Category Archives: Barefooting

The End and the Beginning

New Year’s Eve asks us to look back into the past year in order to assess where we’ve been, and it simultaneously begs us to look forward with hope that our future is brighter than, or at least as bright as, our past. Everybody and their brother is posting their reflections and their resolutions, so I figured why shouldn’t I. At the very least, this post will give my friends a heads up about the resolutions I’ll be breaking come January 3rd or 4th.

Obviously, if you’ve read this blog in the past year, you’ll notice that the past 365 days haven’t been a cakewalk for me. While my life has been incredibly blessed, I’ve had a really difficult time recognizing my blessings and reveling in them. My goals for this year in no particular order were:

  1. Eat paleo.
  2. Watch less TV.
  3. Exercise in a variety of ways (including swimming) while running (barefoot) a race a month.
  4. Meditate.
  5. Read more, including the Bible and Common Prayer.
  6. Play and find my inner hippie again.
  7. In short, do things which bring me joy. Relax.

Listing my goals out like that reminds me of Benjamin Franklin and his list of 13 Virtues or John and Charles Wesley’s tabulations of their moral behaviors. I suppose if I am going to list my resolutions or goals, I should keep track of how well I am doing with them in some manner. I don’t. I ate mostly paleo and lost about 50 pounds (I did gain some of that back this holiday season!). I can’t say I’ve watched less television; in fact, I may have watched more (Oh, Mariska, how you tempt me!). I did exercise a lot, but not as much as I would have liked. I finished my first triathlon, so that’s pretty decent. I totally left out meditation and prayer for a good portion of the year. I felt so disconnected, and I am not sure whether my lack of meditation caused the disconnection, or if I didn’t meditate because I felt disconnected. Either way, I didn’t spend enough time alone with my thoughts and God. I read a lot more, but not the specific texts I mentioned I would focus on. I played more, and playing was lovely. I did things which should have brought me joy, but they didn’t always. Instead I feel as if I just focused on the negative, even when I swore I would focus on the positives. I’m a realist; it’s difficult for me to be to be positive. I am going (to try to) to fix that this year. #PollyAnna2012 will become #joyful or #merrymaking or #radicaljoy for this year.

In short, I want this year to bring less of this:

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And much, much more of this:

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Speaking of this year, here are my goals in order of their current importance to me and my mental and physical well being:

  1. CULTIVATE JOY: Do things which me bring me joy. Embrace the random. Enjoy the mediocre. Don’t stress over things I can’t control. Live in the moment and revel in those I spend my time with. Put down my phone or my other distractions and really love and live the moment.
  2. CONSUME CLEANLY: Eat better food. Drink less cider and more water. Put into my belly those foods which will best fuel my body for physical activities and mental joy. I’m going to attempt to jumpstart this with a new Whole 30, beginning on January 7. I want a clean slate and a clean body for the new year.
  3. EXERCISE: Exercise in a variety of ways (including swimming) while running at least a mile a day. Finish a Half Ironman triathlon before my 39th birthday. Carpool or walk or ride my bike to work every day. Use the body and the buses for transportation as frequently as possible.
  4. BE INTENTIONAL: Watch no TV, except an occasional movie. Use social media for no more than half an hour each day. Replace the time spent on nothingness and meaningless conversation with strangers with pursuits of intellect and kinship. Meditate, pray, read, and contemplate theological and academic things. Practice silence. I also would love to finish this dissertation.
  5. PLAY: Play and find my inner hippie again. In the spring, I’ll start a disc golf club at school.
  6. STAND UP: Begin standing up against injustice in a real and tangible way. Use grace and love to resist those things which are unethical or immoral. Help the Burris GSA, Prism, to be more active and visual by bringing meaningful activities into my students’ lives.

These are my hopes, dreams, goals, resolutions for 2013. I hope to use Sunday mornings to write in this space about these goals and about current events. I will begin tomorrow morning, though it isn’t Sunday, by writing in depth about that first goal of practicing joy. Practicing joy will no doubt be my most difficult goal, but for me it is by far the most important. I can’t have another year like this year. Any suggestions you have about cultivating joy are welcome! How do you cultivate joy?

For some running inspiration, join us with this challenge:

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Blessed: Cleansing. Teaching. Dissertating.

