Running

I can smell the salt of the sweat on my brow and neck, with hints of bug spray–the bouquet of harsh metal, lime, and kerosene. The hot concrete burns through the soles of my shoes. The residue of the chocolate gel I took fifteen minutes ago still covers my gums and coats my throat, which catches wafts of pollen and car exhaust, temporarily choking me as I gasp for air. The rush of cooling wind on my face and bare chest, the dopplerring woosh of cars passing, the caw of a raven, or the screech of a hawk. The scooting shuffle of startled deer as I pass by on the roadway near where they are grazing.

Doing what you set out to do. If you are strong, you think it is just a matter of wanting it bad enough and believing in yourself, but it’s not. If it was, we would need only think of a thing, and it would be ours.

Instead, there are the disrupters of our happiness. They appear and lay waste to our plans in an instant, requiring us to change course and call instantaneously upon powers we did not know we possessed. These challenges that come disguised as parking problems, missed trains, turned down applications, and every conceivable NO – are, if we are to give them a name, tests. They are not tests of our abilities, but tests of our will.

Take running. I am a runner. Lately, I have started talking about it too much, to the point where some of my friends don’t want to hear about it. Too bad.

You set out to run. Today my goal was 18 miles. Five years ago, if you told me a man would wake up and step out his door and run 9 miles away from that door and 9 miles back home – I’d tell you, without question – this was a man who needed intensive psychotherapy. I now understand that this is a man who understands life and wants to live it.

Life takes endurance. Sometimes what is required of us most is not to crack under pressure. As that pressure continues to mount, as debt is added onto debt, as extra-curricular activities like tests, sales goals, health issues, relationship problems, and financial hurdles pile up on what already seems an overfull workload – our endurance is tested.

Life takes balance. We cannot run head on at every problem that confronts us. You want to own your own home. You could sprint. You could save the downpayment money in short order – beg, borrow, steal if necessary, but get that money, come what may, and get yourself a mortgage. But, if that downpayment money strapped you – you would only default two months out. The sprinter cannot win the races that life sets up for us – they are too long.

Life takes faith. Faith comes in believing that a higher power is looking out for you and has a plan for you. But the result of faith is optimism in the face of despair. There is no need for an example. Each of us has suffered what we thought were unbearable periods in our lives – where every door was closed to us, and all we thought we needed was lacking. No one comes out of these times until they learn to smile in the face of disaster. Disaster is looking for the weakest prey it can find. If you show disaster, you are not an easy target, and you are not backing down, it will look elsewhere.

So, running. How does one run 18 miles? You begin at a slow pace; a pace so slow it seems like you aren’t getting a workout. Just wait. By the end, this pace will seem like sprinting. Even the untrained runner will hit the three-mile mark in good shape – no serious cardiovascular strain – no cramping muscles – no overheating – no nausea. Around five miles your muscles will start to tighten up. The sun on your shoulders will start to be painful, and even bathing in it for a minute or two in between shady patches will make you start to sweat hard, depleting your precious reserves of water. Here come the disrupters.

Hills. Going up hills is painstaking work. You must keep your pace, going at the hill with short quick strides. Your breathing will escalate. Your heart will beat near the high end of its range. Lactic acid will build up in your muscles, making that stride seem impossible to maintain. But going down the hill in this fatigued state will cause you to take long lazy strides and absorb all of gravity’s impact with your thighs … which will cause unthinkable pain ten miles later. The key to the hill is you must know that on the next flat section your body will recover and that it is only a temporary pain. But you must also recognize the hill’s power to demolish you and not go at it too aggressively, lest you waste too much of your reserves and cause yourself to crash later. You must endure the hill, but attack it in a balanced way, and you must have faith that it will not beat you.

