AKMA’s Random Thoughts

This morning, I really did not want to run. I didn’t feel achey or even especially leaden, but just weary through and through. Hey ho, I did some cursory warm-ups and started on my way, hitting a pretty strong pace on the out mile. A little before the end of my first mile, though, I felt that I was running out of gas, and the rest of the run was unpleasant in the extreme — again, not in terms of pain, but gasping for air and forcing my legs to do their best to keep up the pace.

Along the way, I realised that this was the reason I stopped timing my runs in the first place. The felt urgency of contant improvement, of never letting my time get slower but always faster, makes me… not so much anxious (an internal feeling) as driven (felt as an external necessity). There’s no reason in the world that I should be obligated constantly to improve my running time; I’m in my late sixties, I’m already in plausible health so far as I know, and being able to make a two-mile run at all is a significant victory over where I was five or six years ago, when I started by skipping rope in the back garden on James Street.

At the same time, I do relish the sense of some sort of progress, even just a tiny bit, so as to feel as though I’m not in exercise stasis. So I think that I may ratchet back my timing even more, perhaps just once a week or only when I feel like it, so as to allow mywelf to just run most days without pressure, but to have a check-in every now and then. We’ll see what happens.

I got home in significant discomfort (again, not pain, not torment, but overall discomfort) and had trouble hitting the ‘Stop’ button of the timer. When I could make the clock stop, it showed a time almost a whole minute faster than my previous personal best; that two miles pulled my rolling average down to 18:38.

Fruit and coffee, some continued preparations for this morning’s ‘spiritual snack’ session on the history of Lent, then in some order a second cup of coffee and some toast, cleaning up, I”ll lead the Sung Eucharist at St Helen’s, then the short talk, then home to do more work (I owe homework to the Diocese and also to the Sodality), and heaven permitting, a good rest. I could use a break — this part-time work, as all part-time workers know, can be a backbreaker.

I started my morning run at speed, but my legs were very stiff and my upper legs sore, and as I pushed to get some momentum and limberness, I accidentally did something off-kilter to the timer, so when I noticed halfway through, I just shut it down and took it easy the rest of the way.

Coffee, hot breakfast, Morning Prayer at home.

And a joke at my own expense: last night Margaret was making a late-evening pudding to supplement the Subway GF sub that constituted her railroad dinner, and she handed me the yoghurt to put back into the fridge. I put it back onto the upper shelf (according to the transcendent refrigerator law of ‘Always put items onto the smallest shelf that they’ll fit onto’), but it didn’t quite fit onto the shelf; something further back pushed it off the shelf when I let it go, and I reached back in a flash to catch the falling pot. Sadly… I mishudged the catch, and was just trying to push the (flexible) yoghurt pot back into the fridge, on a shelf — but that had the effect of squashing the (nearly-full) pot against the shelves as it fell, squeezing the pot and spewing yoghurt all over the kitchen. Margaret and I cleaned up, with some laughs and chuckles, but when we came downstairs again later she spotted another splatter of yoghurt… and another… further and further from the fridge. This morning she came downstairs and, standing in the front hall, said ‘I can’t believe the yoghurt reached even here!’ (It hadn’t. She was having a laugh on me. I am expecting to take a walk to church with her, and for her to say as we’re corssing the Iron Bridge, ‘Look! There’s even yoghurt here!’

So, a non-timed run this morning (good thing, because my legs were weary after my stretching them out yesterday morning for my timed run), bade Margaret good morning as she made her way to Wolverhampton for a catch-up with the Feeneys, fruit and coffee, cleaned up and went to Morning Prayer, then to my station in the Square at R&R, back to the Parish Centre to check messaages, home to feed the ladies their lunch (and to eat my own), then back to church for the ecumenical World Day of Prayer service (not live from the Cook Islands, but the chain of the day’s prayer begun from the Cook Islands), back to check for afternoon messages, and home at last to feed the ladies again, and to rest my bones.

The Ash Wednesday service last night went well, I think. Certainly we achieved a truly impressive success in ash/oil mixture for clear, bold forehead crosses; I’ve never seen the like in all my years of ordained ministry. My homily will be below the ‘More’ fold.

This morning’s run — 2°, thank you very much — was a good pace, a good time. Rolling average declines to 19:01 (and next run will probably lower it further, as the fifth time in my average will be bumped out of my rolling window with the next run, and it’s a time that’s a good bit slwer than I’ve been running for the last two weeks). This may be common knowledge among real runners, but it seems to me that I do better to increase the pace of my steps rather than the length of my stride. Sometimes my stride opens up more than others, but pushing my stride further seems to have less benefit than making myself stride more often.

