The church began observing Lent today. I knew it was coming, but I didn’t really have any plans. Some years I’ve made big efforts with my life to give something up, some things have been really tough. Others have been really easy. Some years I did things that saved me a whole lot of time so that I could in theory find more time for prayer. One year it worked really well, another year it didn’t. I found that if there’s something apparent in your life then the beginning of Lent can be a bit of a nudge to pick it up and address it. If you need to go looking for something to fast from for 40 days then you probably aren’t going to hold it very close to your heart and you won’t learn much from it.

Then I learned what my friend Matt is planning to do for 40 days. In fact it’s something I previously have done as I approached Easter, I did it in 2006. I’ll quote his note from Facebook instead of trying to describe.

As I enter lent this year I have been mulling over many different conversations, realities that my friends and families are living in right now, and the need to challenge the systems of our day which are killing our souls. Thus the decision to fast from refined sugar feels like it is tying in all these threads. I’ve also been challenged by Isaiah 58, the call to a fast that is less about giving up something, as it is about activism to the poor and needy around you from a heart of love and justice. i feel like many times my fasting is lived from a very shallow level, and my mind is concerned with what it is that I’ve given up, rather than the many whose daily reality is like this. More and more i have become suspicious and pissed off with the rampant integration of refined sugar into all things that were intended to be pure and good in the food Creator has given us to live off of. This comes from becoming a parent and only recently introducing food to our dear little Jasper. A rant is coming about this in days to come.

It’s also appropriate to quote a section from Isaiah 58. I don’t know which portion struck a chord with Matt, but this is a summary of the relevant pieces.

…
The bottom line on your ‘fast days’ is profit.
   You drive your employees much too hard.
You fast, but at the same time you bicker and fight.
   You fast, but you swing a mean fist.
The kind of fasting you do
   won’t get your prayers off the ground.
Do you think this is the kind of fast day I’m after:
…
To put on a pious long face
   and parade around solemnly in black?
Do you call that fasting,
   a fast day that I, God, would like?
…
This is the kind of fast day I’m after:
   to break the chains of injustice,
   get rid of exploitation in the workplace,
   free the oppressed,
   cancel debts.
…
Do this and the lights will turn on,
   and your lives will turn around at once.
…
If you get rid of unfair practices,
   quit blaming victims,
   quit gossiping about other people’s sins,
If you are generous with the hungry
   and start giving yourselves to the down-and-out,
Your lives will begin to glow in the darkness,
   your shadowed lives will be bathed in sunlight.
I will always show you where to go.
I’ll give you a full life in the emptiest of places—
   firm muscles, strong bones.
You’ll be like a well-watered garden,
   a gurgling spring that never runs dry.

Excerpts from a paraphrase of Isaiah 58 – “The Message”

Similar to Matt, this year I’m going to do three things. The first, is to adjust my diet, the second is to raise my voice against the injustices in our food system, and the third is to mourn.

Changing the diet: I’m going to stop eating manufactured food for 40 days. The intent is not to “put on a pious long face and parade around in solemnity” as Eugene Peterson puts it. There is not going to be excessive discussion about what counts as manufactured food, but it’s inevitable that such a discussion needs to occur on a few occasions. Most non-manufactured food has one ingredient. Some of it has two ingredients, like good bacon (Piggies and salt) or good peanut butter (peanuts and salt), or maybe even three ingredients like good ice-cream (milk and cream and sugar), but I can hardly imagine that anything will have more than four – Beer (water, malted barley, yeast, hops). I’m not going to eliminate sugar (partly because I already invited 20 people over to my house next week to eat ice-cream) because while refined sucrose, glucose & fructose are under publicized as an unhealthy sources of our daily caloric intake, they are the biggest problem when disguised and manufactured into other food, not when eaten as an ingredient to a home made lemon-poppyseed loaf.

I don’t anticipate that not eating manufactured food will be that tough for me, last weekend I ate about a hundred things, six of which were things I deemed to be manufactured. A few perogies, a clif bar, some cheerios, gatorade, and two different kinds of store bought bread. I needed none of those. Especially if I had made bread, which I haven’t done in a couple months. I’m also going to write, I’ll post what I write here on the blog but I don’t plan to write exclusively for the blog. I’ve been doing a fair bit of writing to elected representatives in the past couple weeks with Bill C-11 and now the nightmare that is Bill C-30 banging around in Ottawa. I’ll be doing a bit more writing to them, but I need to figure out who is the most appropriate elected audience before I decide who to write to. Instead I think I’ll start with an open letter to my alma-mater about the conferring of honorary degrees to corporate executives with the multinational corporation Nestle.

On the final point, mourning, I’ll leave that to Matt to describe.

Alongside these 40 days, I have been really confronted by Jesus’ secret to the universe in, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” We as western culture don’t really do mourning well, and in fact so much of our society is constructed to pull us away from it’s life changing depths to live in the triviality of our age. I don’t think we can truly enter into an activism for social justice without paying the price to enter into mourning. This is the way we find Creator’s heart in the midst of all the crap in our world, and then also find the comfort by which to seek to bring good and change for the kingdom of what is true, good and beautiful. So I’m trying to intentionally enter into mourning around all the hell that has been caused by refined sugar in Canada.

Instead of a hushed and sombre beginning to lent this year I’m doing something less than traditional, but more in line with the attitude of Isaiah 58, I’m starting with a battle cry:

While this story is not going to be anywhere near the entertainment value of my 2009 Birkebeiner Race Report I think I should still describe it… although a bit more briefly.

