Book list part V

Book List part V

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougal. This is such an interesting book! Who knew there were really 100 mile runs! I didn’t! Now I would love to go to Leadville Colorado and see the race. Don’t think that’s because I’m interested in doing anything so crazy. No, if I can continue to make the 5 mile in Mantua, that will be a feat.  This is a definite must read if just to hear the sordid tale of Nike or was it Adida? As well as the evidence for barefoot running.

Since I got the book on Kindle I can’t flip back through and remind myself of the interesting facts. I don’t like electronic books, but when you have tons of books already living at your house, you begin to see the beauty in at least the idea of the Kindle. (We recently packed up about 200 more books to take in to McKays used book store.)

Anyway, since I don’t have the hard copy to peruse, here is a quote from Amazon:

An epic adventure that began with one simple question: Why does my foot hurt?

Isolated by Mexico's deadly Copper Canyons, the blissful Tarahumara Indians have honed the ability to run hundreds of miles without rest or injury. In a riveting narrative, award-winning journalist and often-injured runner Christopher McDougall sets out to discover their secrets. In the process, he takes his readers from science labs at Harvard to the sun-baked valleys and freezing peaks across North America, where ever-growing numbers of ultra-runners are pushing their bodies to the limit, and, finally, to a climactic race in the Copper Canyons that pits America’s best ultra-runners against the tribe. McDougall’s incredible story will not only engage your mind but inspire your body when you realize that you, indeed all of us, were born to run. 

A must read.

Letters: a compilation of letters from Leon Leishman Hall while serving in the military from 1942-1944, compiled by Stephanie Winzler. This was certainly an eye-opening, humorous, and revealing compilation. The quote:

So Dad, I guess you have the house started on by now, no doubt? Or is it the same old story? Oh just wait till we get this or that and we can’t do this just yet because of that . . . why the hell don’t you start so you could have something to work for, why worry about the financial part of building, it’s the principle of the thing that really counts. Or what other excuse have you now, or you haven’t by chance actually started construction have you? I didn’t think so. Beats Me?

So many stories we don’t know; so many stories people don’t tell--perhaps all for the better, perhaps not. I remember talking with Grandma Hall one day when I was at Aunt Verda’s house, Grandma told me how unhappy she had been being married to grandpa all those years and that she would have left him except for the children. It was a revelation to me, and one I could tell that Aunt Verda didn’t appreciate much. And while I’m sure everyone knew but me, it wasn’t until grandpa was dying and in the hospital that I found out he smoked (and drank coffee).

It was nice to read about Dad’s physical prowess in so many areas, which I knew, but I enjoyed reading his stats as did Mary--also nice that his abilities have continued down the generations.

Book list part IV

Book list part IV

Chi Running: A Revolutionary approach to effortless, injury-free running by Danny Dreyer. Okay, so I read this book thinking I would smoke all the runners in that dam race. Didn’t quite work out that way, but it was helpful in teaching me correct form. I didn’t find the inspirational chapters at the beginning that helpful, but I thought the chapters on form to be very good. And Chapter 3 with the four chi-skills was pretty good too. Basically if you don’t know what you’re supposed to look like when you run, this is a good book for you. And I certainly didn’t. Just fyi you should lean forward from the ankles but maintain straight posture.

“This changes your foot strike to the midfoot and allows your legs to extend as your feet leave the ground, radically reducing the amount of impact on your knees.”

Another invaluable piece of advice is about picking up your feet.

“Pushing off with your toes creates too much up-and-down motion and overworks your lower legs, a main cause of shin splints. Picking up your feet allows your body to run smoothly without bouncing. This will ensure that you’re moving horizontally forward toward your goal, instead of bouncing along like you’re on a pogo stick, fighting gravity with each step.

When you pick up your feet, you’ll avoid many common injuries, including shin splints, plantar fasciitis, and knee injuries.”

"Every movement in T’ai Chi is balanced by a movement in the opposite direction. The same holds true for ChiRunning. The principle of Balance says that if a part of your body is moving forward another part of your body must move to the read to balance it. Since your upper body is tilting forward, your lower body is responsible for the necessary counterbalance. Let your stride open up behind you, not in front of you."

Well I didn’t intend to quote all this, but as I looked over the book, I realized I needed to revisit my form. And I just got some ideas for my Dam Race inspirational missives!