Coffee and fruit, cleaning up and dressing for Morning Prayer, bus to Oxford, tutorials morning and afternoon, then home to my sweetheart and her dogs. Continue reading “Last Night, This Morning, and Afternoon”

Non-timed (good) run, coffee and hot breakfast, cleaned up and went to Morning Prayer (St Helen’s Wharf barricaded because of a gas leak; that’ll be unwelcome for the 10:30 service), splendid meeting with an adult baptisand, then helped Margaret restore her data to her new phone, wandered to R&R because I left my folio there. Now to mark an essay or two, edit my Ash Wednesday homily, and come home to relax.

‘When the revolution happened I realised how much everybody hated me and I started to wonder why. Then I thought, would you rather have a country governed by the principles of liberty, equality, fraternity and social justice or one governed by an amoral, self-serving, tax-avoiding, privately educated elite?’
— Marie Antoinette, in I’m An Aristocrat, Get Me Out Of Here! by Mark Dawson; Gonzo
Moose Theatre Company @ Pegasus Theatre, Oxford, December 2013.

I don’t know what happened yesterday, but it looked from this side like a spam attack. I tried to login several times, but couldn’t break through. I did run gently yesterday, -1° thank you, non-timed, and hit a pretty good pace for much of the run. I had a lot of emailing and editing and writing to do for the parish, and ran out of steam late afternoon. That was frustrating, since I wanted to send back some marking.

This morning I took a timed run in a relatively balmy 0°, another good pace (though at first it felt unlikely — legs and lungs both warming up slowly), bringing my rolling average to 19:08. Don’t get excited — it’s hard for me to imagine my time will keep improving at this pace.If I do well, I’ll be slogging along in the mid-18s for a long time.

Coffee, fruit, Shower, Morning Prayer (and I’ve been forewarned that there’ll be a pastoral matter for my attention after MP), marking and work on Ash Wednesday sermon, and I mean technically it should be a day mostly off, the idea of which will taunt me from the sidelines till I just give up at the end of the day.

A second -1° day in a row, and my run felt disappointing. I didn’t feel strong or limber at the start, and I ran out of gas in the last third of a mile; it was all I could do to keep running all the way to our door. At the time, I thought that this was the point of an average; there are highs and lows, and this would be a high time to balance out recent lows. Much to my amazement, when I hit the timer when I got home, I had reached a personal best by a significant margin. As a result, my running rolling average crept down to 19:19 (the cumulative average since I started timing in January is still 20:28, so…).

Mattins with homily at St Nicolas’s at 11:15, then hurriedly to the Parish Centre to lead the Faith Forum on ‘Incarnation.’ When I get home after that, I’ll collapse in a heap — though I’m preaching at the Ash Wednesday service at St Michael’s, so no slacking off.

I ran into a new (to me) inaccurate citation this morning: the one about plato claiming that empathy is the highest form of knowledge. No, wrong, incorrect. It caught my ear because I felt confident that it was both not the way Plato thought about knowledge and not the way he’d have said that if indeed he had thought it. In order to pass it along that way — without attribution to a specific source — you would have to have no ear for Plato at all. Someone just liked a pop-psychological slogan, and the attribution to Plato made it seem more profound, more ancient, and more authoritative. It turns out, though, to just make you look like someone who knows neither about Plato nor about web slogans without a cited source.

Unless you can find a cited version of an alleged quotation, your overriding assessment of it must be that it’s false. The Web is just too big and too shallow (alas!) to trust unsourced quotations at all.

I took an untimed morning run today; just as well, because my right knee was irritable and my whole body felt resentful about the bitter -1° weather. Hot breakfast, coffee and another coffee, and working on both a homily for tomorrow (on Moses’s face, not on Paul’s ill-conceived metaphor based on Moses’s face) and my parish presentation on Incarnation. Doing the background work for the Incarnation talk gets me excited and voluble, so I have to steel myself to focus on tomorrow’s homily.

Whose idea is this return to cold weather? I know, ‘March comes in like a lion…’, but honestly, when I checked the weather app before my morning run, the temps in my morning running time were consistently below 5°. It’s blessedly good to have longer days, but it would soothe my spirit to have a bit more warmth concomitant with the light.

This was a timed-run morning (that’s another ‘Whose idea was that?’), so I put my head down, gasped and wheezed through two miles, and made it home in a good time; the rolling average stands at 19:24 now. Coffee and fruit, cleaned up and dressed for Morning Prayer, I’ll have a meet with our training LLM, then home for the rest of the day (sermon prep, putting together my presentation on the Incarnation for Sunday’s Faith Forum). Today’s New Testament Seminar will be held online, saving me the three hours or more getting into and back from Oxford. Hey, I might even indulge in some pleasure reading.

I took a non-timed morning jog/walk (we had a spell of rain exactly in the middle of my run, so I sheltered under an overhang for a while); home to coffee and fruit, shower and dress for Morning Prayer, then to Oxford for three tutorials and a talk by Jarel Robinson-Brown. Then, home at last.