Earlier in the year, we featured a number of posts by Philip Jackson, a colleague of mine from Macedonia, on the parallels between running a marathon and the Christian life. In that same vein, I would like to reflect on my own recent experience of training for a half marathon.
This has been a huge learning experience for me. I have never been an athlete or competed in any individual athletic competitions since I was required to participate in kids races at Sunday school picnics in my childhood. I jogged in college and in the first years in the Philippines but never ran a single kilometer all those years in Far East Russia. Then about the time that we began serving with SEND U, I started again, simply for the sake of getting some exercise, running 5 km three times a week. That was hard enough, and even last summer, I found that I often could not finish the 5 km without walking partway. When a friend suggested that I should sign up for a longer race, I quickly dismissed the possibility. But this spring, through the repeated encouragement of Phil Jackson, I decided that maybe I should try a half-marathon. I was willing, but I knew I wasn’t even close to being ready to run 21 km. I found a 16-week training plan designed by a running coach and basically followed it from June until the race in Vilnius, Lithuania on September 15. And I finished the race in just over 2 hours, about 13 minutes faster than I had expected!