The Finish Line

Halfway through the run...

Brought to you live from Malta, with my ever steady hand: here´s a sneak peak at the finish line, right next to the ferry port in a town called Sliema:

Valletta Run

I´m falling behind on this blog business, but slow and steady wins the race (as I remind myself as I trot along, spandex-clad running aficionados whizzing by me on both sides.)

I promised to tell you about last week´s sunrise run to Valletta, the capital of Malta. What was I doing in Malta in the first place, you may ask? I find myself somewhat frequently in this fascinating island country, where I assist in organizing formational activities for women, that help each person to deepen in her friendship with Christ, to know the faith better, in order to live the faith better. Did you know that Malta actually appears in the Acts of the Apostles? St. Paul got shipwrecked here on his way to Rome. (Luckily, I take a plane, not a boat.) St. Luke, the author of Acts and one of St. Paul´s travelling companions, describes the hospitality of the natives, the inhospitality of the local fauna (watch out for the snakes), some miraculous cures, and other events that you can read about in Chapter 28, should your curiosity be peaked.

While we´re on the topic, St. Paul also uses a lot of sports imagery to talk about the Christian experience: “Do you not know that the runners in the stadium all run in the race, but only one wins the prize? Run so as to win”; I do not run aimlessly; “ I drive my body and train it”; “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith”. So it´s kind of fun to run a marathon on the very island where St. Paul would have done his own calesthenics, as it were. But I digress.

I think that early morning is the best time to run. You leave the house when it´s still dark, the dew-washed pavement reflects the orange glow of the streetlamps and the fingernail morn grins down at you. Your footsteps echo along the boardwalk, beating a march in time with the churning Mediterranean waves that rumble as they grind away at the rocky shore to your left. The sea is immense, black, fused with the sky at the unseen horizon. The air, damp and tasting of salt, is invigorating.

The sailboats, rowboats, fishingboat, yachts in the marina rise and fall on the swell and their masts and rigging sway as hints of orange and pale gray begin to creep into the sky. As you’re running, the world is waking up. You round a curve and, across the harbor, you see Valletta, a fortified stone citadel, and the thick sloping walls that have kept her enemies at bay for centuries. Valletta is strategically positioned on the heights, so you abandon the pierside path to begin the ascent on a spiraling avenue, lined with trees with overarching branches. The tunnel of foliage leads you past the gate of the city, the battlements of Fort St. Elmo and monuments to Maltese heroes of the Second World War until you reach… the capital´s centralized bus station and the romanticism ends as you realize you have to book it back to Sliema to make it home on time.

And now, some visual aids, in case my stunning prose didn´t leave you 100% satisfied:

The harbor

The gates of the city!

A few words about Saxum

It´s not only the Latin term for “rock”, it´s also the nickname that St. Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei, used for one of his spiritual sons, a bespectacled engineer by the name of Alvaro del Portillo, because he was so solid and reliable. “Saxum, how white I see the road --the long road-- that you still have to travel. White and fruitful, like a ripe field..." These are the words that St. Josemaría wrote in a letter to Alvaro in 1934, and would prove to be prophetic.

Whether it was a question of risking his life in the Spanish Civil War, rolling out of bed with a raging fever to find money today to pay a pressing debt tomorrow, or simply helping St. Josemaría organize his work and keep to his schedule, Blessed Alvaro was St. Josemaría´s right hand man for decades, and then became his first successor as the head of Opus Dei.

St. Josemaría never got a chance to visit the Holy Land, although in his prayer and imagination he would have trekked up and down the hills of Judea, boated across the Sea of Galilee, and trodden the path to Jerusalem innumerable times, in the company of Jesus of Nazareth. For him, the Gospel passages came alive as he imagined himself as one more character in the scene. Many years later, Blessed Alvaro was able to fulfill his predecessor´s desire to make a pilgrimage to the land where the events of salvation history took place, the land that the Church Fathers refer to as “the Fifth Gospel”. For his 80^th birthday, Blessed Alvaro got a plane ticket to Tel Aviv (not a bad birthday present), and celebrated his last Mass in the Cenacle, the Upper Room where Jesus instituted the Eucharist. His last Mass, because upon his return to Rome the following day, he suffered a massive heart failure and passed on into the next life... but continues pretty darn active in this one, judging from the devotion so many people (including myself) have to him. 

The Saxum conference center project takes its name from Blessed Alvaro, so that thousands and thousands of people from all over the world will, like him, have the opportunity to make a pilgrimage the Holy Land and step into the pages of the Fifth Gospel.

The Saxum website is pretty cool: www.saxum.org. And, for those who are interested in sponsoring me in the Malta marathon, you can find out how to help with Saxum here: http://www.saxum.org/donations/ways-to-give/ . 

Thanks! Next up: in situ training in Valletta, the capital of Malta... Stay posted!

First day of training

There are a lot of theories about how to prepare for a marathon. How many miles to run/walk/sprint/jog/skip/schelp/trek/mozy/cruise etc. every day. How many carbs to consume, how many liters of Gatorade to down. Since I´m the type who likes to play it by ear (for better or for worse), I´m going to go for the trial and error approach. The other day I laced up my trusty Adidas tennies and headed out for my official first day of training along the longest stretch of cobblestone free road I could think of: the bikepath along the Tiber River. It takes you out into the country, you pass field of sunflowers, horses, and grazing sheep, a water purification plant (which somewhat mars the otherwise bucolic experience), and lots of twisty Mediterranean pines.

Of course, since it´s Rome, the cobblestones are sooner or later inevitable.

Rock'nRun

Hello, everyone! It´s me, Kathryn Plazek, and I´m back in the blogging world. Ok, so my last attempt at blogging failed somewhat miserably, but if at first, you don´t succeed… sign up for a marathon.

That´s not exactly how the saying goes, but that´s what I´ve done, and I´ll tell you why.

Really, it´s a question of the stars aligning just right. Don´t worry, I´m not into astrology, but I am an idealist and one dream that I have is Saxum: a conference center that´s being built –as we speak– in the Holy Land, just 18 miles from Jerusalem, where people from all over the world will be able to come to discover the ground where God left his footprints.

And, speaking of footprints, I love running, and it just so happens that I´m going to be in Malta on February 22, the very day the Malta Marathon takes place. Too good a chance to miss—run 42 kilometers (which is a little more than running from Saxum to Jerusalem and back—they´re only 18 kilometers apart) and use the opportunity to get the word out about Saxum.

A month and a half isn´t a very long time to train for a marathon, but I figure, what do I have to lose? Just my pride, hehe. And what do I have to gain? Well, with the support of all my friends and family, lots of sponsors to help make Saxum a reality. No pledge is too small – a dollar for every kilometer – or whatever you feel inspired to commit to… because Saxum really is an inspiring project.

By the way, “Saxum” is Latin for “rock”… hence the title of this blog. In future posts, I hope to keep you up to speed on how Saxum´s coming along… and how my training is going… we´ll be taking some tours through the cobblestone streets of Rome, along the Maltese coast, and beyond. So stay tuned!