"Turtles"
Peg Duthie
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville, TN
26 April 2009

Yesterday, the 10th annual Country Music Marathon took place in Nashville. It's an event I've volunteered for off and on over the past decade, and it's been a joy to see it grow and become better and better over the years. It feels good to be able to say "over the years"; during its first couple of years, there were questions about the marathon's financial viability, and there was doubt about whether the community would ever support it to the degree necessary for it to become a tradition. My first volunteer shift, back in 2001, was chaotic and disorganized enough for me to consider not coming back, and I had a very poor impression of the professionals in charge.

I'd also really enjoyed being in the company of runners, however; it was inspiring and exciting being around so many people on the verge of reaching a major personal milestone, or adding to it, or hoping to improve on it by not only running 26.2 miles, but by doing it faster than the last time they ran twenty-six miles. These days, I consider it an accomplishment whenever I manage twenty-six minutes of exercise, at any pace, so my hat's off to anyone who runs at all, let alone 26.2 miles, let alone aiming to complete 26.2 miles again and faster.

In any case, I volunteered again in 2002, which ended up being much more fun for me. I worked on one of the gear check-in trucks, where the runners dropped off their sweats, their car keys, and whatever else they'd needed right during the hour or two before the race started. I felt much more like someone doing a necessary job, and it helped that I was working with a good group: there was a middle-aged mom, a woman who'd served in the National Guard, a freshman at a local Baptist college, and a friendly UPS driver who made fun of the freshman and me for openly ogling some of the great-looking gams in our vicinity. And there were more runners than there'd been the year before -- the event had grown to 11,000 racers, and that adds up to a lot of nervous energy concentrated within one square mile. It was fascinating to behold the sheer range of ways in which that energy got expressed, with some people taking on the role of mentors and cheerleaders, some people fretting about the lavatory lines and their starting line corral assignments, some people staying focused on their personal pre-race rituals, and others raring to make a party of it. There's a guy who's known in Nashville as "the blue guy" because he shows up every year covered head to toe in blue paint -- he's described himself as "a giant bald Smurf" -- and I've seen other people wearing fairy wings, cowboy hats, tutus, and tons of tattoos, some temporary, some not. This year, there were also 49 women planning to hula-hoop their way through the half-marathon; they are literally a colorful bunch, with shiny and sparkly hoops in very bright colors. They're raising money to help breast cancer patients, and there were about 800 who showed up as members of "Team in Training," which raises money for the fight against leukemia and lymphoma. A sixty-something friend of mine from First UU walked the half-marathon on behalf of Gilda's Club, and one of my fellow volunteers said his church was doing some sort of marathon-related fundraising among their own people as well.

Perhaps the most significant lesson I've learned from volunteering for the marathon so far is that it's not exclusive to elite athletes or the genetically blessed, and that it's something I can still aspire to attempt as I age: the finishers in 2008 included an 88-year-old man and a 77-year-old woman. Until I volunteered for the marathon, I hadn't known that quite a few people purposely walk a marathon instead of running it -- that it could be a race truly welcoming of turtles. I was a member of my high school's varsity cross-country and track teams, but to be blunt, I was slow, slow, slow, and very much a slacker when it came to showing up for practice. My only real talent was being stubborn enough to keep putting one foot in front of the other until I reached the finish line, but that turned out to be a major points-getter for our teams, because I was often the only female two-miler on the track, and when I wasn't, I was still a shoo-in for second or third place as long as I stuck it out to the finish line.

One of the things I liked to do instead of practicing was to read about the practice of running. I liked that there were different theories on how to do it right. I liked the connections I could see between distance running and strength of mind and character -- Chariots of Fire won Best Picture of the Year when I was in seventh grade, and the articles I read about great runners and how they pushed themselves to become better. I loved novels such as Brogg's Brain, where the hero's a high-school miler who has to sort out what he wants vs. what other people are telling him he ought to want.

That's a core conundrum many of us have faced -- not on a track, perhaps, but in matters concerning religion, politics, and social justice. It doesn't help that mainstream narratives tend to speak in terms of winning and losing, and to treat silver medals as "not quite good enough" and failures, rather than the impressive achievements that they are. It doesn't help that while our culture loves turning winners into celebrities -- at least for five minutes or so -- it also has a tendency to portray devotion and discipline as rather eccentric and freakish qualities, rather than everyday tools of survival and self-improvement. We see far more attention lavished upon reality-show contestants instead of, say, researchers and teachers and librarians, and I guarantee you more people can name the judges of American Idol than the 2008 winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, myself included.

