Five Weeks Out
I am five weeks out from my main spring events – Bald Eagle Gravel Grind on April 14, a 46-mile grave bike race in the central mountains of Pennsylvania and Hyner Ultra 25k on April 20th.
I have written about the marathon monks of Tendai Buddhism and while my regimen is not this strict, my days start early with lectio divina, prayer and breakfast. After the kids go to school, it is usually a 1 – 2 hour training block, focusing on cardio. This week’s post is going to look at the spiritual practice of a contemplative forty-six-year-old day and look at how you have time for self-care and making caring for you a spiritual discipline.
Ultra endurance training is an eating competition with movement involved
0445 – I turn over and see that it is 0445, I slip out of bed and turn off the alarm clock set for 0530 with the false hope that I will sleep a few extra minutes. If my wife is home, this usually extends my sleep to 0545, and sometimes 0600. Most days, I get frustrated and get out of bed by 0515. Thus starts my day.
After stumbling around to get to the bathroom, I make my way downstairs, drink my 12 ounces of water, and take my allergy pill and creatine supplement. Eating first breakfast and then engaging in lectio and prayer finish off the first hour of my day.
What follows is eight to twelve hours of organized chaos. As I am in the season, peaking for April – June events, I will train anywhere from 1.5 to 3 hours a day during the week and 6 – 10 hours on the weekends. My workday is usually around 10 hours long.
A Day of Food
Breakfast this week has been one of two meals:
Yogurt Protein Bowl with Granola, Coffee
Cottage cheese and oatmeal waffles with Peanut Butter, Coffee
Second Breakfast:
bacon and egg sandwich on
bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit.
Lunch:
Protein Bowl – hard boiled eggs, 6 oz of sirloin or 8 oz of chicken breast, grape tomatoes, 1 oz of Dubliner Cheese, 15 g of almonds, coffee
Afternoon snack:
Trail mix
Picky Bar brand food bar.
Dinner:
Mashed potatoes, gravy, ground beef and green beans
I went out to dinner with my bride on Wednesday and I had Steak Birria Tacos and Yellow Rice.
Evening snack has been sweet potato tater tots, a chicken burrito and protein shakes
Breakfast and Dinner on Wednesday of this week
A Day of Hard Things
This was what Wednesday of this week looked like. This is a typical two a day for me.
The Spiritual Practice of Doing Hard Things
Do or do not, there is no try. Embrace the Suck. Mind over Matter, if you do not MIND, it does not matter. Mantras are important to me. These three in particular.
Waking up at 0530 to train when it is 0 degrees outside, sleeting and snowing with a 12 mile an hour wind sucks. It sucks the life out your soul, it can be emotionally draining and downright life threatening when you are out in that weather for longer than one hour. Mind over matter.
In 2004, on the eve of what should have been the beginning of my career as a pastor, I received devastating news. My church was not going to support my endeavors of being a pastor. I could have cut ties then, but naivete and stubbornness kept my career on life support until it finally died in 2016. With this death came the end of my active involvement in organized religion.
I was stubborn and worked with what I could for four years before making a hard decision, going back to school for a second master’s and starting over. As if this was not enough of a challenge, I had two more children and started ultra endurance running. ADHD has its downsides.
Yogi Berra once said, if you come to a fork in the road, take it. The spiritual practice of doing hard things is one that teaches humility, patience and engages in the spiritual practice of attention or attentiveness. Mind over Matter.
In 2008, I started over with a second Masters, graduating four years later with distinction. In 2018, I would enter private practice full time. It took me fourteen years to re establish myself. Mind over Matter.
Post Traumatic Growth
It is easy to complain about our past slights, wrongs and betrayals that have happened to us. I know, I am a therapist, I help people manage these emotions every day. I do a lot of hard things frequently, mostly physical, but there are emotional struggles as well.
A common phrase in the world of trauma work is post traumatic growth. Post traumatic growth is simply the positive psychological change that some individuals experience after a life crisis or traumatic event.
There is a lot of talk about PTSD and often in my office, this is what everyone wants to bring up. How the bad thing that happened to them destroyed their lives. We have a joke in one of the training communities I am in when we go through a hard training that sucked, we simply laugh and ask, “but did you die?”
Joking aside, trauma can be horrendous, but we still must ask the question, “how did you grow?” I will always reflect on Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl and the lessons they have taught me about their experiences in the concentration camps.
In psychology and therapy, we can evaluate one’s growth from trauma using what is known as the Post-Traumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI) (Journal of Traumatic Stress, 1996). This scale was developed by Tedeschi and Calhoun is the It looks for positive responses in five areas:
Appreciation of life.
Relationships with others.
New possibilities in life.
Personal strength.
Spiritual change.
As a clinician, these are five areas I look at addressing when creating treatment plans with clients.
The Spiritual Practice of You
When we take time to make ourselves a spiritual practice, we can begin to tune into our authentic selves. We are all a work in progress. God knows us and loves us as we are, we owe it to ourselves to cultivate the same love for ourselves as God has for us.
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