For eleven days now I have been getting up at around 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning to run, and for eleven days now I have been eating only meats, vegetables, eggs, nuts, and some fruits and drinking a hell of a lot of tea and water. I am almost halfway through my first real Whole 30 and my first real Run Streak. Yesterday and today I feel almost euphoric. My mood is excellent, my body feels fast and alert, and my intellect seems to be firing rapidly. Yes, it has taken some adjustment to run while also cleansing my body, and I am sure my little cells are probably thinking I’ve gone mad, but the trade offs are worth it. While doing a Whole 30, weighing yourself is frowned upon, but my clothes are fitting so much better, I just had to know. I’ve lost ten pounds in eleven days. Crazy really.

I finally got my new Altras in the mail. I’ve worn them twice for a total of four miles. After those first four miles, I will say I don’t think they’re exceptional. Maybe I just need to get used to them, but they seem heavy compared to my Vibram Five Fingers or my New Balance Minimus. They also seem to constrain my feet in a way that neither of those pairs of shoes do. Maybe it’s just because I am not used to them. I did order them for longer mileage, so maybe on Saturdays when I start doing my longer runs again, I will see the benefits of the cushioning. Right now the taller, though flat, sole is awkward. And, honestly, they are some of the ugliest running shoes I’ve ever seen. Unless, of course, you count Hokas.

I hope I can lose this last 40 pounds, so I can just run “barefoot” all the time!

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Teaching is going well right now. I have one class that is difficult. They don’t listen, they talk constantly, and several of them are just straight up disrespectful. Working at a school like Burris has caused me to forget about how to deal with students like that. There are so few seriously disrespectful students there, that when I have one, it’s as if I lose my damn mind and forget how to deal with it. There are some students in there who want to learn. There are so few that I had almost written off the entire class, until I saw a quote on a friend’s Facebook wall. The quote said, “When you say a situation or a person is hopeless, you are slamming the door in the face of God” (Charles Allen). As soon as I read it, I realized that was my problem. I had given up hope, which is something I had always promised myself I wouldn’t do in education. No matter how difficult some students can be, losing hope really does nothing except make the situation worse. I spent yesterday asking myself, How can you motivate these students? How can you be someone who challenges them into making something of themselves, whatever that may be? Who are you to slam the door in the face of God? Yesterday was pretty humbling for me, and I hope I can continue to follow hope and, above all, to give grace.

I will confess that I am struggling to keep up with all of the paperwork that I have to keep for the State of Indiana. I have to keep several binders worth of papers from parent communication to extra-curricular activities to data to blah blah blah in order to prove that I am actually doing my job. What I think is totally absurd about the paperwork is that (1) there goes a hell of a lot of trees, (2) anyone who knows me knows I go above and beyond both in the classroom and out, and (3) I feel as if I spend some of the time I used to spend on planning and grading (you know, being effective) on pushing paper around on my desk and into binders. I’m literally making myself less effective to prove how effective I am. Grrr.

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With all of the blessed craziness with paperwork for school, I am still finding time to work on my dissertation almost every morning. I have read a lot of new information about food, foodways, cutlural understandings of food, commodification, exchanges, and various other related topics. I’ve read Paradise, Bastard Out of Carolina, and The Antelope Wife to start with, and I think those my be my three different chapters. Paradise will be the basis for a chapter about the Eucharistic food exchange, Bastard Out of Carolina will the basis for commodified food exchange, and The Antelope Wife will be the basis for the third chapter about proper food exchange. The overarching idea is consumption of the Other and how people exchange food for identity, sex, and spirituality. Those are the foggy bits of how this dissertation is going to go down.

Tomorrow is my first writing instead of researching day, and I am pretty nervous about it. I’m not sure why, but I get paranoid when I am required to put my fingers to the keyboard, instead of putting my pen to the page to take notes. I know what I see happening in these novels, but I always get nervous that I won’t be able to prove it well enough or write about in a way that others can understand. I have to take a step back and remind myself that I write every day. People understand what I write every day. I can do this.

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I do have to say that I am blessed with many friends. I am blessed with a good body and a good mind. I am blessed with a loving family and an amazing partner. I am blessed with a job and a home and food to eat. Simply put, I am blessed.

