Here are two suggestions for getting through the 26.2 blister-breaking, bone-pounding, spirit-crushing miles of Monday’s Boston Marathon:
The Boston Athletic Association, organizer of the event, suggests focusing intently on your body, continually re-examining your posture, your hand position, your breathing cadence, your hydration, your split times.
Rev. Thomas Paprocki suggests praying the rosary.
Paprocki, chancellor of the Archdiocese of Chicago and a pretty fair distance runner, will line up in Hopkinton, Mass., Monday afternoon with thousands of other hopefuls from around the world.
Like most of them, he will be excited. Like most of them, he will spend the first few miles finding his place in the throng, establishing his pace, perhaps exchanging a few words with those around him.
But as he settles down, Paprocki will place his thumb on his forefinger, where he wears a miniature rosary with 10 wooden beads for all of his long runs.
As he says to himself the familiar cycle of prayers–one “Our Father,” 10 “Hail Marys,” one “Glory Be”–he will move the beads around his finger. To help him keep track of where he is in a full rosary of 180 prayers, he switches languages after each cycle, moving through Polish, Italian, Spanish, Latin and English.
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While the pavement passes beneath him and the words stream through his mind, Paprocki will be contemplating a series of Biblical scenes known to Roman Catholics as the Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries and the Glorious Mysteries.
Taken together in a full rosary, these mysteries play out the story of the Gospel. For Catholics living in times when Bibles were scarce and literacy was rare, the rosary was an important way of remembering, understanding and living their faith.
Like many forms of religious discipline, however, the rosary has taken a beating in modern western culture. For most Americans, including many Catholics, the prayer beads are associated with mantilla-wearing old ladies and quaint scenes of immigrant culture.
But as a lifelong jogger, Paprocki found the mantra-like regimen of prayer a perfect complement to running. When he ran his first marathon three years ago, at age 42, he took the rosary along, and he has continued the practice ever since, in training and in competition.
From a runner’s point of view, it seems to work. Paprocki has cut nearly an hour off his first marathon time and hopes to finish Monday’s race in about 3 1/2 hours.
It’s helpful from a chancellor’s point of view too. Paprocki said that often after a good run he not only feels invigorated, but finds that whatever problems vexed him in the morning are more tractable when he returns to them in the afternoon, or perhaps solved altogether.
And in the process of spreading shoe rubber all over the streets of Chicago and other cities, Paprocki has managed to raise more than $40,000 for charitable causes.
By the middle of this week, he had lined up $7,400 in pledges for the Boston Marathon, which he has dedicated to the archdiocese’s Annual Catholic Appeal–the campaign that used to be called the Cardinal’s Appeal, which supports various missions of the church in and around Chicago. He hopes the total will rise before the starter’s gun goes off.
And by the time he gets to the foot of Heartbreak Hill, perhaps the most notorious incline in the world of marathon running, Paprocki will be a step ahead of most of his footsore fellow travelers–he will already have said his prayers.
More than matzo: Speaking of good works, on Wednesday the JUF Uptown Cafe opened its doors for the first time, serving a Passover seder to 50 guests and volunteers.
Located in a storefront at 4000 N. Sheridan Rd., the cafe offers a kosher meal and companionship to needy people of all faiths. It is sponsored by the Jewish United Fund, which eventually hopes to serve up to 200 people, four times a week.
At Wednesday’s seder, about two dozen guests, mostly elderly and many disabled, sat down at large tables. An equal number of volunteers served their food, restaurant-style, then sat down to pray, eat and sing with the guests.
The Uptown Cafe aims to help its neighborhood, which includes roughly 3,000 Jewish people living at or below the poverty line. Some live on the streets; most are alone.
But organizers are just as interested in engaging the hearts of the cafe’s volunteers, especially teens, many of whom are signing up at area synagogues. The idea is that, for all involved, this is more than a soup kitchen.
“You definitely could feel a sense of community in that little storefront today,” said Steven Nasatir, president of the JUF and an inaugural volunteer. “That’s important for all of us.”
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