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