Please Don’t Drop Over . . . But I Wrote Something

Summer is here and with it comes my renewed sense of who I am. I know I am cyclic; I think who I am follows a certain strange circadian rhythm. (Incidentally, I just discovered through a quick Wikipedia accidental search that I might be the lucky owner of a circadian rhythm sleep disorder.) No, it’s more than simply a circadian rhythm; my body follows a seasonal rhythm as well. I frequently look back through my blog posts to see what I was thinking about in previous years and previous months. Sometimes the blog posts from the same weeks in different years are surprisingly similar. With the exception of last summer, which I believe to be the darkest night of my soul, summer is usually a time of growth, joy, freedom, and redefinition for me. I am most likely to start a diet, an exercise program, or some new venture in the summer. I grow restless and get a sense of wanderlust when the weather gets hot. This summer has been no exception.

I began eating Paleo/Primal in January of this year, so my diet had already changed considerably. I haven’t once looked at paleo/primal as “a diet,” so it’s been much easier to continually eat this way. Also, I have noticed that I am intolerant of most of the food I was shoveling into my face as a vegan. I can’t eat corn (serious diarrhea). I can’t eat wheat (bloating, hives, mouth reaction). I can’t eat soy (serious hot flashes). And I can’t eat much dairy (tired muscles and achy joints). The dairy, though, is typically the cheat. I can’t get enough Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. It’s almost paleo/primal, right? Right?! I find that if I stick to eating whole, clean foods like meats and fishes, coconuts, nuts, eggs, vegetables, fruits, fermented ciders, and sparingly using raw honey and maple syrup, I feel so much better.

The side benefit of eating this way, for me, is never having to count calories, always having lots of energy, always having food options that appeal to me, and feeling full with very few low-blood-sugar moments. When I was vegan, I felt good, but never amazing, because I always felt just a little tired. I couldn’t easily go out to eat with friends, unless I wanted to be a total pain or my friends were also vegetarian or vegan. I found myself counting calories, because many processed vegan foods can get really caloric really fast. I counted calories, too, because I could never get full. No worries about feeling full with paleo/primal eating. I can eat breakfast and not be hungry again until dinner.  When I was vegan, my blood sugar would drop at least twice a day to the point where I was really grumpy and lightheaded. Also, as a vegan I always missed eating meat. I haven’t, not one time since I’ve been paleo, found myself fantasizing about a black bean burger or a slab of tofu, though they are both enjoyable. Frequently, when I was vegan, I would desire ribs or a burger or a salmon steak.

Basically, I feel like I’ve moved into a new life and life more abundantly. I’m still not cool with factory farming, and I never will be. I try to get all local, grass-fed meat and eggs and wild-caught fish, paying close attention to the ways the animals are raised, harvested, and slaughtered. This is the consolation I make for taking another life, which I still feel is sacred. This facet is the most difficult for me about paleo/primal, but I feel so much better I don’t ever want to look back. And, from my fattest point three years ago (256.4 pounds) I have lost 46 pounds total, but just from this January, I have lost 30 of those pounds. My pants size has dropped three sizes, and I bought my first pair of Calvin Klein shorts at Marshall’s when I was in Florida. I can run, bike, and swim with much more ease and speed. It’s really refreshing and beautiful.

I have set two new goals for myself: run a trail marathon by the time I am 40 (July of 2014), and complete a triathlon of some length by the time I am 39 (July 2013). Summer affords me the time and light to get in a lot of exercise, which may be why my mood gets so much better. Every morning I get up at 5:30 or 6 and either run to the pool and swim a couple of miles, or ride my bike 20-ish miles. This summer I decided to do two-a-days, which include ab exercises or kettle bell workouts in the afternoons. I find myself doing circuits, hoping to add in other body-weight exercises. I’m a big fan of minimal equipment. Today, as I sit here writing this, my abs are still on fire from the medicine ball workout I did on Monday, but I’ve read enough to know that you’re abs can take some punishment. Every day punishment, so I plan to carry-on this afternoon before joining the summer solstice bike ride that leaves from Pita Pit this afternoon. I also play disc golf, because I can and because it’s fun.

I know.

I sound like a total meat-head who can only talk about diet and exercise, but I consider those to be two of four basic building blocks of my life. Diet. Exercise. Spirituality. Intellect.

