Tag Archives: Warren Kay

Finding Your Running Life Balance

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In the final chapter of Running – the Sacred Art we come full circle to the concepts laid down at the onset of this book.  I really like this George Sheehan quote Warren Kay uses to open the chapter:

Don’t be concerned if running or exercise will add years to your life, be concerned with adding life to your years.

We need to find a balance and find a way to enjoy life.  As runners running will be a large part of that enjoyment. I think running for all of us is fun and at some level we all want to improve and push ourselves to our physical limits.  Most of us need help doing that.  I thought I could train for a marathon by myself but at the last minute realized I’d be much better off taking the marathon training class offered by my running club.  That was the right choice.  Not only did I receive coaching, but I also met new people and had others to push me when I was tired and encourage me along the way.

Kay says that it is important for all runners to have a “coach”, but especially spiritual runners.  I put coach in quotes because your coach might be your running group.  I don’t think you need a specific person to coach you but having someone or a group of people to push and challenge you is vital.  I think he used the coach term because it translates better for most of us to the spiritual.  We need someone or a group of people to challenge and push us spiritualy as well as in our running.  This could be a pastor, imam, priest, or other spiritual leader.

In both the running and spiritual realms Kay thinks coaches provide three valuable things:

  1. Proper guidance
  2. Adequate support
  3. The right attitude

Just like it takes pain to become a better runner, it can take some pain and brokenness to become a more spiritual person.  Kay compares it to running up a hill, most people don’t like to do it – requiring an attitude change, you have to adjust your stride – or adjust your life to find balance, and it can be slow going – it takes patience and fortitude.

I think he ties the whole point of his book together with this final quote:

Having made contact with that pat of myself, the spiritual quest – which is the endeavor to find who I am and be truly at home with myself, to establish a healthy relationship with others, and to have a healthy relationship with God – is a natural outcome.

We runners are special and have a unique opportunity to find our way to God through our running.

The last section of the book is a list of suggested readings. I have created an Amazon collection of the books I could find in their selection.

[tags] Warren Kay, Sacred Art, Balance, Spiritual [/tags]

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Running for Pilgrimage

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Tibetans on a pilgrimage to Lhasa; they are ko...
Tibetans on Pilgrimage to Lhasa; they are kow-towing every few steps.
Image via Wikipedia

I think pretty much every major religion requires some type of sacrifice. We are familiar with some of them – giving our time in service or our money as alms or charity. But for most of us I bet the sacrifice of a pilgrimage is a little more extreme or even unheard of.  For many Christians and Jews a trip to Jerusalem or a holy site in Europe is a pilgrimage, Muslims are required to visit Mecca during their life (or at least try) and many Eastern religions have holy sites as well.

Again you ask, how does this apply to running? I’ve never taken a pilgrimage and I don’t think it would be safe for me to run around any of the sacred sites I mentioned above. But combining all we have talked about so far – prayer, sanctuary, meditation, etc – pilgrimage is a major step, think of it as a spiritual quest.

As I was reading the background on pilgrimage in Running the Sacred Art, my mind started drifting to the marathon.  Yes, Warren Kay agrees with me on that and links the two!

To ensure we are all the same page, Kay defines a pilgrimage as a journey made to a sacred shrine for spiritual purposes, such as healing, blessing, prestige, camaraderie, and a source of faith.  He sees three major steps to a pilgrimage – separation from the routine, being at the shrine, and the journey home.  The following quote about pilgrimage really hit me as being similar to many of my running experiences:

You find yourself among like-minded people who are making a similar quest, and through the journey, you recognize and respond to the humanity in them. You are likely to open up easily, talk to strangers and engage them as people, even as friends. This realization of community can become so profound that you may also experience a compassion for the whole of humanity.

Does that sound familiar to you? Let me quickly highlight the comparison of a marathon (or other run) to a pilgrimage.

  1. For many the marathon is a “holy grail” to obtain.  They have a specific location they want to race it at with a purpose behind it.
  2. You go through a long process of training, sacrificing and separating yourself from others to accomplish it.
  3. You often travel to a different city for a race, meeting and interacting with other runners at the expo and pasta dinners.
  4. The level of excitement and community grows as you jam into the starting corrals.
  5. You become separated from the mere mortals (aka spectators) as you run the course.
  6. Everyone running beside you has the goal of accomplishing this 26.2 mile quest and often will help you make it if you stumble.
  7. Crossing the finish line brings ecstatic joy, even as you collapse into the waiting arms of medical personnel.
  8. You become transformed by calling yourself a marathoner.

I want to make sure I don’t take too lightly the idea of a pilgrimage because I have heard from others that it can be a profound experience.  I know in accomplishing the marathon my perspective on running and life has changed even if just a little.  Previously we talked about running as sanctuary, but sanctuary and pilgrimage are different.

Kay describes the difference simply.  A sanctuary run is like going to church – you go regularly because it is convenient.  It can be powerful but is also part of the routine.  A pilgrimage run is something more unique like visiting the tomb were Jesus was buried.  It is unique and not part of the routine. A pilgrimage run could be going back to your old stomping grounds and running an old trail or cross country course from your past, like I did over Christmas.  It was a time of remembering and reflecting, even though I didn’t necessarily intend that at the start.

Have you ever gone on a pilgrimage run?  Could your first marathon experience equate to a pilgrimage?

[tags] Warren Kay, Sacred Art of Running, Pilgrimage, Spiritual [/tags]

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Contemplating While Running

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So you are out for your daily run and “bam” God decides to run alongside you.  What would you talk about? Or you are running along and you see God cross the trail in front of you?  While I don’t think that would happen in a literal sense, I do think that you can see God all around you – not in the pantheistic sense, but in the sense that God created everything and therefore a part of Him is in that creation (similar to an artist).

Continuing the look at Running – the Sacred Art – the next chapter is titled “Seeing God While Running.” Warren Kay alludes to God as an artist who leaves their mark on every painting (creation) which is easily identified by someone who knows about God.  Kay describes two types of seeing, with our eyes and with our brains.  On a normal run or throughout the course of the day we may see thousands if not millions of images and details.  Most of them we pay no attention to, how often do you see and comprehend the same buildings during your daily run or commute? Kay says that we often see things, but don’t let our brains interpret them.  Using the example of an optical allusion, two people may see two different things – a rabbit or a duck – depending on their perspectives.

Go for a run with a watch and mp3 player, now run the same route without either.  Did you see anything different? I think most of us do.  What we see is shaded by who we are: pessimist, atheist, analytical thinker, etc. Do you ever take time to think about God or your spiritual being during a run? I like this quote from page 46:

We can’t see God directly in the trees, mountains, lakes, buildings, and cars. But if we know how to look, we can see God in them, because God is present in them. Just about everything has the potential to become a means for seeing God.

Kay encourages us to multitask while we run. Not in the podcast/music listening way, but in a contemplative way.  His three tasks to “practice the spirituality of running” are 1) following commonsense running advice, 2) looking at the surroundings, and 3) contemplating the notion of the Sacred.  These combined form what he has called contemplative running.

Combining his definitions contemplative running would be: running while self-consciously living in the presence of God.  This type of running gives you the opportunity to “see and experience God’s good creation, which includes your own body.”

What do you think about this type of running?

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