The Marathon pt. 1
Today is the day I have decided to embark on the challenging yet beautiful journey of conveying the story of the "untrained marathon" I ran alongside two of my brothers in Christ during my outreach. For those who have not been following my previous 'Outreach Stories,' this series testifies to some of the many miraculous ways God showed His mighty hand while I was on outreach in the Himalayan Mountains in 2023. (For more heart behind this series click,Entry 24: Outreach Stories #3 (Mudemia and Boosheti)
One reason I am sharing this with you is so I can look back and be reminded of God's power and providence. But my greatest desire in sharing this is to convey the message God has entrusted to me and use it only to glorify Him and display how His strength is perfected in my weaknesses. Many of you may read this and say that running a marathon untrained is foolish and meaningless, but I believe God invited me to do it, and I would rather please God than please man. I have learned that obedience to God often looks like foolishness to man. It is written, "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong" (1 Corinthians 1:27).
I have heard other people share this story, and the only times it makes me uneasy are when they make the marathon about me. Though I am the main character of the story, I am not the message. The message is about God showing up when we have faith and that He will display His glory in our weakness. The story is meant to glorify God and give Him all the credit. To understand the fullness of the marathon, you must first understand everything that led up to it. In part one of this two-part story, I am going to paint you a picture of where I was mentally, physically, and spiritually leading up to the day of the race. It starts in the fall of 2022 in Hawaii, before we even arrived in the Himalayan Mountains.
I assume you can find my friends and I. From left to right is Devin, Micah, then me.
Malnourished Physically, Overflowing Spiritually
While in Hawaii, my outreach team and I trained our minds and bodies arduously by working out, often twice a day. We did this in preparation for what we thought the majority of our outreach mission would entail. Our mission was to trek for weeks at a time through the Himalayan mountains to bring Bibles to villages that had never received them or heard the gospel. The people training us had experience in trekking. They would often highlight the mental and physical difficulties of the grueling task of walking for 10 to 16 hours a day with 60 to 80 pound packs in the high elevation of the Himalayas. A phrase commonly repeated was, "Trekking is one of the hardest things you will ever do." This sentence, to an 18-year-old like myself and most other young men was captivating and stirred a type of nervous excitement. It often made me fearful but simultaneously curious. It raised inquiries such as, "What would I do when challenged with something so difficult?", "Could I push through even when I feel I cannot walk another step?", and "Will the desire to see villages saved be stronger than the pain in my legs or the weariness of my mind?"
All these thoughts, on top of the hype of being surrounded by 300 zealous other students and my own newly saved and extremist mind, led me to train my spirit in radical discipline. I came to the conclusion about halfway through my 3-month lecture phase that emphasizing the edification of my spirit would be much more powerful and beneficial than training my physical body. I stopped waking up early to lift and would instead read scripture and pray. I stopped worrying about my caloric and protein intake and started fasting. We still had mandatory workouts for trekking preparation, so I often did them two or even three days into a fast just to see God's strength in my weakness and to see my spirit edified. There were two phrases that I would repeat over and over. The first was, "The LORD glories in my weakness," and the second was, "One more, one hundred more, all the more for the LORD." I now know that working out many days into a fast is crazy and unwise. Ever since this season God has been teaching me prudence, but back in the fall of 2022, this is where I was mentally.
Sunday
Fast forward to Sunday, February 12, 2023. My team and I just returned from an amazing but different-than-expected, month-long outreach to villages in the heart of the Himalayas. We returned to a YWAM base that was still in the Himalayas but in a big city around 4,500' elevation. During our time in the villages, God showed up in crazy ways, but we did not trek nearly as much as we thought we were going to. This was totally fine with us, and we were grateful for everything God had done in our time in the mountains, but myself and the two other guy students on my team, Micah and Devin, had a burning desire to do something hard. Despite feeling that we had lost all our intense training due to extreme malnutrition and inactivity in the high mountain villages, a previously cultivated desire still awaited its culmination. Physically, we were malnourished, but spiritually, we were overflowing from the mighty acts of God in the past month.
Monday
After just one day of being back and getting a couple of proper meals, us boys decided we wanted to start training physically again. We wanted to slowly start easing back into a rhythm of exercise and planned on steadily regaining our fitness. We woke up early Monday morning and ran only two miles at a relatively slow pace. Even with the short distance and easy pace, those two miles were quite rough. Ironically enough, even after the bad, "easy" training experience it was only a couple of hours later that Micah, Devin, and I were riding on a bus and saw advertisements spread all across the city for an international marathon. Devin started looking up information about it out of curiosity and saw that it was not too late to sign up for it even though it was only 5 days away. By the time we got off the bus, we all decided we were going to run the marathon. It started by us just saying that we could walk half of it if we had to and that there was no reason we would need to go hard. We loved the thought of us all running our first-ever marathon untrained and in a third-world country. We then learned that only the top 100 racers receive a medal. After looking at the standings of the year prior, we learned that 100th place had a time just under 5 hours. We decided if we were going to go through the grueling process of running a marathon untrained, then we at least wanted proof and some hardware to take home. This is when Micah, Devin, and I started devising a plan. We decided we were going to try and run the marathon, 26.2 miles, at a ten-minute and thirty-second pace per mile, which would take us around four and a half hours to complete. This seemed reasonable and would almost guarantee a medal. We realized we only had 4 days to train for a feat that some people train months, even years, to accomplish. Not only that, but we also knew we were doing it malnourished, at 4,500' elevation, and in a third-world country without proper running shoes, supplements, or course knowledge.
