It seems strange to think that it takes work in order to rest, and even stranger to realize that resting can initially feel like work. But this is exactly what I discovered over a 10 week period from the beginning of May until the middle of July when I made a decision to only run at a pace slow enough to keep my heart rate in my easy zone.

What I quickly learned was that keeping my heart rate in an easy zone was anything but easy. In fact, it really did feel a whole lot more like work. My easy runs were a struggle, not so much for my body, but for my mind.

The battle really is in the mind

The mind is brilliant, complicated, and often the most frustrating part of our bodies. It’s constantly thinking and processing, and when we really start to pay attention to what’s going on in there, it can be exhausting. When Paul told the Corinthians to “take captive” every thought that didn’t line up with the truth (my paraphrase, see 2 Corinthians 10:5 to read the whole thing), what he was telling them was to get busy doing the hard work of “minding the mind,” as Jennie Allen says it in her book, Get Out of Your Head.

Bear with me for a minute while I do some Greek geeking. The word used for captive only appears 3 other times in the Bible: 2 of them describe taking prisoners and the other describes gaining control.

Translation? It’s going to take work on our part to control our thoughts instead of allowing our thoughts to control us. That’s exactly what I experienced during those 10 weeks of intentionally slower running. My mind hated it.

Because I’ve run multiple marathons and ultra-marathons and numerous shorter races at fairly fast paces, when my heart rate monitor beeped to alert me that I was already out of my easy range, I got frustrated. Because it beeped a lot, I got frustrated a lot. In those times, my thoughts went something like, “What is wrong with you, Paul? You’ve run 50 miles in half a day and you can’t run a quarter of a mile without your heart rate getting too elevated?”

So I’d slow down. Walk. Whatever it took to get my heart back to that elusive easy place. Start running again, trying so hard to keep it under the limit that I’d set, and inevitably, I’d hear the beep again.

“God, you’re a loser!” I’d whisper to myself. “You might as well give up.”

But I didn’t. I fought through 10 of the longest weeks of running I’ve ever experienced and just the other day I typed these words on a running forum I frequent: “I’m starting to see my easy pace drop.”

The payoff is worth it

One of the reasons why I did the whole “only run easy” experiment was because I knew that I was going to head into a marathon training schedule for a fall marathon that I hoped wouldn’t be canceled due to COVID-19. When I found out it was being canceled, I decided to stick with the schedule and run on the days when I was supposed to and do the workouts (easy or hard) that it called for. It was during this time that I made that observation about my easy pace dropping. But that wasn’t the only thing I learned. Here are 2 more takeaways from my running that I think can help all of us (even the non-runners who are reading this) as we do the work of learning to rest.

Rhythms over rules

I know I’ve written a lot about running and so if you’re not into that kind of thing, you’re already hanging on by a thread. Please bear with me a little longer as I explain a typical training schedule so the takeaways will make more sense. A marathon training schedule is usually around 18 weeks long and mine called for 4 runs a week. The schedule tells you when to run and how far or fast to run. Monday might be an easy 3 miles and Wednesday may be a faster pace run of 5 miles. The weekend is always the longest run of the week.

I’m sure you can imagine that there are many times during those 18 weeks that you may not be able to complete the workout. Fatigue, injury, perhaps a global pandemic can all ruin the best plan. So I’ve learned how to embrace rhythms (how often to run) instead of rules (how far or fast to run). I’ve run 4 times a week since I started the plan but I haven’t stressed out on if I ran 5 instead of 7 or an easy instead of a tempo run. My body loves it – there is a rest that I am finding that I didn’t know before. Many followers of Jesus are more upset about broken rules than broken rhythms. But rhythms are inherent in and the lifeblood of relationships.