Now, on the one hand, life is not fair, and that's just the way things are: it's human nature to find competitions more immediately compelling than career arcs, and there's nothing inherently wrong with vegging in front of the tv or YouTube instead of reading about green fluorescent proteins, subatomic physics, or papilloma and immunodeficiency viruses papilloma and immunodeficiency viruses. That said, what physical and spiritual exercise can teach us is how to co-exist with our compulsions and our temptations, and to distinguish between short-term gratification vs. long-term fulfillment. One of the core lessons of religion is that the things that really matter don't happen overnight, and that they're rarely greeted with gold medals or good press as they're happening. Another fundamental lesson is that sometimes diligent preparation and paying your dues won't pay out: according to the King James version of the Bible, the writer of Ecclesiastes observes that "the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all" (9:11). There were over 31,000 people registered for yesterday's races; about 27,000 of them finished the race, which means over 4,000 people didn't. More than forty people were taken to Metro General Hospital, and one man died after crossing the finish line. Even experienced runners were having trouble; the top women's finisher from Tennessee said that, for a second, she almost decided to take the half-marathon course because the heat had gotten so bad. During registration, I met several dozen runners who were feeling optimistic enough to request reassignments to faster corrals, but there were also people dropping back, dropping out, or downgrading their plans because injuries, unexpected obligations, or, simply, revised expectations.

But a third, as-important lesson to be gleaned from both the realms of sports and religion is the value of both persistence and self-awareness. I spoke harshly a few minutes ago about the media's over-glorification of winners and insta-celebrities, but to give credit where credit is due, there is also significant attention being paid both to the grunt work that goes into achieving results, and to understanding one's true priorities. A month ago, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal by its golf writer, titled "Mastery, Just 10,000 Hours Away" -- 10,000 hours being about ten years' worth of "persistent, focused training and experience." To quote the author, "The good news about deliberate practice is that, with commitment, almost anyone can engage in it at any age.... The bad news is that deliberate practice is very hard, and usually unpleasant." In the realm of golf, what this translates to is that, while hitting balls on the range any which way is fun, it doesn't actually accomplish much in the way of improving one's game. What does is "a super slow-motion, 30-second swing" that many golfers "find… to be so difficult and awful that they won't do it." The Journal writer himself admits that he's one of them, because he finds each second to be "agony. Why? For people whose minds customarily operate at 100 mph, slowing to a snail's pace" is hard enough and disagreeable enough that they realize that they are not in fact that ambitious. And the thing is -- and the Journal writer makes a point of this -- that's okay. He gives the last word to Geoff Colvin, the author of Talent is Overrated, who says, "One of the main problems golfers have is unrealistic expectations. They make themselves miserable when they should be having fun."

This is a condition I have seen among people of faith as well. We get caught up in comparisons between who we currently are and who we think we ought to be, and when our focus strays or our abilities aren't up to the task, the temptations include giving up, blaming others, blaming the weather, trying to persuade ourselves we never cared or shouldn't have cared, and other self-sabotaging themes that have existed since time immemorial.

Yesterday, there were four women over the age of 70 who finished the marathon, and that wasn't considered a news item at all. It means I've got at least thirty years before I'm allowed to say "I'm too old" as my reason to sit the thing out. Every now and then, I look at my church directory or my address book, and I come across the names of people who have given up on congregational life, on Unitarian Universalism, or on religion altogether. As often as I insist that our religion isn't and shouldn't be all things to everyone all the time, it's still a source of distress and self-doubt when a connection fails to happen, or when it falters. But, just as often, I come across the names of people I wouldn't have met if I wasn't involved with the UU community, and while one of them does happen to be a Nobel laureate, and quite a few of them are distance runners and walkers, the fact remains that most of them aren't going to show up in the record books or bestseller charts or WikiPedia. But the fact is also that the people I most admire -- the ones I truly want to become when I grow up -- are the ones whose lives wouldn't get immortalized in that fashion: people don't end up in almanacs or Associated Press reports for coordinating meals for the sick and the homeless, or writing thank-you notes to other volunteers, or keeping meetings to under two hours, or showing up with flowers, or making the coffee, or paying their pledges on time. But these are the people whose acts truly help repair the world and make it a bit more fair; they reinforce my own faith, and show me what is possible with practice and persistence. May we all find the strength and support to persevere toward our goals -- and the wisdom to discern which results are the ones we truly wish to achieve. Amen and alleluia.