Race at your pace

My friend has got me hooked on "Race at your Pace"  It's a medal a month challenge for walkers, bikers, swimmers and runners.  The medals are solid, well crafted things, shiny with snowflakes, or Christmas holly, frosty blue, raspberry red or the black and silver skating on ice January one.  I never won anything at school.  They didn't give prizes for reading and being away with the fairies, thinking.

So getting a medal as a middle aged adult is a thing of beauty!  I'm ridiculously pleased with them.  It was hard to swim 5 miles in December and hard to tackle 125 walking miles in January.  It got me out the bed, supplemented the medication that has kept me stable for 9 months now.  It's built muscle and must be keeping my lungs in order too! The medals now hang, like Christmas decorations, off the rack that holds the CD player and my CD collection.  They clink if I hit them and occasionally I have to say I have put one round my neck.  Because they mean a lot to someone who carried inadequacy as a teenager who came from such a sport loving family.

I'm a bit of an evangelist for them too.  I now have two friends in addition to me who are taking on their own challenges.  It featured in conversation at the doctors - her receptionist has done couch to 5K and hated it.  Remarkable.  It's easy to talk about things you love and find helpful.  Which I guess is why I find it easier to talk Jesus via books.  Because the tottering book stack grows.  Because I can't not read.  I have tried - a little - to limit the books.  Because of the expense.  But I'm curiously book hungry, word hungry. And I love it when I get to share.....my passion in life!!