Another basic building block is my faith. Summer gives me time and inspiration to devote to spending intentional time with God. As I did with Lent, I am utilizing Common Prayer to facilitate my morning worship and prayer time. I take great comfort in the ritual of liturgy and prayer, and I find I can connect more completely, more fully with God, when I structure my prayer as a call and response with the refrain, “Lord, hear my prayer.” In my prayers, then, I can be as specific or as general with my words as I want to be, and the words, “Lord, hear my prayer,” feel as if they reassure me that God can hear my thoughts about that topic without my having to verbalize them. There are many things I pray, that I am not sure I would know how, or feel comfortable, verbalizing, even just to God, who I have been told already knows my thoughts.

As a child, I couldn’t see the value of prayer if God is unchangeable and if God already knows my thoughts. What’s the point? Now it seems to me that the point is much like speaking to a psychologist, and sometimes I can think/speak through my own problems or think/speak my own joys much like I would to a friend. Sometimes simply doing that makes it feel as if God is answering, and maybe that is the answer. Maybe we aren’t really changing God’s mind, but our own. Maybe we aren’t hearing a tangible answer from God, but we are instead somehow coming around to an answer. Perhaps this is how many people make decisions where God’s will looks a lot like their own will. I’m not sure. I’m just knocking around some skepticism/cynicism. Sometimes as Christians, I think we like to have things both ways: God is unmoveable, but we can move God through prayer, and we want God to be constant, but we want God to save someone’s life or change an outcome. In fact, we sometimes beg. It’s interesting is all I’m saying. I haven’t lost my faith, I just have lots of questions.

I have also added into my quiet time the discipline of reading through the book of James each day. Once I feel as if I have most of its truths committed to my soul, I will choose another book, though there aren’t many short enough to read in their entirety each day. I may have to read a few chapters each day or something. I started with James because of its practicality and because it seems to be an outlier about some pretty heavy theological concepts, like faith and works, speech, and prayer. I like James for his candor and for his perspective. He’s not Paul, and I love that about him.

I think when I am grounded in my faith, my relationships get better. I lump family, friends, and my love into this building block of spirituality. It all rolls together for me. When I am fully centered and fully contemplative of God, my faith, the Church, the way I deal with people is much more grace-filled, much more holy, much more compassionate. I can’t give love that I am not allowing myself to take from God. When I center in God, pursue God, my relationships fall in line and become more fulfilling, more of a blessing, and less like work. Summer is a time to nurture those relationships.

Finally, feeding my intellect is something that I have to do to feel like all is right with the world. Sometimes I feel like I go into a nine-month-long hibernation during the school year. I get up. I teach. I come home. I plan. I grade. I go to bed. If I am lucky, I add in some exercise or socialization. But, during the summer, I get to do whatever I want, whenever I want, and I even have time to read. I read a lot during the summer. It’s my goal to read at least two books each week: one fiction and one nonfiction. So far, I am on schedule. I love learning new things, and my favorite way to do it is by reading, especially since it’s become real again.

So, yeah. Summer. Love.

Food, Glorious Food. And Sports.

Food 

What’s the next thing I’ll eat? I ask myself this question as I sit here—frustrated because I’d love to put my grades into Power School, but Power School is “either too busy or the site is down for maintenance”—in my comfy, slightly strange chair, which is next to my stack of “currently reading” books. Among comic books (like Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and The Breathers), at least one fictional text (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian), and several other random nonfiction books dealing with gender and theology (Nobody Passes: Rejecting Rules of Gender and Conformity and John Wesley’s Sermons) are many nonfiction texts about food. From cookbooks or food magazines to theoretical texts, my book collection has recently gained quite a few texts dealing with how food is used and interpreted in culture. These books were part of my dissertation preparation and background knowledge, but now they are just books for pleasure. For fun (mind you), I am currently reading books like Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture and The Anthropology of Food and the Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power, and Eating Culture. I will admit it: I think about food almost constantly. I know it’s a semi-charmed kind of first world life I lead when I can sit around, pouting about not being able to enter my grades on the computer,  thinking about what I might whip up for a snack while I work.