Bugs. Running in summer is pleasant with the flowers, sun, wind, and birds to watch as you go. But with all of this come wasps, flies, mosquitos and gnats. Just when you feel like you must walk, like you cannot go another step—they will arrive to fluster and disrupt you. You cannot waste precious energy fighting them off. You must let them bite you. And as they chug along in earnest to keep up with you, they will dive at you over and over for a quarter of a mile before getting their precious mouthful of flesh. Which, of course, leaves a bite that will become irritated by every drop of sweat that touches it. These are mere annoyances … but you cannot let them break your will.

Heat. Everyone can run one hundred miles if. If, that is, they remain hydrated. In the heat of summer, we dehydrate quickly. This means you must carry water with you in bottles, on a belt. This belt weighs several pounds and slows you down to the tune of thirty seconds to a minute per mile. Around mile ten, those bottles feel like lead weights. But you cannot do without them. Like many things in life you must carry with you, things which are essential – well, life’s luxuries come at a tremendous cost. Gas. It is expensive. But it gets you where you need to go. So too with water.

Pain. The pain begins as a tightness of the calves. There is the radiating pain in your back as your hamstrings pull the muscles of the lower back down out of their normal alignment. There is the pain in your hips and knees, which after thirteen miles stings with every step. There are the blisters that after mile ten turn every step into a nail gouging your foot. There are the cars that cause you to detour off you’re chosen path and run through tall grass and on gravel stones. There are intersections that you must wait out. There are dead deer on the side of the road emitting noxious odors that make you hold your breath. And then there are your legs. Your legs which at one moment feel like they can chase the wind and then in an instant feel as heavy as lead. This ebb and flow of pain in the legs, operating at a constant speed – it is a simple anatomic anomaly that comes from your own body. The body burns oxygen, sugar, and after mile ten, fat, at uneven levels. Sometimes supplying your body with too much fuel gives you a blissful runner's high that eliminates all pain, and then at other times leaves your tank empty – requiring your muscles to work on fumes. The result of running on fumes is pain in the muscles that feels like a pull but isn’t. Every runner knows these false highs and lows. Like in life, if you misread these false highs and charge ahead at full clip, the corresponding low will sink you for good. And with the lows, if you do not endure through them … your body will not keep burning the fuel to get you to the next high and you will crash into a wall of fatigue that you cannot recover from. As in life, you must move forward steadily, despite all nature and your own body put in your path.

Yourself. All these obstacles and disrupters are nothing compared to your own mind. In all of us there is a spirit that knows two states of being: belief and deceit. Deceit is the part of the spirit governed by fear, the part that kicks in when we are broken and tells us to recover. Deceit sets in very quickly to deprive us of our goals. It says stop. Unless quieted, that voice will grow so loud that nothing can overcome it. At mile thirteen it says, you have already done a half marathon, enough is enough. It says, your legs can’t take five more miles, just quit. It says, you can’t make it up that next hill. It gives us an out. And that out, that respite, that promise of rest, that illusion of peace … it is so tempting. It is always so tempting to give in before the race is run before the goal is in hand. What makes a man quiet the deceit in his heart and persevere? What makes a man believe that he can make it five more miles, make it to the next mailbox, the next tree, the next house … over and over for hours, until he has run his race? Only you can answer that for yourself. But there is something needing in all of us. In all of us, there is an emptiness that must be filled, a question we must answer, a mouth to feed, a principle worth dying for, a dream we hold in our hearts. And in all of us, God has given us a way to fill that emptiness. And at mile seventeen, when that emptiness is so small when the distance left is just a few more steps … that is when deceit is there to tell you that you don’t need to see the thing through – look how far you have already gone. And as every champion knows, that moment, when you push through that last wall and finish strong, is the only happiness we will ever know. For that victory, once achieved, can never be taken from you. You will enjoy it always.

I have lived my life by putting everything I have into that last mile. I have lived my life by taking one step past the finish line – a step the man next to me won’t take. I plan to keep living my life that way. Because at the end of this life, when you add up all those decisions to take that extra step on all of the races that are given us, and when you add up the extra seconds I gained at the end of the journeys I chose, I know, that sixty years from now, that will make all the difference.