Month: October 2017

This week, 11:43 — my legs were heavy, but I can tell that I am walking a smaller proportion of the mile than I had been, week on week.

Yesterday morning’s run/walk was good; I came in at 11:50. My legs felt mostly all right, but I couldn’t breathe as well as I’d have liked. Still, progress, and I’m not complaining about that.

This morning was a neat 12:00 mile. Since I started at thirteen minutes a few weeks ago, I figure that by next October I’ll be running three-minute miles.

My wind is improving, but is still a big obstacle to really running. This morning, my knees were stiff, a bit sore, and generally reluctant to help me move along. Still, I’m making progress.

I didn’t start the timer on my phone correctly, so I don’t know how long I took this morning, but I’ll call it 12:15 ’cos I’m moderately sure I did better than last week.

As I went, I pondered how my various components were handling this experience. I was looking for a body part to blame — as if it would be most interesting if I were generally fit, with the exception of this or that bit). I thought ‘Well, I’m easily winded, so limited lung functioning might be the problem’; but then I observed that my quads were not doing a great job of lifting my legs, and my right hamstring started sending me gentle warning messages, and even my calves and feet were not jolly contributors to the overall running experience. After thinking it over for a few seconds, I reached the startling conclusion that I am just plain out of shape. Which is, after all, the reason I started run-walking a few weeks ago in the first place.

One of the cliches of twentieth-century theological reading of Scripture was that radical critics ween’t critical enough. I’ve seen that most often as an interrogation of the critics’ historical discernment — ‘You can’t say that miracles are impossible, because miracles are reported even today. You need to criticise your own modernist presumption that miracles can’t be historically true.’

I’m generally ready to poke biblical modernism, but I would take the ‘not critical enough’ gesture in a different direction. That is, the prevalent historical interpretive discourse persists in treating the most recent historical interpretations as self-evidently ‘true’ or ‘correct’. But if we have any historical awareness at all, we recognise that today’s self-evidently true conclusions are tomorrow’s risibly out-dated error. The biblical interpretation industry invests contemporary historical discernment with an authority incommensurate with its inevitable transience. Miracle stories may be accurate or not, but the restless necessity that interpretive judgement keep changing is a matter that any casual observer can verify.

Same mile, same run/walk, same 12:35 as last week.
My thigh muscles felt weaker than last week, and my legs were leaden. I actually felt like running on Wednesday morning, but gave it a miss; this morning I was less motivated, and the run was hard.