Guardrails over guilt

When we choose to live by rhythms instead of by rules, something pretty amazing happens: we start to be motivated by guardrails more than guilt. Guilt does weird things to us, doesn’t it? Guilt can make us feel bad for reading 10 minutes in the Bible because a reading plan told us to read for 30 minutes. We see the 20 minutes we didn’t read instead of the 10 we did. Live with guilt long enough and his cousin, legalism, will move in with you, too.

Guardrails, though, remind us that if we continue in the way we’re going, we’ll eventually be in trouble. Guardrails allow me to skip a workout and not feel bad about it while holding me accountable to the truth that if I miss weeks of them, I’ll find myself out of shape and in the ditch. Guilt drives us, but guardrails direct us. Guilt leaves no room for rest, but guardrails create room for the occasional bad driver to not become a dead driver.

The work of rest is relearning how to choose rhythms and guardrails over rules and guilt. We live in a rules and guilt culture that values results more than anything. But there is great reward in choosing the alternate path marked by rhythms and guardrails. I’m praying that you find the courage to take it.

I recently logged my 10,000th mile since I started running a little over 10 years ago. After taking a few weeks to process it, I realized that I’ve learned some really valuable lessons along the way that have less to do with running and a whole lot more to do with life. Here they are, in no particular order:

If you wait for the perfect time, you’ll be waiting a long time

I remember when I first started running. I didn’t have any fancy equipment – no wearable gadgets like Garmins or Fitbits, no way to capture the distance I’d run or how hard my heart was working during the run. I used a stopwatch to time the run and then I would get in my car afterwards to “drive” my run and get the distance. A little math would then give me a pace for the run and I’d rinse and repeat the next time. The point here is that I started running long before I had the things that I have now. Waiting on the perfect time to start something is the perfect recipe for failure. Simply begin.

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When I started, I thought this would make me an expert

At some point, the stopwatch and car thing got old and I knew I needed a better way to log my runs. I’m not totally sure how I found Running Ahead’s website, but I did. Early on, I can remember seeing a post in the user forums about a runner who had just logged his 10,00th mile. The enormity of that number was almost too much for a beginner like me to wrap my brain around, but I do remember thinking that if I ever hit that number, I’d be an elite runner. But now that I have, I realize that running a lot of miles doesn’t make me an expert. It simply makes me a runner who knows more than I did back then. Sometimes in life we see people who are farther down the road than we are and assume that we’ll be (fill in the blank) once we get where they are. The truth is that none of us has arrived at our destination, and while I definitely know more where I am than I did where I was, I’ll never get where I’m going if I think I know it all now.

[Tweet “You may know more where you are than you did where you were, but you won’t get where you’re going if you think you know it all now.”]

Most of those miles were ordinary and unspectacular

My first marathon. My first ultra. That time I ran 50 miles on my 50th birthday. Looking back on my decade of running, I can definitely highlight some moments that I’ll never forget. But the vast majority of those 10,000 miles were ordinary, unspectacular, and often run alone. So often we put such a high emphasis on the big things that we forget to value all the little things that led up to them. Quite frankly, there’s no medal without mettle.

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Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin. (Zechariah 4:10)

Never underestimate the cumulative power of small things. As you do them consistently, they tend to grow into something bigger. Extraordinary moments are fueled by ordinary habits.

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Getting out the door still requires a choice

One of the most surprising things I’ve learned is that making something a habit isn’t synonymous with that something being easy. When I first started running, I mistakingly assumed that one day I’d be in such good shape that a mile run or a 5k race would be easy. How wrong I was! Even after 10,000+ miles, I find the first mile of any run the least enjoyable. I fight the hardest mental battles right before a run and during the beginning of a run, and that will probably never change. We know that success isn’t achieved on autopilot. We tend to forget that it isn’t maintained on autopilot, either. 

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After 10k miles, I’m just getting started

We all know them. The story tellers. The middle aged men talking about their high school glory days. The people standing still because they’re so busy looking back that they have no vision for the future. It’s easy to become those people, because that requires no effort.

