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 7th: “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.”
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.
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