Dining Al Fresco Paleo

Last night I made glorious bison burgers for dinner, because I’m doing the Whole 30 to try to jumpstart my metabolism again and to get rid of the foods that I think are causing me the most pain. The picture doesn’t do justice to the amazingness of these burgers and their artistic presentation. They were half-pound charcoal-grilled bison burgers with spring greens, avocados, onions, tomatoes, and bacon. I drizzled mine with a bit of balsamic vinegar just to set off the taste of the onions. I had a banana for desert. We ate outside on the porch at our new slate table. The weather was perfect. The food was delicious. The evening was wonderful.

The only thing that made the day more wonderful was I got up this morning and was tempted to weigh myself. I’ve lost five pounds in two days by cutting out sugar and dairy. I can’t say I could live this strictly forever, but it feels pretty good to cleanse my body and to lose a bit of weight. I told my brother, last night, that I am trying to focus more on how I feel, how fit I can get, and how my clothes wear than I am trying to focus on weight, but I couldn’t resist just seeing if there was any difference. Now I know, so now I won’t weigh myself again until June 17, just before I leave to go to Florida.

Sports

I am “training” for a half marathon in July, but I haven’t done much running lately. I’ve done more walking and biking than anything, so I need to make sure to pick up the running, making sure to do a good portion of it barefoot. I just sent out a check to Tuhey Pool, to join their outdoor pool lap-swim program for the summer, because I also want to do a triathlon at some point before I turn 39. I’m hoping to do this triathlon in September of 2013. It only cost $75 for the whole summer and I can go for lap swim and for the regular swimming time later in the day after I’ve done the other work I need to do. I never feel like the summer is long enough, and I always feel like I have so much to do. This summer is no exception, but I do know I want to get in lots of exercise and lots of clean, healthy eating. I want to look hot when school starts (I mean not that I’m not super cute already). We’ll see where this goes.

Lent Day 38: Relay for Life

Last night Bec and I met up with our friends Sarah and Celeste to walk for a few hours at the Relay for Life. We calculated that we probably walked about six miles while we were there and it was a three-mile trip to get there and back, so we walked about 9 miles last night. My ankles are a little sore today, because I haven’t been walking barefoot as much as I should be, and I haven’t been running at all. I wore my trusty Vibram Five Finger Classics for the walk last night, and my feet love me for it. They were a bit sore last night, but today they feel great. My ankles, not so much, but my feet feel awesome! I love barefooting!

This coming week, since I’ve been unsick for about a week now and my energy is coming back, I plan to make a concerted effort to get up at 5AM to run two miles and then head to Ball Pool to swim two miles every morning. On Fridays, I want to just go swim three miles. I figure running two miles four days a week (Monday through Friday) and then a longer run of at least five miles (on Saturdays) is a good way to get back into the pleasure of running without the pain. It ends up being thirteen miles of running and eleven miles of swimming each week as a good solid base to add onto this summer when I have more time. Bec and I have been going to the Mounds to walk every Sunday, which is a nice way to start the week, but I want to get my body back into shape.

Food Like This Fuels Me: Pork Chops and Spinach Salad

Much of my mental and spiritual well-being hinges on my body feeling well, so when I am not exercising regularly I don’t feel whole. The food I’ve been eating has helped tremendously, and I’ve lost 25 pounds since January 1, but I just want to be able to run and swim without the pain and with the pleasure. I haven’t eaten chocolate or ice cream for a week, which has helped to keep my blood sugar more stable.

I’m not sure what the connection between this post and Lent is, but I can say that I think we are designed to be at an optimal fitness for our own bodies. I’m not by any means saying that we shouldn’t be fat, because I don’t mind being fat nor do I think it is the sin that our love US culture makes it out to be. I mention that I lost 25 pounds, simply because I have. I completely changed the way I eat and what I do with my body, and it’s changed me. Did I set out to lose weight? A little bit, but only because I want to be able to run more, longer, faster, better, because I love how I feel after a nice, long run. Minus the sore feet because I am heavy. The bigger sin, than being fat, might be not using the resources God gave us to make our bodies be the best they can be. Whatever that means for you.

Maybe that’s how this ties into Lent: God wants us to be the best we can be for the sake of worshiping [Them] with no constraints. I suppose it’s kind of like yesterday’s post, in that God wants us to be able to play and worship with reckless abandon. For me, that means being able to move my body in a joyful galumph over trails in the woods, or to move my body like a fish through the lake waters. Beautiful movement = joyful worship.