Category: Ultra Life

I have only attempted running at night with a headlamp a couple of times.  Quite frankly every time I go running with a headlamp I am even more amazed by the 100 milers that head out on trails, leaping over tree roots and winding their way through rocks with just a little patch of rock.  The last time I went for a run with a headlamp was my New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day run where I start out about 11:30 PM and get about 3 miles in and then run for another 3-4 miles after the stroke of midnight.  As I was running along our pathway system in my hometown (where there are only a couple of lights, mainly when you go under the main streets) I was struck by just how much I could see once my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I learned to keep my head steady so my light would stay out in front of me.  Now I wasn’t running a trail so I know my head will bob up and down a lot more on that but after a couple of miles I really became used to the patch of light out in front of me and how it was just enough light to show me any hazards like ice or clumped up frozen snow patches that I needed to be careful on.  The darkness was still enormous and at times seemed overwhelming but that little patch of light provided just enough for me to carefully hammer out my miles.  As I ran I realized just how often I attempt to run through life in the darkness also.  It really struck me as I ran that there have been countless times that I have purposely chosen to leave my headlamp at home and attempt to go about the ultra marathon of life in darkness and how if I had chosen just a bit differently in those times maybe I wouldn’t have taken some of the awful tumbles that I have.  The more I ran and dwelt on this the more I realized that I was picking up a stone that I thought had been dropped on the side of the trail long ago.  See I was picking up the stone of “what if” and “if I had” and all this stone can do is plunge me back into darkness because by going back over these topics again and again I was forcing myself to live in darkness instead of letting the light shine in front of me as I moved forward.  You may be catching a theme in these mile markers, hopefully it is starting to shed some light on your trail forward.

This is this awesome passage in Ephesians that by far describes the absence of light, or the misguided use of light so better than I ever will.  Ephesians 5:8-14 “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.  Lie as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord.  Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but expose them.  For it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret.  But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for it is light that makes everything visible.”  I am a lighting guy in my professional career as an electrical distributor (I’ve also worked as a lighting manufacturer rep and a short spell for a manufacturer of natural daylight products) so I have studied light professionally a lot.  In fact I am quite passionate about light and the effect on the human body, how certain color spectrum of light are better for us from a health perspective than others, how you can change the mood in an office or classroom simply by choosing the correct color spectrum for your environment.  I am also a firm believer that more light doesn’t necessarily mean that you have better light.  Light has to be used efficiently in order for it to do what it is meant to do and that is simply this.  Light displaces darkness.  It doesn’t replace darkness which is what I think a lot of people think, but what it does is that it reveals the hiding places of darkness and exposes it to be illumined by the light.  And so it is with us and how we approach our ultra marathon of life in everything we do.  However, it is how we exercise light that will make the difference in our lives and in the lives around us.  I love the phrase “the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth” because this requires action on our part.  You do understand that fruit requires action, it requires tending to the fruit tress, pruning off dead branches, ensuring your fruit tree has enough hydration and that the soil surrounding it has the proper nutrients.  Running an ultra marathon requires these same characteristics also.  However, if you tend to the fruit trees of life properly but you cover your trees in darkness nothing will ever grow.  Just as fruit trees need the natural daylight to grow and become fruit bearing trees, so do you need the efficient use of the Light in your life to grow beyond who you are today.  To efficiently use the Light you are going to have to expose some of the dark areas of your life to the light.  For me this meant that I could no longer ask myself the “what if” and “if only I had” questions in life anymore.  If I truly wanted to move on from where I was to become the ultra runner I knew God was calling me to be I was going to have to expose those dark questions to the light and be willing to let light overwhelm the darkness so I could see the hazards on my trail.  Light will always displace darkness, it’ll never replace it as the darkness will still be there.  But if you use light efficiently and in the right measures it will shine the path forward.

Living an ultra life means that to see the path forward you can no longer afford to keep running in the darkness of the “what if” and “if only I had” questions.  To move forward and confidently stride to the finish of this ultra marathon of life means you will need to expose the darkness to a tiny square of life, one little patch at a time until the light fully displaces the darkness and your eyes adjust and you can see the hazards that used to trip you up.

