Why run?

Last night’s good intentions are laid out on my floor. My running leggings. Merino wool pullover. A decent pair of socks. It’s 5:33 am, my alarm has gone off, and I’m counting raindrops. Maybe this is a sleep-in morning. I roll over and promise that I’ll find time to run later.

When I do wake up, I need to pack the kids’ lunches, answer a few emails, switch the laundry, do an interview, more emails, squeeze in some writing, and before I know it, school’s done, and it’s time to pick up the kids. Where did the day go? I genuinely enjoy running, but it’s hard to make the time for it.

Safari run

I was a third-year university student when I first started running regularly. It wasn’t my idea. I’d become fast friends with a Minnesotan exchange student, who, like me, thought that a semester at Daystar University in Kenya sounded like the right kind of adventure. The showers were cold 80 percent of the time, and so were the eggs in the dining hall. A first-thing-in-the-morning run made both problems palatable. Not to mention the views. Herds of zebras and wildebeests grazed lazily along the five-kilometre dirt road running to campus; the occasional giraffe loped along the horizon.

My friend told me that running wasn’t just a hobby for her. It was something she was raised to see as a faith practice. Eating well and exercising, along with reading the Bible and praying. To her, regular exercise was a non-negotiable part of her faith.

This was new to me. Sure, I’d attended a Christian school with “Whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God” emblazoned on the lobby wall somewhere near the trophy case. But I thought it meant math exams, basketball tournaments and concert band. Not something as mundane as going for a jog.

Exercise, defined as unproductive non-competitive movement, wasn’t a big part of my life. As a university student, I found it easy to forget my body even existed. I remember rationing my sleep as I got closer to exam week, measuring my days in the number of words I could write and feeding on anxiety. I did take occasional breaks to kick a soccer ball for my intramural team and volunteered a lot. If I was up early, it wasn’t to go for a run; it was for a prayer group or to put the finishing touches on an assignment. Life was brimming with good things, but life-giving physical activity wasn’t one of them.

My semester in Kenya changed all of that. A good run meant a good appetite, and I was far less anxious. But then I came back to B.C. and stopped running.

Running is hard

It wasn’t until about three years ago, as a mom with a four and two-year-old, that I found myself waking up with the urge to run again. I knew a few moms in my church who were runners. I caught sight of one flying past my house right around the dinner hour one day. I yelled out, “You look like you’re running away!”

“I am!” she yelled back, her face earnest.

Motherhood is way harder than I expected. Harder than an icy shower and cold eggs. Why make it harder by running? Unless the running is what makes the hard stuff seem not so bad.

As I put on my shoes for the first time in years, I felt like I was playing dress-up with tear-streamed toddlers as my audience.

“It’s just a run, or a run-walk, we’ll see,” I reassured them, while Jakob, my husband, peeled our daughter out of my arms. “I’ll be back soon.”

After that, two or three mornings a week, I started getting up at six am to meet a fellow running mom in the dark.

“If it wasn’t for the fact that I knew you’d be waiting for me, I wouldn’t have come,” was our standard greeting.

The community

For a lot of runners, the social part is key. It certainly is for me. Recently, I learned about something called Parkrun. Terrace isn’t a big enough place to have one, yet, but in 60 other communities across Canada, thousands of people participate in a free, timed race every Saturday. Globally 400,000 people Parkrun every week. It’s a professionally run race that doesn’t cost a cent and is welcoming to runners of all abilities. And if you hear a regular Parkrunner talk about it, it’s like they’re describing church.

When I asked CC Board Member Sarah van der Ende why she started running, she told me about the sense of community she experienced on her first race day. “I was captivated by the energy. I remember mingling with the crowd at the starting line and hearing the gun go off [. . .] It is absolutely thrilling to be surrounded by so many like-minded people.”

For Sarah’s 30th birthday in January, she ran 30 kilometres with 16 friends: five joining for the whole distance and the rest for segments.

Sarah is now training at least 10 hours a week for her first marathon, which means she runs even when she’s not in the mood. Thanks Sarah, I feel very called out. She writes, “There are no good or bad days to run. There are good days and bad days, and I need to run through them all. I can’t predict what race day will feel like, so I need to be prepared.”

Embodiment

Being a body is a blessing. A blessing that’s easy to forget for those of us who spend a lot of our workdays on a screen. But for Christ-following people, to forget that we are embodied is to forget God.

“It means something that the Eucharist, this lasting ritual of the presence and memory of God, is a physical nourishment as much as it is spiritual [. . .] the body of God entering our bodies,” writes Cole Arthur Riley in her book This Here Flesh.

Our embodied God created us to be embodied, too. I guess that’s why it feels so good to get outside and run, walk, roll and stroll, whether you’re by yourself, with 16 friends or with 400,000 strangers. I would never have started running if it weren’t for knowing that a friend was waiting for me in the dark with her shoes on. So if that’s you, if you’re waiting for someone to invite you, here’s your invite: Everything else can wait for a minute. Grab your shoes, let’s go!