A Hobbit and a Benedictine Monk Walk Into a Half Marathon

"Consistency, companionship, and the quiet holiness of finding your own pace: What running has in common with monasticism, old marriages, and the road to sanctity."

From Aleteia

By Daniel Esparza

Consistency, companionship, and the quiet holiness of finding your own pace: What running has in common with monasticism, old marriages, and the road to sanctity.

There is a kind of glory in monotony that we rarely stop to honor. Not the monotony of boredom, but the other kind — the deep, rhythmic constancy of things that ask you to show up the same way, day after day, with nothing to prove and no crowd to perform for. The sea at the same hour. Vespers at the same bell. The long run every chosen day at the same pace.

I finished the Mitja Marató Costa Barcelona Maresme recently — 21 kilometers along the Catalan coast, from Pineda de Mar to Calella, flat as a psalm and twice as repetitive. In all truth, quite a boring race. And yet. What stayed with me afterward was not the finish line, or the time on the clock, but the sensation of consistency — of having run the same race from start to finish, never surging, never dying, never cheating the rhythm. Not too slow. Not too quick. The same pace, held like a note. Even more boring, if you will. 

The monastic tradition has a word for this, more or less: stabilitas. St. Benedict built his entire rule around it — the commitment to stay, to persist, to resist the restless temptation to be somewhere else, doing something more spectacular. The monk who stays in his cell does something the travelling virtuoso might never quite manage. He learns the shape of his own soul, so to speak, by staying still long enough to see it.

Running, of all things, teaches the same lesson in motion.

Your pace is your vocation

Every runner eventually learns what no coach can fully teach: the pace that is yours. You can study tables and formulas, wear the right watch, follow the right plan, buy great shoes, use the proper socks, and a long et cetera. But at some point, somewhere around the eighth or ninth kilometer, the body tells you the truth. This is who you are. This is what you have. You have to run from here.

The spiritual tradition calls something similar a calling — the Latin vocatio, from vocare, to call. The idea is not that some people are called and others are not, but that each person is called differently, to something specific, something that fits the particular grain of who they are. The great mistake is to run someone else’s race. To set out at a pace that belongs to another body, another life, another story. You can do it for a while but, boy, you will pay for it later.

The saints understood this with uncomfortable clarity. Allow me to use some running metaphors here. Francis of Assisi ran barefoot. Benedict ran slowly, in circles, in one place. Ignatius ran with strategic efficiency. Teresa ran through interior castles at a pretty fast pace. Therese didn’t run: she took the elevator. The point is that none of them ran the same race, and all of them ran their own.

You will never run alone

And yet. The image of the solitary runner, earphones in, sealed off from the world, is only half the story — and, I have come to think, probably the less interesting half.

Most of us started running because someone asked us to come. A friend who said there’s a race in October, want to do it with me? A partner who laced up at six in the morning and made it seem possible by simply doing it. The person who ran alongside you in the second half, when the legs were gone, and said nothing, because nothing needed saying.

Liverpool supporters sing "You’ll Never Walk Alone" — borrowed from Rodgers and Hammerstein, carried by Gerry and the Pacemakers into something borderline liturgical — and the line lands because it names something true about every communal endeavor: the courage to go forward is rarely generated alone. Frodo could carry the Ring, but he could not carry it without Sam. The burden was his. The companionship was what made the burden bearable.

Running, and spiritual life, are like this. The pace is yours — no one can run your race for you, no one can feel what you feel at kilometer sixteen, no one can decide for you whether to hold on or let go. And yet the people who made you show up, who run beside you, who meet you at the finish line or simply at the coffee shop an hour later, are not incidental to the story. They are the story as much as you. 

This is what the mystical tradition calls communio — not the erasure of the individual in the group, but the deepening of each person through their belonging to something larger. The monk in his cell is not alone; he prays with the whole Church. The runner on the road is not alone; she runs with everyone who ever ran before her, and with the friend who called her last September and said there’s a race in October.

What monotony gives back

Consistency, in the end, is a form of faithfulness. The long marriage that does not need every day to be extraordinary. The prayer that persists through dryness. The training run that is not an adventure, that offers nothing except the quiet accumulation of capacity — the slow building of something that will hold when it needs to hold.

We ran the Maresme at the same pace from start to finish, with 21 kilometers of flat coast ahead. It was not dramatic. It was not fast. It was boring. But it was ours. And in the particular silence of kilometer 17, with the sea still there and the legs still moving, there was something that felt like a training ground for contemplation.