The Endurance to Continue

I ran a half-marathon seven years ago.

I am not a runner. Not regularly anyway.

I might be persuaded for carbs alone to do another one. Can we all agree that bread is amazing? Oh, and homemade pasta.

My first day out running I was out of breath and convinced I was going to die on my front lawn. I checked my pulse…126 beats per minute. Is that even healthy? I must have been running for hours!

Or 12 minutes.

Must have been at least a mile then.

or ¼ mile.

I was out of shape and not even a little prepared for the sore muscles.

I actually went home and googled “Couch to 5k training plan.” Before you laugh, you should know that  there were thousands of hits…We all start somewhere.

A few years later, when the bad memories of training had worn off enough for me to remember them without wincing…I decided to train for a half-marathon. The whole 13.1 miles. I decided to enlist a training buddy to keep me company.

Untested optimism is easy…so is untested faith.

I was excited…it was a crazy idea. I was naively optimistic. It would be awesome to accomplish!

We printed a training schedule and suddenly the whole half-marathon idea was a little more intimidating. Two miles on Monday and Wednesday, two and a half on Friday and four miles on Saturday. Or something close to that.

The schedule increased by a half mile each week and one mile on the weekends. Until the long run was up to ten miles.

There is the mental decision to take on a challenge…and then there is the determination to stick with it. Sometimes our determination needs a boost. This is why we need good people in our lives.

I did not want to go running at 5 a.m. but I had a training partner who wouldn’t let me quit. Refreshing my mental game whenever I started to waiver, she just kept going. If I wasn’t outside and ready for her, she knocked on my window to wake me up and then waited for me. It was annoying. I love her.

We powered through each of the short and long runs, week after week until race day.

Race day came early in the morning and the air was cold and crisp. I was nervous and surrounded by a hundred other crazy distance runners. This was intimidating, but after months of anticipation I was ready to get started.

We powered through the first seven miles pretty easily. Training paid off, this was actually fun! I am a runner… look guys!

Then I hit mile ten.

The furthest I had ever run.

The realization started out as a celebration, but quickly became intimidating.

Stopping for a water break and stretching before moving on…the wall caught up to me.

I did not want to run anymore. My mind and my muscles were exhausted.  I still had a whole 5k to do. This was starting over almost. At least it felt that way.

My friend started encouraging me with all of the good stuff. You would never have known she had just run ten miles with me.

“Come on we are so close. This last three miles is nothing! Take a few breaths, get some water and we’re going to keep going. We aren’t quitting.”

The doubt argued…“Are you kidding me? This is like starting over. You’ve already done ten miles. Thats plenty. You started too fast. You can’t finish…you are already defeated. You stopped for a break, you are done.”

Then my training partner and prayer warrior friend decided for us.

“I’m counting down–3, 2, 1…Go!”

And we were running again because I didn’t really want to quit and she wasn’t really asking.

I don’t think she was listening to what my doubt was saying either.

I’m glad. Thanks to her we made it.

Life is hard. Part decision, part mental determination; all dependance.

Sometimes I want to quit, sometimes the pain of just walking  this faith thing out is too hard without someone encouraging me.

There’s a reason life is often compared to a race. Starting something new takes patience and training. You can’t jump from start to finish just because you’re impatient. It takes restraint to do things the right way. Honestly? It takes a whole lot of faith to make it through life.

It takes a coach who knows the game and it takes training your mind. We are told to take every thought captive. For good reason.

The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.              –2 Corinthians 10:4-5 (NIV)

In 2005 the Natural Science Foundation published a research article that stated that we have between 12,000 and 60,000 thoughts per day. About 95% of these thoughts were the same as the ones yesterday and out of those thousands of thoughts 80% are pessimistic.

If 80% of our thoughts are negative, what is shaping our day?

 Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.–Philippians 4:6-7 (NLT)

Worrying is bad form and it will hurt if we don’t re-train ourselves. If the math is good–we think between 9,600 and 48,000 negative thoughts a day.

Let each day worry about itself indeed! What if we actually lay all 48,000 negative thoughts down at Jesus’ feet? How many of those can we control anyway? What good comes from listing them day after day?

I decided to run the half-marathon because I wanted to accomplish something big that took determination.

But… I also wanted to run the race to prove that I was good enough to.

I had never done anything that required that much thought and dedication. I didn’t really know if I could, and I didn’t believe that anyone else thought I could either.

This was one of my 48,000 negative thoughts.

I’m not good enough, I’m not strong enough, If I can accomplish this I can prove I might be…

But when I’m fighting toe-to-toe with these thoughts in my own wisdom, I am already losing. I will never convince the enemy of my soul that I am good enough for him to stop harassing me!

He doesn’t bother me because I am not good enough, he bothers me because he knows I am.

When the enemy presses an attack on an area of our lives, he reveals his fear. If he feels threatened… I must be something to be feared.

The enemy’s schemes are a confirmation that I am a threat.

I will keep my eyes on the coach and keep running this race even when its hard and I’ve hit a wall and don’t know how to move on.

You aren’t alone in this. Its hard and in hindsight it seems like a just quarter mile.

The truth is… if just a quarter mile is the hardest thing you’ve ever done…its still a struggle. It still counts as progress. It is still something that you accomplished. Don’t you dare belittle the journey that God is taking you on. There is no beginning that is too wimpy to count; no testimony too simple, or too dramatic to be ineffective. We all start somewhere.

Pace yourself– you’re in this race for life.

But don’t worry friend, you’re not alone.