Push through

I was a poor distance runner most of my life.

No, that’s not quite right. I am a poor distance runner.

For most of my life, however, I always stopped running before the term “distance” could apply to what I was doing.

In a college physical education class, I had to log six miles of running each week. Three nights a week, my friend, Jay, and I went to the football stadium to run laps around the quarter-mile track. Neither one of us was in running shape when we started, so we did more walking than running.

But by the end of that semester, we could finish eight laps (two miles) around the track at a slow jog.

That’s as far as I could go. The sensation I got when running was that an iron cage was tightening around my chest and my lungs were turning to paper.

Over the next few years, I tried to take up running again as a New Year’s resolution. The weight gain I longed for in high school, when I could barely keep 145 pounds on my 5’ 11" body, finally came in my twenties. I couldn’t shake the pudge that seemed to be growing like Th Blob around my middle and my neck. So, I took up running again…a few times.

I never got far. My friend, Tracy, ran with me for awhile and helped me break the two-mile barrier. He got me up to three miles, but what miserable miles they were! I was glad when I moved to a new city and didn’t have to put up with his constant encouragement to just smile while I tortured myself.

“Death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back,” I recalled Marcus Aurelius saying in ‘Gladiator.’

I got another friend, Sarah, to run with me for a couple of months. I’m going to be honest: One of the reasons I asked Sarah was that I thought impressing a woman would motivate me to try harder. Nope.

One winter, I hired a college cross country coach to work with me.

I did what he taught me to do until it hurt. Then I quit. The one race I ran with him ended with me barfing at the side of the road.

After that, I made up my mind to just accept that I am not a runner. I don’t like it. I don’t want to do it. Why bother?

A few years later, something got me to bother again.

My son, Daniel, was born.

When a man becomes a father, it’s like every mirror in the world changes in a flash. Starting the day your first child is born, all you can see in every mirror is your child’s daddy looking you straight in the eye.

Nothing in my life ever made me want to live more than the birth of my son. And nothing in my life had ever made me want to live so well.

So, on a whim, I signed up for a half marathon training program.

As in 13.1 miles.

If you’re keeping track at home, my record for distance was three miles.

Like I said, it was a whim brought on by the trauma of becoming a dad.

I won’t leave you in suspense. I ran the half marathon, not once, but three times (two for training and one for the real thing).

I’ll never forget how it felt to do something that I thought was impossible.

I’ll never forget finishing that impossible race and wondering what other impossible things I could do next. It’s a feeling like no other.

But I don’t want to dwell on crossing the finish line after 13.1-mile race; I want to go back to the first time I broke the three-mile “barrier.”

It was the first night of the training program.

I met my training group and the leader announced we were going out on a three-mile run. I didn’t want to look like a wimp in front of the group, so I didn’t object. But in my mind, I was thinking: “Shouldn’t we work up to that over the next few weeks? I mean, I haven’t run so much as a city block in nine years!”

But, no, off we went on a three-mile run on the first night.

I will say this: I chose a training program that put me in a group of runners who were “on my level.” That meant grandmothers. I’m not kidding. My training group was mothers, grandmothers, and me. All of us were a little…overweight. When we got together on Thursday nights to train, nobody would look at us and mistake us for marathon runners.

This is key. When I showed up on the first night and saw that I was a 37-year man among a group of women in their 40s, 50, and 60s, I hesitated. I thought: “Is this the best I can do?”

And I had to admit: It was.

As it turned out, those grandmothers were better runners than me. I had to be honest with myself and face the facts.

If I chose to jump to another group full of sinewy men and their testosterone, I’m sure that I would have quit the training program after one or two weeks.

But running with those grandmothers was just my speed.

And, frankly, grandmothers are way better at encouragement than a pack of shirtless dudes who are already eating their popsicles in the parking lot when I’m just starting the second mile.

So, on the first night of the training program, those grandmothers and I ran three miles. It was light. It was slow. And, frankly, it was a struggle. But we finished together.

I went home amazed and a little proud.

Each week we added one more mile to our group run. Just two weeks into the program, I couldn’t believe it when I finished a four-mile run. Then a five-mile run. Then a six-mile run.

When the year started, I would have told you that I would never run more than three miles. It’s as far as I had ever run in my life…and just barely.

But now I was running twice that!

As the distance grew longer each week, I observed something.

The worst parts of the run were the first three miles and the last mile.

When we started out on our training run each week, the first three miles felt like every miserable mile I’d ever suffered through in my life. I had the same “iron cage” feeling around my chest and the same “parchment” feeling in my lungs. Thoughts of quitting the program always came during the first three miles of the training run.

But then something happened a little after the three-mile mark: I started to feel good. It was like when an airplane gets up enough speed that the “lift” under its wings takes it up into the sky. On miles four through nine, I felt like that airplane.

That’s when I could see something that I never saw before. It wasn’t that the distance I tried (and failed) to run was too far; it wasn’t far enough.

The half marathon training program taught me that the struggle comes just before the break-through. When I think I’m at my limit, I need to keep pushing until I push through the limit.

That revelation cast new light on so many parts of my life.

I see the principle at work in my body, emotions, and mind. I see it at work in my profession, relationships, and how I use my talents.

When it feels bad and you feel like giving up, push through.

Two points to keep in mind.

First, it helps to be running the bad miles and the good ones with a group of grandmothers! You need to surround yourself with people who are going the same way and at about the same speed (with a few going a little faster).

Second, you need to be sure that you’re running the right race for you.

There have been times in my life when I learned the hard way that I was trying to “push through” in a race that was not mine to run. When you’re in the wrong race, you will keep “pushing through,” but only to injury and total failure. Sometimes, you need to admit that you’re running the wrong race and that nobody (least of all you) will gain anything from “pushing through.”

But when you have the right people in your life and you’re sure that you’re going the right way, don’t let the pain and struggle stop you.

When you feel like you can’t go on one more step, it’s not that you’ve gone too far; it’s that you haven’t gone far enough yet.

I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus (Letter to the Christians in the ancient city of Philippi, chapter 3, verses 10 through 14).

Grace and peace.