Beautiful fall day during hunting season so I’m out running a trail in the Bighorn Mountains with an orange jacket on, orange buff on my head, my running pants with orange stripes and was just happily following this wonderful trail from Spring Marsh down to the Narrows where I was going to turn around and run back uphill.  Well, at least I thought that was what I was doing.  Instead I ended up on top of a mountain that I had never been to the top of before, and that I didn’t recognize, and my trail I had followed just sort of petered out into nothingness.  I broke out my compass and tried to remember which direction I was supposed to be running and realized that not only was I not running northeast that somehow I had gotten turned around and was running due north.  Where in the world was I?  I was already at about 6 miles so knew I should have been to the Narrows by then and somewhat remembered seeing Leaky Mountain off to my left or north at some point on the trail.  Suddenly I remembered where there were a bunch of fallen trees across the trail and taking the trail to the left probably about 3 miles before and I began wondering if I should try to find my way back even though now I couldn’t even really find the trail I had run on.  I decided to hoof it up a bit further so I could get to the top of the treeline hoping maybe I would spot a landmark or something that would help me find the best way back to my car, knowing that I was severely off the path and was going to do a ton more mileage than I had planned.  I wasn’t particularly worried but I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was lost, hopelessly lost and I needed to get found really quickly or it was going to be a long day.  Just as I topped out of the tree line I heard the most joyous sound I thought I could ever hear, a series of gun shots rang out, and even better because I was up so high I could tell where the shots came from.  Remember the beginning part of being all dressed in orange because it was elk hunting season?    I pulled my whistle out and started blowing as I ran down a sort of game trail down the hill and when I got to the bottom, all dressed in my beautiful orange, I saw the most awesome sight I could see right then.  Three hunters all decked out in their camouflage, high fiving and getting ready to jump on their horses and head deeper into the woods to where their elk had fallen.  Of course now they are really looking at me strange but I confidently and boldly strode up to them and said “I am unbelievably lost now.  Could you guys tell me how to get back to Spring Marsh from here?”  As they shared a laugh and joked about stupid runners getting lost they pulled out a map and showed me where I was and where I needed to get to.  They also pointed out the best paths to get where I needed to go and pointed out the forest road that would be the best point of where I was going.  They even offered to give me a ride on the back of one of their horses after they got done getting their kills sorted out.  I told them I would be cool and one of the guys handed me his map and told me to put it under the wiper blade of a blue Dodge pickup when I got back and we separated ways and I proceeded to run the 12 miles back to my car.

I truly have a penchant for getting lost, always have and probably always will.  I used to panic when I got lost and start to get really freaked out as soon as I realized I was going the wrong way.  However, something truly remarkable happened along the way as I began to put perspective into different ways to handle my reactions and some of the bad habits that weren’t allowing me to enjoy life as much as possible.  I examined why I freaked out so much when I got lost and decided that I didn’t trust that I could get found and I had a permanent sense of lost somewhere deep inside my heart.  Jeremiah described this another way “My people have been lost sheep; their shepherds have led them astray and caused them to roam on the mountains.  They wandered over mountain and hill and forgot their resting place.” Jeremiah 50:6  Being lost isn’t permanent, forgetting your resting place just might be.  If you have a sense of always being lost, it’s probably about time to get found.  The only way to get found is to remember where your resting place is.  I love prophecy simply because prophecy doesn’t fit into our neat little boxes that we tend to try to throw stuff into.  It’s just as easy to look at that verse above and blame being lost on the shepherd as it is blaming me being lost in the woods on my poor sense of direction.  It’s an obvious leap of faith but notice that the “they” referred to isn’t the shepherds but the sheep.  And it isn’t the wandering that Jeremiah is pointing out, it is the forgetfulness of where the resting place is.  When you forget where your resting place is located, you go through life anxious and afraid of everything around you.  There is no peace and there is no sense of direction or stability in your life.  Your resting place is that center of peace, the place where you know it’s just a matter of being aware of who you are and what you were created to do and then determining to find that place again.  Your resting place is your sure place, an inner peace that transcends any sense of being miss-placed or lost.  Finding this place is going to cause you to have to reach back into your bag of stones, the things of your past and to find the stone that best represents why you are feeling lost.  Then you are going to have to apply truth to being lost and get yourself found.  This means you are going to have to find the place of peace that got lost and has been lost for a really long time maybe even.  You are going to have to not get lost on purpose but you are going to have to get lost while out adventuring so you can get found because in this getting lost to your self and your own ambitions and plans for your life (just like I get lost sometimes on the trails I am running) this situation is going to cause you to not panic and over analyze and spin headlong into a bad habit that won’t do a thing to help you get found.  You’re going to have to find a place of peace, a place that is higher than where you presently are so you can look around for some landmarks and maybe if you’re lucky and time it just right hear a volley of shots that signal you to the fact that somebody with a map may be really close at hand and that even if they joke you some they are going to set you on a path back to your resting place.

Living an ultra life means you are going to have to acknowledge that sometimes you are lost and then drop the stone of being uncomfortable by the side of the trail and get back to your resting place, that place of peace.

