1000

I was bored, with nothing to look forward to but a long cold winter, days of work and nights of school. I was also a little scared. But I knew I had to do something—really, anything—to shake up the status quo and get out of my head. I made a list of my options in notebook 3 of 7:

Get a tattoo
Chop off hair
Second, third, and fourth piercings
Sell my eggs
Have someone else's baby

After an evening of Googling and reading testimonials the last two got crossed off. $20,000 was not worth the emotional trauma. The others were just more pencil lead on a page.

A few days later, right before falling asleep, I had the random urge to run a half marathon. The next morning I jumped on Google again and printed off a training plan designed by Nike and endorsed by Ellie Goulding. I taped it up next to my bed, where I could see it even lying down. The whole thing was impulsive. The only foundation to the decision was the desire to do something, and the knowledge that I could give up any time I jolly wanted to because I was not telling anyone and I wanted to enjoy each moment of training without the pressure I'd put on myself by desperately caring about approval or lack of it.

Ever since 8th grade I've been a fair-weather runner, sometimes committed sometimes not. Last summer, though, after that trip into the mountains when mi amici jump-started me into action after a month of moping, something clicked and I realized I needed to move. By January, I'd been running consistently more than usual, but making the leap to a halvsie was going to require a push. So morning by morning, January, February, March, I ran. After a little more Googling, I eventually penned "Skunk Cabbage Classic" on the last Sunday of my plan, the first Sunday in April.

I am not good at running in the sense that it does not come naturally. I am not like my brothers or other Y-chromosome friends who can go out and run a 22 minute 5k with next to no training. I'm the girl coming in at 32 minutes with her 8 year old sister, unable to breathe and sore the next day. Training for a halfling, every muscle in my legs, core, and shoulders, the blisters on my feet, the scrapes from icy falls, the alarm clock, the weather app that would not move above zero, told me running was hard and the race was not worth it. My heart told me good, because the race is not the point. 

The point was doing something. The point was beating the winter. The point was beating those Saturday mornings and, instead of moping in bed with my computer, finding myself on top of a snowy hill, staring the peaks of surrounding hills in the face, listening to birds sing for the faint eastern sun. The point was experiencing irrational, flighty happiness running down a dirt road. The point was not believing the lies of the stupid existential crisis I've been going through for forever that makes me qualify words like "happiness" with words like "irrational" and "flighty."

The point was getting to eat tons of oatmeal and bananas.

Just kidding on that one (maybe not entirely?).

Those first few runs, or just a mile of sprinting on and off, were just as much the point as the 14-miler  peak in Corning or the actual 13.1 race in Ithaca. In my mind, anyway. It's the perspective I choose to have.

Just like I choose to have hope—hope that running a 1/2 marathon (or doing school, or brushing my teeth, or you-fill-in-the-blank)—is somehow significant because Jesus dying on the cross and giving me life is significant. Hope that light is better than darkness, work better than lethargy, a hello to a stranger on the sidewalk better than no hello at all.

Hope that there is a certain equality to life. Jesus, please make it equal. That if there is anything significant about running, it's just as significant running two miles as it is 13; that is, that the playing field is level when I recognize my body is a gift and I can't move or breathe without you. You, who are continually creating me, continually transcribing my DNA, changing my breakfast into ATP and holding my very molecules in place, separate from the air, or that tree. You, who have the power to lay me low, make me bleed, cover my body in blisters and annihilate me at any second. You who are holy and complete and separate. You who are intimately attuned to your creation. You, who set me free for free and for freedom.

Glory hallelujah. I'll praise Him... by doing what I can with what I've been given? By running? Does it work that way?

Hope is my choice, a choice not dissimilar from red pill or blue pill, Neo?.

Hope is my perspective.

I hope there is some worth in working hard and trying to live a "fuller" life with a variety of experience, tempered by a determined depth. Because of Jesus, no matter what I do, I know I have eternity with a God whose love I fallibly reciprocate. That takes off the performance-pressure that I'm so familiar with but hate.

So if I can get to heaven by living easy (no 1/2 marathons, so to speak), or living hard (compliments of the internal drill sergeant, thrill seeker, and Nancy Drew), I'm not sure why I'm choosing hard. Or maybe... maybe hard is easy. Maybe I have no choice. Maybe I'm still blind.

Maybe I need to go for a run and be still and know that he is God and confound the critics and damn the demons.

Maybe choosing hard means I'll have an extra story to tell when there's a party up in heaven with an open mic.

Training for the half was an extra story. The actual race was just an epilogue, a happy ending, a cherry-on-top—call it what you like. Rather anticlimactic because I got to trade in the layers of thermals and run in shorts and a tee under a clear, cool sky of sunshine. My race number was 1000: lucky, and eerily significant because the book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years is part of what inspired me to do something. I met people. I did a pre-race warm up mile with Hannah, who gave me a smile and the scoop on the course. The gun went off, and settling into pace I ended up with a stranger for 11 miles. And then we were friends. He says I pulled him, I say he pulled me. Either way, at the finish it gave me a fourth person to hug, after Mom & Dad & Sanna.

We drove home, and there was school to be done and work Monday morning. But there's a story in my head, along with the gospel, and a few less demons.