The IronPriest is Micah Jackson, an Episcopal priest currently serving at the Seminary of the Southwest. He is a doctoral student in homiletics at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. He is trying to be a better steward of his body, and this website is a part of that effort. You can write to him at micah at ironpriest dot org. He keeps his more general blog at St. Jerome's Library
Welcome to IronPriest! This is a blog about the fitness challenges of clergy, and about my own personal journey to fitness. See where I began by reading the first post. If you want to follow along, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read about my participation in the LIVESTRONG Challenge and donate here. Thanks for visiting!
As you know if you read this blog, or know me at all, goal setting is a challenge for me. More accurately, goal setting is easy, but goal achieving has been difficult throughout my life and work. I’ve actually achieved quite a bit in my life, so it’s not like I’m an irredeemable loser, but it doesn’t come easy sometimes. There are reasons for this, and I’m even aware of some of them. But that’s not the point here.
The point here is the insight that I had not that long ago. The problem isn’t that I have trouble finishing things (as some of my teachers and others have opined in the past). Indeed, if I get anywhere near the finish, I have a long record of completing tasks successfully. But I don’t always get there, because the part I actually don’t enjoy is the middle. You know, the long bit between the beginning and the end where the bulk of the work gets done. It’s just often not that exciting.
A couple of years ago, Nike+ gave those of us who use their equipment a way to set a goal for January and then put a little chart of our progress on our blogs. I did it, and it really helped me. This year they’ve done something that I hope will be even more helpful. They set up a way to make a year-long goal, but also to break it into smaller goals that can be set each month. I’m aware that this is the time-honored and almost cliche principle of “breaking big goals into smaller goals.” If I’m late to the party, then I am… just get me a drink and a finger sandwich and let bygones be bygones.
Because of my historical difficulty with the middle, I’m setting my goal this month as a number of runs, rather than as a number of miles. Consistency is more important in this phase than workload. You can follow along using the widget on the top of the home page. I hope you will. And I also hope that as we come to the end of this year, you’ll be setting your own goals for physical and spiritual fitness for the next one. God strengthen you in 2009.
I don’t read very many blogs. To get above the Mendoza Line, you’ve got to be really contributing to my life and thought. There’s basically only one fitness-related blog that makes my cut. If you don’t know him, let me introduce you to Matt Fitzgerald. If you know me at all, you know that I’m going to appreciate a posting called “I Must Be a Geek If I’m This Excited about An Exercise Science Study,” or “A Drop Too Much.” If you’re interested in the science side of exercise, and like lively writing from a real athlete whose theory and practice are aligned, check him out.
Sick today. Can’t bring myself to go into the gym. Furthermore, I haven’t been doing well with the consistency for the last several weeks, what with the holiday and the end of the semester. Guess I should have listened to myself in the last post. I’ll get back onto the horse and then it’ll be back into the gym.
Just gotta avoid the shame spiral and remember to trust God and my body. Back soon.
He claims that since time is a fixed resource, and since it passes at a fixed rate, that it really isn’t possible to “manage” it in the sense of causing it to do something differently than it would naturally do. Good point. Instead, he says, energy is the resource that we can, and should, manage. And here’s where it got interesting to me as the IronPriest. Loehr suggests that energy is a cyclical resource. Now this is obvious to anyone who has effectively done sports. A period of energy expenditure must be followed by a period of energy recovery. Duh. But then he goes beyond that truism to note something that I hadn’t thought of before… if you only expend energy, you quickly run out, you burn out in a very real way. But it hadn’t really occurred to me that if you only recover, you are equally in danger. Piling up rest might not seem that dangerous, but it really is. It’s the classical sin of sloth, because you’re hoarding energy.
But then again, you’re really not, because of course, like the mana in the wilderness, energy can’t be saved up that way. It must be expended in order for it to be useful, and then it should be recovered through rest. When you recover more than you work (for a broad definition of work), you do so out of a lack of faith. It’s as if you are saying to God that you don’t trust that the energy you expend will be useful, or recoverable. And that’s sinful if ever there was such a thing.
So, when you head out to the gym remember that doing so is act of faith… faith that the workout will strengthen you, and faith that God will renew your energy, and renew it abundantly, even increasingly. Could this be another thing that Jesus was trying to teach us when he said, “The one who loves his life will lose it, but the one who loses his life will find it”? Expending energy is a necessary step in the having of energy. It cannot be stockpiled, at least, not by resting all the time.
Now, drop down and give me 20 pushups and 1 Hail Mary. Then rest. Good workout!
One of the important missions of this blog is educating clergy about health and fitness. Today I am pleased to highlight another bunch of people who are doing the same thing. Introducing… my sisters and brothers at Duke Divinity School’s Clergy Health Initiative!
They have a $12million grant to assess and improve the health of the 1600 or so United Methodist pastors in North Carolina. That’s a great start, but if you’re not a Methodist pastor in North Carolina don’t lose heart. There are people waiting to support you in your quest for physical and spiritual health. If you’ve got walking shoes, and don’t live on the shoulder of a highway, you can start moving more, and making better choices about how you eat.
Watch this space for another way to support your quest for fitness and support your fellow Christians in their quest. Until then, read this story about the Clergy Health Initiative, and watch this video.
by Jim Loehr. It’s aimed at business, but he started out as a sports psychologist, so I thought it might have something interesting for us here at IronPriest. And I was right!