Love Wins: A book about heaven, hell, and the fate of every person who ever lived by Rob Bell. This is a very controversial book in some circles. The first week it came out on Amazon there were over 300 reviews, now there are over 600. I pre ordered the book because I was so excited to get it. I wasn’t disappointed. It’s kind of like reading poetry, and like reading thoughts or ideas you had or questions you asked about life when you were much younger and didn’t know everything. But Bell revisits the questions and makes it all make sense, in a way. Obviously the things of God can never be made sense of in a clinical way. And so, as Bell would say, the long quote:

“I believe the discussion itself is divine. Abraham does his best to bargain with God, most of the book of Job consists of arguments by Job and his friends about the deepest questions of human suffering, God is practically on trial in the poems of Lamentations, and Jesus responds to almost every question he’s asked with . . . a question.

“What do you think? How do you read it?” he asks, again and again and again.

The ancient sages said the words of the sacred text were black letters on a white page—there’s all that white space, waiting to be filled with our responses and discussions and debates and opinions and longings and desires and wisdom and insights. We read the words, and then enter into the discussion that has been going on for thousands of years across cultures and continents.

My hope is that this frees you. There is no question that Jesus cannot handle, no discussion too volatile, no issue too dangerous. At the same time, some issues aren’t as big as people have made them. Much blood has been spilled in church splits, heresy trials, and raging debates over issues that are, in the end, not that essential. Sometimes what we are witnessing is simply a massive exercise in missing the point. Jesus frees us to call things what they are.

 . . .

If this book, then, does nothing more than introduce you to the ancient, ongoing discussion surrounding the resurrected Jesus in all its vibrant, diverse, messy multivoiced complexity—well, I’d be thrilled.”

So, anyway, this is a wonderful book. A book that sees with fresh eyes.

Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church  by N. T. Wright. This is another fascinating book. But unlike Bell’s book--that you can just pick up and dive right in, this book takes a bit more struggling. Wright has written too many books and thought too many thoughts, which is great, but it does leave you thinking you will never really understand, and definitely never catch up. But that’s okay, and I definitely recommend this book. (N. T. Wright is one of the world’s top biblical scholars, a prolific author and the Bishop of Durham for the Church of England.) And so the quotes:

“First, what is the ultimate Christian hope? Second what hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present? And the main answer can be put like this. As long as we see Christian hope in terms of “going to heaven,” of salvation that is essentially away from this world, the two questions are bound to appear as unrelated.”

“From Plato to Hegel and beyond, some of the greatest philosophers declared that what you think about death, and life beyond it, is the key to thinking seriously about everything else.”

In the early chapters Wright does a review of hymns and poems to reveal that Christians don’t really know what they believe about life after death. Mostly they believe that heaven is “essentially away from this world.” In chapter three Wright covers 7 modifications of early Jewish belief made by the early Christians; these modifications give evidence of the literal resurrection since these changes in thought would not have occurred without some very real and startling occurrence. (Some scholars believe Christ’s divinity was made up hundreds of years later. Not so, says Wright, and he gives the 7 interesting variations to common Jewish thought of the era.) I don’t have time to cover these, except maybe the 7^th: “Nobody in Judaism had expected the Messiah to die, and therefore naturally nobody had imagined the Messiah rising from the dead.” Well, it’s hard to explain this, you’ll just have to read it.

However, I do want to move on to one point in Chapter 4 that I quite enjoyed. Wright points out “four strange features shared by the accounts in the four canonical gospels. These features, [Wright] suggests, compel us to take them seriously as very early accounts, not as often suggested, later inventions.”  These features are all interesting, but I will mention only the second:

“the presence of the women as the principal witnesses. Whether we like it or not, women were not regarded as credible witnesses in the ancient world. When the tradition had time to sort itself out and acquire the fixed form we already find in Paul’s quotation of it in I Corinthians 15, the women were quietly dropped; they were apologetically embarrassing. But there they are in all four gospel stories, front and center, the first witnesses, the first apostles. Nobody would have made them up.”

Ah Paul!  Anyway all four of the strange features are interesting. But you’ll have to read them for yourself! The whole book is excellent.


pics: Christmas dinner 2011; appetizers are put in shot glasses that have been partially filled with ranch dressing! Very cool. Mary taught us this from her gala events at Harvard.