Five stories about the time God told me to run a marathon

1. …and all I got was a finisher’s medal

Saying that God told me to run a marathon is a provocative formulation, but not inaccurate. What I mean is that the same source of good ideas that has at various times told me You should keep seeing that girl and you shouldn’t give up on your dissertation and you should turn down that job offer and now that you’ve accepted the job anyway and moved to another state, you should leave as soon as possible told me one day: You should run a marathon. That’s not quite as surprising as it may sound. I had made a successful return to running as an adult (a few years after that source had said You should start running again, but still) and I had run some 5K races and a decent 10K and a few good half marathons, and then I took a shot at breaking 80 minutes in the half. But there were high winds on race day, and despite red-lining from mile four on, I failed to meet my target by 37 seconds. All I needed to hit my goal was another summer of training and better conditions on race day in the fall, but the source of good ideas said You should run a marathon.

So I did. I had previously told myself I had no interest in ever running a marathon, but I trained for one all summer and ran in the local marathon in the fall. I learned some useful things along the way, like not to let yourself run the pace that feels natural from mile seven to fifteen, and what happens at mile 23 if you run that pace anyway. I finished a very distant second to a scion of the Scheels dynasty, and that was that.

Except then a friend offered to sponsor me for the Boston marathon. That seemed like a good indication that I really was on to something when I was told You should run a marathon, but registration for the race the following spring had just closed, so I had to wait almost a year to register for the next race, scheduled for April 20, 2020.

Like a lot of plans for April 2020, the race didn’t happen, and the airline tickets I had reserved turned into airline credits. Eventually the Boston marathon was postponed to fall 2020, so I made another set of airline reservations, which then turned into even more airline credits.

In October 2021, three years after running a qualifying time, I finally made it to the Boston marathon. I kept wondering: Why am I here? Was I supposed to, I don’t know, run into a long-lost acquaintance and tell him to get baptized? Have a gospel discussion on the bus to Hopkinton? Apparently not. Why was I there? The only answer I got was Have a good race! which was kind of anticlimactic.

2. Many are called, but you weren’t chosen

That’s not to say that my being there couldn’t have served a deeper purpose. About seven miles into the race on an overcast morning, I passed a woman who had collapsed in the road maybe a minute previously, recently enough that race officials hadn’t yet reached her. Fortunately a runner just behind her was an EMT; I heard him say “Begin chest compressions” as I ran past. A minute ahead at that point into the race means that she was likely an excellent athlete, somewhere on the brink of qualifying for the Olympic trials, the kind of athlete for whom seven mostly downhill miles at marathon pace on an overcast day is more of a pleasantly brisk jog than a moment of intense physical distress. When something like that happens, it’s not overexertion, it’s just the cosmos playing games with your off switch. Fortunately an EMT was in the right place at the right time, and she survived. His choice to run a marathon served a deeper purpose. I was a minute late, with no useful expertise to contribute.

3. Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize?

I don’t think Paul was much of a runner.

I did not win the Boston marathon. I was about a thousand places back. That dosn’t mean I didn’t have a good race. Of the thousand-odd guys in my age group, I finished ahead of all but 28 of them (albeit in the Covid-depleted field of 2021). That’s pretty good! Just not good enough for anyone else to care, even among the small group who care about age group finishes at the Boston marathon.

Like most things we do, the meaning of a marathon is nearly always only what it means to the person running it. Which is to say: Apart from yourself (and maybe a few close family members), no one cares. A small fraction of runners will ever be in a position to compete for a top place in any race, and a smaller fraction in a marathon. You can run the last two hours or more of a small marathon invisible to the person behind you, and unable to see the person ahead of you. Even in a major marathon like Boston, only a few dozen people at most are racing against anyone but themselves.

I finished a few places higher in the Boston marathon than I would have otherwise because, after turning left on Boylston, a half mile from the finish and four miles into the phase of hating marathons and regretting my decision to ever try running, I was determined not to finish behind the goofball running in a Hawaiian shirt. Running marathons does not bring out the best in me.

4. Physiology always wins

People often expect the meaningful part of a marathon to come in the race itself. They look to things like enduring to the end or battling through the pain. But if a marathon turns into an epic experience, you’ve most likely done something wrong. The last several miles are probably going to be unpleasant no matter what you do, but it’s largely up to you if that’s the last 3 miles, or the last 13

The well-documented and depressing fact is that your marathon potential is highly correlated with your half marathon time, which is even more highly correlated with your 10K time, which can be accurately predicted based on your 5K time, etc. Of course this assume that you’re running on a level course in good weather conditions, after a significant block of effective marathon training, that you’re able to digest a certain amount of carbohydrates during the race, you nail the rest of the logistics and that you make correct pacing decisions the whole way. (Except no one agrees what effective marathon training looks like, and it’s inherently difficult to touch the range of fitness you need in the last few miles of a marathon, except by doing dismal stuff like going out for a 20 mile run, then running two or three more miles at a quicker pace. Plus Mother Nature gets a vote on how your day turns out.)

This means that your optimal pace, and a foolhardy pace that will send cramps shooting through your legs like electric shocks at mile 21, differ by maybe five seconds per mile. Too fast, too easy and just right can feel nearly the same for the first 10-15 miles. To an outside observer, they’re indistinguishable, and both look very much like a slightly upbeat jog.

It turns out digesting carbohydrates while under physical stress – something so basic that bacteria can do it – is something I’m not great at. I consistently underperform in marathons.

5. Like ripples in a pond

I don’t need a dramatic conclusion to keep me listening to the source of good ideas. It’s steered me in the right direction too many times, with ideas I would never have come up with on my own. I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s given me everything good I have in my life, and ignoring it has turned out badly. Sometimes we won’t ever know why we did something, and what we think is the reason might turn out to be wrong anyway.

But in this case, I can actually draw a direct line to some meaningful consequences, although from the outside it may not look like much.

For various complicated reasons having to do with how post-pandemic events got rescheduled, I couldn’t use all those airline credits. They just sat there, approaching their expiration date, until one day my daughter asked me, “Are we going to Germany?”

We had talked about it. We only had two kids left at home, and both of them had been too small when we returned to the U.S. the last time to remember much of the experience. So I went online to search for flights so I could tell her: Sorry, we tried, but it’s just not possible…except it was possible, just barely, by flying out of an inconvenient airport – and by using up our airline credits. It wouldn’t be a vacation as much as a relocation, as we kept up with work online for a month while living in a steeply discounted one-room Airbnb in a town that doesn’t show up in any tourist guides (but that does have excellent transportation connections and its own ward).

It may look like a prolonged semi-vacation on the outside, but on the inside it was quite a bit more. It was a chance to show our youngest two children who we were as a family, and why we do the things we do and why we love the things we love and how “I’ll go where you want me to go” ended up as our family theme song, even though they had missed most of our time living abroad. We saw some impressive sights during our trip (it turns out you can see some things with a couple of interested teenagers that you can’t with a cranky toddler and a pre-schooler given to nuclear meltdowns), but the most beautiful thing I saw on that trip was a small German ward making space for refugees from Ukraine (and a random American family who showed up for a month one summer). Most of all it gave us a chance to build some happy memories and spend some uninterrupted time with each other before high school and senior year and internships and college complicated life for all of us.

I don’t know what will come of it. It felt, and feels, like it was important, even necessary, like betting it big on a roll of the dice when it’s your last move, but the stakes are high enough that you accept the risk because you don’t want to have to say that you didn’t try.

That’s what happened because God told me to run a marathon.