That may be the greatest thing I’ve learned in all of this: it’s way too easy to stop. To sit back and think that what we’ve done entitles us to coast. But I refuse, and I want you to refuse, too. 10,000 miles IS a big accomplishment, but it’s the floor, not the ceiling. In fact, it is an amazing foundation on which to build something even greater, and so I’m going to stay hungry. I’m going to keep dreaming about where my consistent, ordinary habits could take me.

[Tweet “When big accomplishments are the ceiling, we’re done, but when they’re the floor, we’re just getting started and the best is yet to come.”]

The best is yet to come, and while it may be harder to believe the farther down the road we go, we can’t give in to the dream-killing, energy-robbing belief that our best days are behind us.

They aren’t. Get out the door and keep going.

Reading Time: 3 minutesThis week as I was running in the snow (which doesn’t happen a lot, so it’s nice to do it when I can), I thought about another snowy run that happened a few years ago and smiled. It was the day someone called me the nicest bad word I’ve ever been called.

But first, some context.

I started running almost 10 years ago. Now, I’m not the fastest or the best, but I have been a pretty decent example of consistency over the years. Some years I run more and some years I run less, but most years I’m logging somewhere close to 1,000 miles. The majority of those miles are run on the same roads, and usually alone.

Of course, I don’t run to be noticed by others (except for drivers – I’d like for drivers of vehicles that could potentially hit me to notice me!!), and when you run a lot of miles alone, sometimes you feel like you’re in your own little bubble, unbothered and unnoticed.

But on that snowy run a few years ago, I wasn’t unnoticed. In fact, I was paid an amazing compliment that was one of the most unusual compliments I’ve ever received.

As I was running through the snowstorm past a business near my home, a friend of mine who was in the store at the time said one of the employees pointed out the window at me and said, “That is one crazy *******!”

With that crazy context in mind, let me tell you what that one simple, honest, off-color statement communicates to those of us living out our faith in a rapidly changing post-modern culture.

Extreme circumstances call for extreme commitment to everyday convictions

Want to stand out? Simply stay committed to doing what you’ve always done at a time when no one else is willing to do it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run by that store – surely in the hundreds of times by now – without that comment being made. But one run in the snow – one normal run in abnormal conditions – is what stood out.

There’s a verse in Philippians that calls believers to “shine like stars.” Did you know that stars are ALWAYS shining? It’s what stars do! But you and I don’t see them shining until the sky around them has grown dark. They simply do what they were made to do in an environment that enhances the effect of what they’re doing!

This is a wonderful time to be a follower of Jesus because if we’ll simply continue to do what we’ve always done – if we’ll simply BE who we have been recreated to be – we’re guaranteed to stand out as the culture around us grows darker.

Standing out is simply a matter of shining out when all the other lights are going out!

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Extreme circumstances can be vehicles for producing effective change

You and I are living in a culture that can tend to be a little bit entitled, yes? We get participation trophies for everything even if we never really did anything, and so it makes a lot of sense that an entitled culture would fail to see the value in uncomfortable situations.

But growth never happens in a recliner (unless we’re talking about the waistline!). Labor precedes delivery. Working out comes before building up. That amazing feeling you had when you made an A came after that horrible feeling you had studying for the test. Seeds push through the soil as the plant begins to take root and grow.

There’s no way around it. Hard times produce strong people when we accept the fact that easy street is not the best avenue for change.

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The apostle Paul wrote it this way:

Not only that, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. (Romans 5:3-4, emphasis added)

Suffering produces. It’s one thing to go run when the weather is perfect. It’s quite another to run in a (Southern) blizzard. Both runs are effective, but only one convinces me (and others) that I’m a runner who will run no matter what.

There is no doubt that the church is facing tough times in America, but there is also no doubt that the tough times can change the face of the church in America.

Shine like stars, and allow the darkness around you to reveal in you and produce through you the brightest light of the Gospel the world has ever seen.