This was our 4 day marathon training plan
-No sugar
-Eat consistent and healthy
-Run a half marathon at a 10:00 minute/mile pace on Tuesday (13.1 miles)
-Rest Wednesday
-Run 8 miles on Thursday
-Carb load Thursday night
-Rest Friday
-Eat light Friday night
-Saturday=race day
Tuesday
On Monday, I woke with zero knowledge or intention of running a marathon. On Tuesday, Micah, Devin, and I woke up at five a.m. to start our first portion of marathon training and ran 13.1 miles. We did it surprisingly well at a 10:07 minute/mile pace. Micah had not run this far since 2018, Devin had only run 8 miles once, and I think I had only run 6 miles once before this. We all finished together, but Micah and Devin were in far better physical and mental shape after the 13.1 miles. It took almost everything in me to stay with them. I could hardly walk for a while after and felt dizzy and as if I was going to throw up. I can still remember leaving the breakfast the girls had prepared for us and walking outside to get some air. I thought to myself, "I am going to humble myself and tell the boys I am not capable of doing the marathon." I thought, "If I almost passed out from the half, there is no way I could run the full distance." But then a still small voice interrupted my doubtful, earthly thinking. The Holy Spirit asked, "How far are you willing to go to see my strength in your weakness? You saw me show up miraculously in the lives of the people in the mountain villages; do you have the faith that I can do the impossible through you too?" This is when something shifted in my mind. Suddenly, all my fear and worry were calmed, and I was brought into the perfect peace that comes from the voice of God. I started realizing this was an opportunity to display a tremendous amount of faith by attempting to run a marathon, letting the joy of the LORD be my strength. I reflected on my life and humbly realized I have hardly ever failed, which made me ask myself a question more people should ask: "Am I stepping out in faith enough if I have only seen success?" I instantly went to my outreach team and told them, "I am going to run the marathon, but as you could see, I could barely handle the half, so if I even run 1 mile over a half, it will be only by the strength and grace of God." I told them I would start the race in faith, and if I needed to drop out at a certain mile, then I would.
Wednesday
On Wednesday, we rested from training. Keep in mind that we were still on outreach at this time. Even though we had started training, our main focus was still to serve others and spread the good news of Jesus. You may be asking yourself why we ran a half marathon days before a full marathon when we were already untrained and the training would lead to fatigue. The truth is we really had little to no knowledge on how to approach such a challenging feat in such a short time. I think our mentality behind running the half was to see if it was even possible at our desired pace. On our rest day, God started revealing to me a new understanding of His love and the cross. As I reflected on the pain of the 13.1 miles I had run on Tuesday, I felt God give me a glimpse of the exponentially greater suffering that Jesus endured in the hours leading up to His death. The beautiful revelation He gave me was not so much that He died for me, but rather that Jesus was so beaten and in so much pain even just carrying the cross, yet He chose to stay alive. He fought not to give up His spirit until the time was right. He actually chose suffering so that He could make it all the way to the cross and fulfill every prophecy that had been made. For some reason, this thought of God becoming man and not only enduring the pain of the cross but also choosing to prolong His suffering until the time had come was just remarkable to me. This could not have been done without the joy set before Him and the power of His unwaveringly, tenaciously profound, agape love.
Thursday
On Thursday, we followed the training plan we had created on Monday and ran eight miles. We did it at a 10:30 minute/mile pace. The newly received revelation of Jesus's love and the fact that we had just run 13.1 miles made this run feel pretty easy. In hindsight, it was ridiculous that we were putting in this many miles just days before a marathon, considering where we were physically, but ignorance is bliss and we were determined. After the morning run and a day of ministry, we ate supper. We had asked some friends of ours who had run marathons, and they said it was super important to eat a large amount of carbs two nights before the big race. We did our best to make chicken pasta with the small amount of resources and ingredients we had and ate as much as we could.
Friday
All this took place during the Asbury Outpouring, a period when revival broke out at a college chapel, leading to 16 straight days of continuous prayer and worship. Because of this outpouring, the YWAM base where we were staying hosted an all-day prayer burn. My outreach team and I participated, and I cannot think of anything more restful than praying and worshiping for 10 hours. I believe this profoundly prepared my spirit and body for what was about to happen the following day. Although I could not help but think about the tremendous size of the task ahead, I professed that the LORD is my strength. I told the LORD that I would have faith in Him and demonstrate it by starting the race, trusting that He would give me the strength to finish. One of the base leaders, Forest, approached me and prophesied over me. He said that he felt God was removing my old fuel and replacing it with new, race car fuel. Forest explained that this new fuel would gradually burn away the old. He also mentioned that he believed I was like a diesel engine—slow to start but efficient and long-lasting once running. Forest did not know I was going to run a marathon the next day...
Saturday (Race Day)
Just like that, after 4 days of training, Micah, Devin, and I woke up at 3:30 a.m. and got ready to run our first-ever marathon. We ate some oatmeal with peanut butter and bananas, then prepared everything for the race. We had a very specific layout for the race involving the rest of our team. Every few miles, we planned to have designated people waiting for us with electrolytes, sugar, protein bars, and more. We arrived at the stadium at 5:00 a.m. The race was supposed to start at 6:00 a.m., but nobody was there. After 45 minutes, people started showing up, and before we knew it, around 7:00 a.m., we were at the starting line. Little did I know the significance of what was about to happen in the next few hours. I did not realize the life-changing experience that was about to take place and how it would impact not only the years to come but also my own eternity. I had no clue about the physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional journey I was about to commence.
Thanks
Thank you so much for taking the time to read part 1 of the marathon story. I hope it painted you a beautiful picture of everything that led up to this crazy event. If you enjoyed, stay tuned for part 2. It will encapsulate the entire race from start to finish and convey how God radically encountered me!
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