02.10.10
Running for God
Running at Innsbrook is a special kind of experience.
I’ve run in a lot of great places. Chicago, Sanibel, the Rocky Mountains…but Innsbrook offers a fantastic combination of pleasure and pain that is just sort of rare.
The hills at Innsbrook — that would be the pain part for those following along from home — present some fantastic challenges. Sometimes they are straight up, other times our hills will present a long slow burn (literally). There are a couple hills that I swear are a half mile long. One particularly insideous hill is a short steep climb that leads into a turn followed by a long slow burn. That hill has been likened to a relationship in which you thought you where there for fun and just when you think all is good, your partner starts talking about commitment. Hill running inspires some funny thoughts.
The pleasure part of Innsbrook running more than makes up for the pain of the treacherous hills. Every steep hill at Innsbrook is crowned with a vista, or a lake view or a ridge run through a wooded glade. The views at Innsbrook are beautiful in every season and seemed to be heightened by the runner’s endorphen-laced brain. The woodland scenes, beautiful on a normal day, are inspired poetry to chemically enhance sensibilities.
Who wouldn’t want this — all the fun of a mental pharmacopoeia and none of the high cost, health risks and possibility of a new housing situation with a roomie named Bubba.
Honestly — after some thought, I wouldn’t want it…at least not for the runner’s high. I can do without the endorphin rush. I’ve that found a more mild version of runners’ high induced by a cold beer, imbibed on our a-frame deck in a hammock on a spring day is a pretty good substitute. And the trip up into the hammock is a much gentler exercise than trotting up one of Innsbrook’s formidable hills. And they say gentle exercise is good, right?
So if not for the brain chemicals, why run? To build up fitness? Why, sure, until the moment when you have to drop out of your routine for a couple weeks and six months of progress is gone! I will never understand why it take so long to get to a point where you feel like you are running well, and yet it can be lost so quickly. For fitness, I’ll take walking any day.
No, over all, there’s only one good reason I have ever come up with for running, I do it for God. And that is probably not what most people were expecting to see — that is unless you read the title.
We have a wonderful classical music festival here at Innsbrook — and I have become acquainted with more classical composers in the last ten years than I thought I would in a lifetime. I’ve learned much about their music and I can even pronounce some of their names. (You wouldn’t believe how Kodaly is pronounced.) But my favorite composer really hasn’t changed.. as Radar O’Reilly once so aptly put it…”aaaahhhhh…Bach”.
Bach’s music is the perfect combination of mathematical precision and unimaginable beauty. It is that moment when all of physics come together to make a sunset and you forget you are watching light bending over the horizon and then refracting through particles of water and then stimulating the nerves in the back of the eye and finally sending electrical impulses to the brain. What you see are glorious reds, fiery oranges and yellows lighting up the sky. What began as a complex physical and chemical reaction becomes beauty in the mind of the beholder… and that’s what Bach does so well. All of those perfectly timed and chosen sound vibrations come together to create the most unimaginable beauty — truly form from chaos.
And what, you say, does that have to do with running for God? Well what Bach did doesn’t have anything to do with it…why he did it absolutely does. Bach wrote the letter s.D.g. at the end of each of his compositions — “Soli Deo Gloria” which in Latin means “To God alone be the Glory.”
He believed that everything we do should be done as well as possible to honor God. He believed that everyone can create music or art worthy of God. Bach said, “Anyone can do what I did, they just have to work as hard as I did.” He also famously said that “composing music is easy, you just have to play the right notes at the right times.”
Bach wrote these letters as his “signature” on many of the over 10,000 pages of music that he wrote.
As I think about running, I think about Bach’s idea that whatever we do, we do to honor God. When we stretch, when we push ourselves, when we do something as well as we can, it does bring us out of ourselves and we focus on a higher purpose — and we sort of lose ourselves as we blend with the symmetry of the universe.
We use our brain, our body and our spirit to create beauty or ideas… and that beauty is found in the oddest places… in a well-pitched fastball or a sailboat riding the edge of the wind or a horse and rider working as one or even an out-of-shape 45-year-old slogging up a gravel road in Warren County, topping a hill and taking in a crimson sunset over Lake Aspen. It’s easy to disappear into the glory of finding a second wind as you open your stride crossing a dam with sparkling lakes on each side, alone with the sunlight on your back, the smell of a warm breeze coming off the lake and the pat, pat, pat of your feet keeping time with the woods’ sounds.
Carl Sagan said, “We are a way for the universe to know itself.” And whether it’s planting a garden, running through the woods of Innsbrook or writing the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, we are at our best when we endeavor not for ourselves but as a tribute to the wonder of creation.
s.D.g.