It’s a perfect afternoon. There’s a cool September breeze, and I’m about a mile into my run. I meet two, three, and four runners going the opposite direction. I give a friendly nod to each one. Then I realize why running is so different now than it was 45 years ago.
Flashback to high school. I’m breaking the tape at the finish line for the two-mile track meet, once again. Since I’ve already broken the school record for this event, every best time is another school record. The next day in the hallways, a teacher now and then nods approvingly at me as I pass by. Other kids know of my accomplishments.
Never die
If you could read a young man’s mind, you’d learn that the world is his oyster. He thinks he will never die. If he’s the athletic type, his body grows stronger, bulker. He conquers one physical milestone after another. The sky’s the limit, man.
I ran several marathons as a teenager and a half-marathon up Pikes Peak in 1972. My best buds were also runners on the cross-country team. At 22, I rode my ten-speed bicycle some six hundred miles alone, from Illinois to Alabama in cold temperatures and rain, camping along the way. It was a loner’s trek for challenge and adventure.
But now, sporting the grey (whoops – white) hair of one looking back on those years, running means something different. I may grow stronger, but there’s a limit. I won’t run in the Olympics with twenty-year olds, if that were ever possible. Despite my good health, for which I’m thankful to God, there will come the end of the road on this earth, when the finish line will mean being pulled along by six pallbearers up the aisle to Christ’s eternal altar of sacrifice.
Honor the vessel
And yet, God has given us bodies by which to glorify him. As we get older, shouldn’t we keep in shape, and eat right to honor the vessel God has given us? And yet how many older folks do we know who keep up a regular exercise program? Have most of us given up?
I haven’t been too bad with exercise over the years. Between home repairs, occasional basketball games, and picking up and playing with our two children, I have stayed in fairly good shape.
But I’ve stepped up my game. It all started when I reconnected with two old friends who were also in their 60s. One was the founder of a large financial company who runs four miles a day at a ten-minute mile pace. Wow. Another one, the head of a nonprofit printing operation, runs 25 to 40 miles per week, depending whether he’s training for the next 5K or 8K run.
I felt challenged by these friends. Or maybe I wanted to counter the aches and pains of getting older. Or I just wanted to feel more alert, stronger for that last hour of the day when I’m firing off my latest proposal for my marketing business.
Saintly fitness heroes
And why not? Catholic heroes like Pope St. John Paul II have shown us the way. This athletic pope enjoyed skiing and hiking. When a Vatican administrator asked him why he was building a swimming pool, he said something like, “Don’t you want to have the Pope around for a while?”
Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit (see 1 Corinthians 6:19). Western lifestyles have led to personal atrophy over the years. Because of labor-saving devices, we no longer chop our firewood, or pump water by hand as my grandmother did. Even keyboards have a soft touch compared to the old hammer blows we had to deliver on manual typewriters! So we have to make up the difference.
Let’s develop what the ancients called mens sana in corpore sano, or a healthy mind in a healthy body.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states,
The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature. (CCC, 365)
Now if I can just find someone to run with now and then.
