I ran the Boston Marathon yesterday. It was hard. It always is.

(That’s me at an aide station ~20 miles, drinking Mountain Dew)

I first ran it 26 years ago. I was still a teen then… and thirty pounds lighter, though most people think I’m still pretty slim. It was my third marathon. My first was the week I graduated high school. Yeah, I like living out on the fringe. Always have.  

This time, though, it was only hard in the physical sense. Everything else about it was pure serenity — peace and calm and joy and trust that God would see me through and work His purposes, somehow, whatever they were, through my 26.2 mile journey from Hopkinton to Boston.

Let me explain…

For many, many years, before I found Christ, I used to think that if I did a certain race, or finished in under a certain time, or placed well enough to qualify for some championship or other, or did a race that was longer or more grueling than the next guy, or did an event more times than most other people, or in a more exotic locale, and if I surrounded myself with all the mementos of those efforts — the trophies and medals and race numbers and photographs — that nobody could ever take that away from me.

And that was true.

I still have them, in boxes and on my wall. Yet that legacy of accomplishment and experience never led to the kind of rich inner peace I felt yesterday and that I feel as I sit down to write this, (happy not to have to walk all the way across the room, much less up or down stairs!) I’ve done a lot of this kind of thing over the years — six Ironman triathlons, a continuous hundred-mile wilderness run, many fifty-mile runs and other things not even worth going into.

Yet none of it gave me lasting happiness. Oh, sure, it was fun and I like being fit and I’ve met some amazing individuals, many of whom have become my very best friends. Yet it was all a kind of artificial, substitute, methadone high that always faded.

What happened yesterday can’t fade because the serenity is unrelated to the race or to the performance or even to how I felt running it. Instead, the sense was in the race itself… and in me. My race became an opportunity for calm and joy because, for only the second time ever, I released the event to God to do with as He saw fit. The race became a kind of offering, a prayer, a release of self.

In an environment that tends to feed one’s pride and ego in absolutely gluttonous portions, doing that can seem pretty weird at times — the endless cheering throngs, the well-meaning congratulations, names etched on arms and legs so spectators can yell for you specifically. It’s a great thing on many levels, endurance racing, but it’s also rife with temptations to the worst kind of narcissism.

Finishing and feeling strong yesterday were merely the cherries on the sundae — a grace I had certainly not earned, much less trained for! My longest run going into this was a measly twelve miles. I had averaged less than twenty per week through the winter. (For you non-running types, that would translate as: “grossly inadequate”.)

Just a week ago, I was in the doctor’s office (a highly sympathetic, marathon-running doctor, no less) and he had advised me, flatly, not to run. My ankle was swollen up like a ripe plum and I was having difficultly walking around the block with the dog without excruciating pain. Starting, much less getting halfway seemed absolutely hopeless. Finishing seemed impossible. I wrote the race off and reconciled myself to it.

I also prayed. Not that God would see fit to fix me and run me, but rather that His Will Be Done. Friends asked me if I was running Monday and, as late as Thursday, I had to tell them, “I really don’t know. It is God’s hands.” And I meant it.

Then, all day yesterday, the ankle gave me no trouble at all. In fact today, with sore legs and hollow, hungry eyes, my ankle feels better than it did last week. Go figure. God is an amazing healer… THE ‘amazingest’ healer. We ask His help in that dimension too seldom, too half-heartedly, I think. We’re not really sure He can heal us — physically or otherwise — or if we want it. Sure, sometimes he accomplishes His purposes in the suffering and illness and pain and death, but that’s not his end purpose.

I went back to a post I did eighteen months ago and found my feelings captured by yesterday’s third-place finisher, Ryan Hall. Prior to winning the Olympic Trials by a wide margin, he said, in a video that still gives me goosebumps:

“This is my vision for [the race]–that everything would fade away: all the accolades and awards, and everything that is at stake, and in my mind’s eye be just me out there running with my God praising Him in my sanctuary. If I can praise God with all my body mind and soul on [race day], then I will walk away from the finish line satisfied, no matter what the outcome, and that will be a satisfaction that no one can take away from me.”

As a control freak obsessed with numbers, I never looked at my watch with concern yesterday, e.g., to calculate my splits and project a finish. People who know me would be surprised by that. It reminded me of another piece I wrote about time, in a different but related context. (My brother’s death and this race are closely tied together; for several years I have run in his memory.) I wrote, 3.5 years ago:

God’s time. It is not ours to know. It cannot be scheduled. It just… is. We must stand still and quiet, waiting in awe and wonder.