. I hate feeling overfull, semi-stuffed. Eat relatively whole foods as this is what God made, and enjoy your food, but serve the Lord first in your heart and you can regain a healthy relationship with food.

Biblical vs. Systemtic Theology

At the end of this month I will be speaking at a men's retreat for a church from New Jersey. Both pastors attended Westminster Seminary as did I and really like the counseling approach they learned there and that is conducted at the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation. I counsel there part time and my wife works there full time. They contacted the agency last year for a speaker and ended up with me. They wanted Ed Welch but he is too big now, and busy, for a small retreat for a local church. The retreat went well last year, both for me and the men who attended. This year they would like to get a little more specific on how they can live in relationship better with one another. Last year I just gave them too much information. This year they would like me to get more specific on how to love each other better. 

   I met with the pastors for lunch this week to discuss what to present at the church. They are both great guys. They are thoroughly Calvanistic and I am a committed Arminian. To their credit, they found this out last year after the seminar and still invited me back this year. I told them I was pleasantly surprised and pleased. They stated they discussed it but don't have any concerns as I didn't say anything heretical last year ( in their estimation). The associate pastor and I got into this lengthy discussion about the relevance and importance of systematic theology. I didn't agree, though as he talked, I could see some of the merits, in defending orthodoxy from heresy for example. However, for application to living, I just don't see that much applicability. Biblical theology yields much greater self understanding and knowledge in living. It is dealing with scriptures more accurately I believe as well as the Bible is not a systmeatic theological textbook. It is a story. God chose to communicate to us in this fashion for a reason. We should read it as a story and find our lives interpreted by that story as they are imbedded in that story. I found the whole discussion rather anxiety provoking as I felt like my friend and I were talking past one another. I just think systematic theology doesn't meet people where they live whereas biblical theology does. They identify with subjects in the story more and parables and story's just communicate more than doctrine does. I think biblical theology is more relevant as it is the form the scriptures take and in which God chose to reveal himself to us. 

Exercise is not just exercise. Nothing is just anything.

The last week evidences what I was talking about before when I mentioned motivation, passion, and worship. I had been reading on Mark's Daily Apple blog about nutrition and exercise. He follows an evolutionary paradigm that informs his anthropology. He believes man is genetically the same as a man from the paleolithic era ,roughly 20,000 years ago (I think). That informs his ideas about exercise and nutrition. Anything requiring processing, such as grains and tubers for example, are not suitable for food. Instead, men are hunter gatherers, eating only what they can kill, pick, and gather. That doesn't leave a lot of room for starches, and can cut into an endurance athletes performance. He's fine with that as he believes that endurance exercise is inherently unhealthy anyway and unsuitable for humans. He is a former elite marathon runner as well. Anyway, I was enamored with his ripped physique and I do love to lift weights. The more I read, the more I wanted to follow his exercise regime. I don't buy his paradigm, but there is a lot of research that shows fruits, veggies, meats, nuts and eggs with little to no starch in the diet is good for one's health, as well as high intensity, brief exercise such as weight lifting and sprinting.  So, this played out in how I ate and exercised over the last week. I missed a couple of days of running and hit the gym for a couple of days. Yesterday I ran sprints on the trails, which was new and fun (and tough). Tonight I hit the weights again and ran a mile on the treadmill. 

   This approach is less time intensive than ultrarunning. The ultrarunning takes 10 hours a week of training. The weightlifting takes much less, maybe 5-6. This is appealing too as I've been trying to cut back time on my hobbies to devote more time to worship, study, and writing. That coupled with the above led me to throw off the ultrarunning and pursue maintenance fitness. It is very hard though to give up the running. I don't like running on the roads, but running in the woods is just plain wonderful. I almost always love it. It combines so much of what I love. It instills a sense of awe, worship and wonder in me. It keeps me healthy, and allows me to engage in mini adventures. The training keeps me fit to do the adventure races. To think of giving it up is like a death and really is hard. It actually hurts, like saying goodbye to someone you love. Yet, I want to serve the Lord and prepare my self in my free time to be ready to offer people truth and love when the moments arrive. I have a half dozen articles to write that have been born out of my counseling that I need to get written so others may benefit. 

   So, the battle continues to know how to best use my time. What makes this more complicated is that these are just hobbies, my exercise habits that is. Yet, because of my flesh, or the "flesh operating system" as Tim Keller names it, these threaten to become my identity, the focus of who I am and what would define me as opposed to my worship of and service to God, or loving God and loving neighbor, or being rightly alligned in the universe....I'm not quite sure how to phrase it. I am dependent, needing life and identity from outside of myself in relationship to God and neighbor. My flesh, the world, and the devil however all conspire to undermine that reality. 

    Exercise is not just exercise. Everything is an expression of your heart, of what you want or desire. Everything you do you do towards some end. We are teleological beings. As a member of God's already/not yet kingdom, my life must be about his kingdom. In losing myself in subservience to Him and his kingdom, I find life.  I find this true in conversations (seeking to love, know the person, listen, understand, then offer truth instead of voicing my own opinion) and in my work ( working, not goofing off) as well as in my hobbies (unto the Lord, not for an alternative identity).

    So, I'm not sure what I'm going to do still. I will wake up and do the important rather than the urgent, according to my priorities. I will wake up and worship and commune with the Lord, then write, then exercise on my lunch break. That way, I'm doing the most important things first. I've always said that exercise should be second, as it allows for the pursuit of all else, but I'm not sure. Still working on that one. I'll keep posting, if anybody is reading. I might have to change the name of the blog :0

New Year

So, here is the first post of the new year. Thought I might post some goals for the year.

As I stated previously, I'm following the Van Aaken method. In line with this, I plan on running every day of the year. A run must be 1 mile long to count for the streak, though the daily mileage will almost always be longer. This will allow me to obtain my main goal for the year-consistency of training. I tend to lose my focus on running when I lose my passion. This is true of course because we are all worshippers, and what we do is an expression of what we love and serve. I am passionate about running when I am gripped by something exciting about running. For example, reading a good race report or a good book. So, to maintain consistency, I need to maintain my passion. This can be difficult because running is a secondary activity, not my identity. My identity is as an ambassador and servant for the King. My running is just a hobby. In line with my identity are important things I have to do that can cut into my training, such as sleeping and writing. The trick is to stay motivated in my hobby while keeping it relegated to a hobby. It's easy to be passionate about it when I let it become too important. It then cuts into my work time and family time as I spend too much time reading and studying about running. 

   So, consistency is my primary goal. Race wise, I would like to complete at least one 50K or one 50 miler per month. After doing this for a year, then I will tackle a 100 next year. I may possibly do the Pinhoti 100 this year as my inaugural 100. I wanted to do it in '08, but wasn't consistent enough in my training. 

  There it is. Oh, and this is a picture of Yvetta, my dog. She's an Entulbucher, or Swiss Cattle Dog. Tough girl. 

New Year