Lent

It’s Lent. I’m not Catholic but my wife is what she calls a secular Catholic. If we had children I imagine they’d be of mixed origin, reluctant Catholics. This is good. I can get behind the secularization of any religion, really. It’s silent, private, and occasional. My wife still votes liberally. She champions birth control and women’s rights. She’s still all-American.

As the spouse of a Catholic I’m not obligated to alter my life for forty days. I don’t feel any compulsion to give up chocolate chips or pork chops. My life, more or less, will go on as normal. I’ll continue to shave every morning. Some nights, I’ll have a beer before bed. On the best nights, I’ll have a glass of Jameson or (God bless it!) Johnny Walker.

That’s not to say that I’m not affected by my wife’s decisions. For Lent, Julia has decided to go to bed an hour earlier every night, get up an hour earlier every morning, and push through a run just as the sun is breaking above the eastern horizon. To me, this is a blessing.

If I want to swim at the university’s recreation center, where I do all of my indoor training, I have to get there as early as possible, slip out of my clothes and into my shorts, swim a few slapdash laps, then shower before heading off to work at the university’s Writing Center across campus. I have to get there early so that I can be at work at a decent hour. Most importantly, though, I have to get there before the most ambitious freshmen and sophomores, who still live in dorm rooms just a few blocks from the rec center, shuffle in, because the rec center only has four swimming lanes and if I end up sharing a lane, I’m afraid I’ll crash into someone much more fluid, much more graceful, than me.

But most mornings I don’t swim. Most mornings I run. Even before this week, before Julia and I decided to hobble our way out of bed at six a.m., I got the most joy lacing up my shoes in the morning and setting out on the streets of Fort Collins just as my body was springing to life. I hate to get soft here, but there’s something purple and romantic about pounding your feet into the pavement when a lot of the world is still brooding over their first cup of coffee.

This is even truer at six in the morning when the night is still hanging around, refusing, just yet, to leave. At that hour there are only a handful of minutes left to savor the near dark, the silence. The few people you pass by, you share a certain kinship with, especially other runners, or cyclists, or even those out walking their dogs. They, like you, know what it means to still be half-dazed from sleep and trying to catch a glimpse of something beautiful before your mind is awake enough to register what that something is.

Today’s the first day of Lent and we’ve been waking up at six a.m. for less than a week and it feels like a honeymoon.

As runners, Julia and I have different goals. I like to run longer than she does. This morning I eagerly dressed myself to run, slammed down half a cup of coffee, gave her a kiss, then took off out the door just as she was getting dressed. Fort Collins has several miles of intersecting bicycle paths that cut through town. You can get on them and just go without hitting a street for several miles. At six in the morning there are few people on the paths and they make for good running. I hopped on, heading east, following the curves toward the rising sun. Already, the blue-black of the night was turning pink beyond the tree line and I wanted to run and run, heading toward the east, toward the sun, as if it might be the last day on Earth, as if there wouldn’t be another sunrise tomorrow morning.

I’ll never know what it means to be Catholic, to carry around that faith like an heirloom. Or what Lent means, what it feels like to sacrifice a piece of yourself year after year, to seek penance through self-denial. But that’s ok. I can live with that.

I may grow weary of traipsing through my mornings at a brisker pace than most people see throughout their days, but for now, at least, it’s worth relishing.