The morning started 30 minutes later than normal because organizers wanted to give it a bit of extra time to warm up. This was definitely appreciated. Still though, it was a green-wax morning, and I added two layers of V30 on top of the six layers of VR40 I had applied the night before (over a relatively thick KR20 binder). I had done as best a job with LF6 glide wax that I could but the scraping/brush job was still a bit hack because I still haven’t built a ski-form. That half hour delay made the difference in clothing choices for me and I got away with one less than I probably would have worn if we’d started at 9am. I almost certainly would have had to stop and take that extra one off as temperatures reached ~-5^oC by the finish. Luckily the difference between start and finish was only to remove my outer mitts and to partly unzip my windbreaker and jacket.

At the advice of my ski coach Emily, I lined up just in front of the 4 hour mark. That meant I was 8th row back. I had also been instructed that due to my fitness and skill level it was basically impossible for me to go too hard at the start. The positioning benefits of a max-effort start were going to be worth it and I could always recover later… when I would be in front of all kinds of slower people and not have to deal with passing them later. I started absolutely as hard as I could when the horn sounded, and was seeded in what I felt like was an appropriate spot. I dealt with just a bit of congestion at the third time the number of lanes reduced and we had to merge but otherwise was able to go full tilt all the way across the lake. I went through the first couple kilometers at sub-3:30/km pace and then I lost a pole. The velcro came undone and because of my enthusiastic polling I pulled my hand right out of the loop. Luckily by the time I had slowed and stepped out of the track someone behind me had picked it up and I didn’t need to shuffle-step backwards through the traffic to go pick it up. It took a bit of time to get the strap re-threaded and I got passed by a few people but I got going again without too much delay. I guess that was what Emily was referring to when she said “You can always recover later”.

I kept the gas going full-tilt until soon after station 1. I believed at this point that I was working really really hard and I should probably try and start to be strategic and get behind a few other skiers for some drafting. This allowed me to back off my effort level temporarily from really really hard to just really hard. After a bit, drafting either suddenly became incredibly easy or the two guys I was following decided to give up. I passed them and pushed on to try and catch the guy in the red jacket. He was about 150 m ahead of us and it took me about 5 kms to catch him. Good motivation to push hard. Somewhere in there I rolled past the 10 km mark and found myself on-pace for a 3:37. I then proceeded to draft him for a kilometer or two before getting dropped on a big uphill. I had just ticked past the first hour at that point and decided I needed to try and get in a few more calories as the first couple aid stations had proved minimally successful, just a cup of gatorade at each. I let myself fall behind a ways and got a gel in. I also decided I would coast the remaining stations and get three cups of gatorade and either a piece of banana or a fig newton at each. It was a smart decision in retrospect and if I’d waited much longer I would have been in trouble getting enough energy down my throat. Things progressed and I went through 20kms on pace for a 3:35 finish.

Just before the Winter station I was passed by the leaders of the 31km race… and witnessed one of them go up a hill in three steps. The same one took me more than 10 steps. The interaction with the leaders of the 31km race was short as we split off to head down to Islet Lake on the long route. I spent another 5kms trying to reel in the guy in the blue jacket who was about 100 m ahead of me when we turned onto Lost Lake. Rolled through the 30km mark on pace for a 3:40 finish. I caught him just as we were approaching the Islet Lake station and was then passed by another pair. I tried to keep up with them in a moment of inspiration but they were flying and even skiing as third person in the train I was outclassed. This meant I skied solo back to Elk-Push having dropped the blue jacket man while trying to pursue the other two guys.

I was passed by teammate Tanner Broadbent like I was standing still on the big hill out of Elk-Push (who was skiing 55 km “Lite”) and was thoroughly humbled as I was starting to get sloppy with my weight transfer and was loosing good kick as a result of fatigue. Wax was good though and I spent the better part of the next long rolling section to Wanisan focussed on good technique. It was a good way to get through this challenging section quickly and I passed a number of people here including Jan Plavec who I didn’t even recognize as I went past.

I rolled through the 40 km mark on pace for a 3:43 finish time and got done the marathon a few seconds over the 2:50 mark. If only I could figure out how to run that fast! The long double-polling sections begin right around Wanisan and I struggled to keep myself motivated to keep double polling even though I knew it was the fastest technique for the terrain. The kilometers kept rolling past and I was really needing to start the self-motivation to keep the effort level rising in an attempt to maintain pace. I dug out a caffinated latte flavour gel with 10 kms to go and it tasted super amazing. I can’t handle them at all on the bike, the flavour doesn’t work for me in the summer, but skiing it was just what I needed. I was starting to pass lots of people at this point, almost all of them not going anywhere quickly and no-one able to keep up. I caught and passed the red-jacket guy here who I’d absolutely killed myself to keep up with from kms 10-15 and was pretty proud of myself. I slid past the 50km sign still on pace for a 3:43 finish and just kept telling myself to hold it together for another 20 minutes.

I think I passed another 5 guys in the closing 5 kms and got to the 1 km to go sign just as I got the first twinges in my hamstrings. My technique was starting to fail even when I was focussed on it and I was very glad that this thing was almost over. With about 200 meters to go I got a crazy cramp in my right thumb and laughed at myself on the last glide in to the finish with a bit of a gimpy polling technique.

Done!

Third in my AG and tenth overall in the with-pack division. About 35 minutes faster than last year!

Shout outs to: Keegan for his first Birkebeiner ever, Laura for her first time through with a pack, Danika for starting classic skiing a few weeks ago and managing to get on her AG podium. Emily for an incredible fourth place and Aaron for a fantastic third. Tanner, Jason, Greg and Paul from ERTC. Also to some intrepid 31 km skiers (which we decided would be considered a crazy-far distance to go and race if the 55 km race didn’t exist) Lenka (Fast!) Paul (Fast!), Claire, and Brent and Lianne who won’t make the mistake of arriving late to the start grid ever again. Also Corey, for an incredible performance in the 60+ AG! I’m going to learn how to ski from that man and I’ll be back for Birkie 2013!