I was sitting in church on a Sunday before Christmas just minding my business when my mind took off on a tangent I didn’t know how to get out of.  It all started with Isaiah 9:6-7 “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders.  And he will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.  Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end.  He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever.  The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.”  Now if you’re normal I guess your mind would go straight to Jesus and Christmas and the manger and donkeys and cows and stuff.  However, if you happen to be slightly abnormal maybe your mind goes where my mind went.  See I went to all my imperfections – as a Jesus follower, as a husband, as a manager, as a salesman, as a writer, as a runner and as a lover of life.  But not in your usual depressing “I’m a failure” type of imperfection where I guess normal people might go.  No, I went with how exciting it is that I am imperfect and how the world needs more imperfect leaders and people of influence, what a better world it would be.  I see so many leaders striving to be perfect – in appearance, in speech, in the written word and other places – and I began to think about what a difference it would make if we would embrace our imperfectness (is that even a word?  It has now officially become one).  Let me make me case for imperfection and imperfectness (which word is correct?) and why a struggling, dis-unified world is looking for leaders and potential leaders that can embrace their imperfections yet still be real enough to be a person of influence and why it is all about this one particular passage prophesying about a coming Savior who would place an imperfect world on His shoulders and establishing a world with justice and righteousness from that time forward forever and ever.  If we could all begin to embrace our imperfectness with an everlasting perfectness perhaps our world would be a better and different place.

We are all dealing with a level of imperfectness and we have all developed mechanisms to hide this imperfectness from others and sometimes like me we even think we are hiding our imperfectness from the very God we choose to worship.  But what if this didn’t have to be true?  What if I could be unfat and healthy again?  Where would I begin if I truly wanted my internal imperfect self to be healed and restored?  See I believed somewhere deep that there was an imperfect yet restored to the perfect One self somewhere deep inside of me and I was desperate to find that person because I knew that I could like and possibly even begin to love that person in his imperfectness.  Yet I knew that if I just kept on doing the things I had been taught to do and expect different results that I would never ever live to see that imperfect person be restored to a point where his imperfectness could be used by a Perfect God to bring glory to God and not to that person (that will make more sense soon).  So I began to deal with my imperfect self and began to bring my imperfections before God in a new and unique way for me.  For me this was in running as I had never (and I do mean NEVER) liked running.  I used to make fun of the faces I would see on the runners trudging along the roads I traveled.  So I determined that if I wanted to see my imperfections be made whole again and useful to God that I would deal with my imperfections on the road as I ran, sweating like a fat pig, jogging slowly along the roads of life.  As I went out each day and presented to God another bit of my imperfectness I noticed something…..I began to look forward to my time running because I knew it was my own little perfect sacrifice from an imperfect person to a perfect God (better than a pigeon or an ox in my mind) a little part of my imperfectness and I wasn’t asking God to heal the imperfectness but I was asking Him to do something different……I was asking Him to allow me to embrace my imperfectness and to allow that imperfectness to be used by Him.  Notice here that I am not advocating for embracing your sin, the lies and the habits that destroy both you and others around you.  No those need to be banned from your universe of thinking and they need to be dealt with at the altar of life and submitted as sin and they need a God sized forgiveness and a God sized healing so you can deal with the imperfectness that results or maybe even resulted in your imperfectness.  There’s another little verse before the verses that line out how to choose the outwardly perfect looking leaders to lead the imperfect church that really lays this out there bold and better than I could ever write.  1 Timothy 2:5-6 “For there is only one God and one Mediator who can reconcile God and humanity – the man Christ Jesus.  He gave his life to buy freedom for everyone.  This is the message God gave to the world at just the right time.”  I am a sinful man and I have sinned against the glory of God but as I ran the fat away I began to believe this verse was written just for me.  Each time I would discern sin in my imperfectness I would bring it to God on my run and I would say “God here you go……here is a sin habit that I have of _______.  Now as I run I ask that your son Jesus be my go between and that he begin the process of settling or bringing about a compromise between you and me so that we can once again live together in peace.”  Now I know that all the theologians in the world will rip that prayer apart and quite frankly I hope they do because if anything it will show that I can only pray in my imperfect knowledge of a perfect God and what He desires for me and that is why going back to Isaiah 9:6-7 in a God government and peace and why I am willing to submit to His governance (I love the definition of governance on the UNESCO website – www.unesco.org – under their education tab where they define governance as “…the structures and processes that are designed to ensure accountability, transparency, responsiveness, rule of law, stability, equity, and inclusiveness, empowerment and broad-based participation) over my life.  In other words when I accept God’s governance over my imperfectness I am allowing Him to build around me structures and processes (those are the people with whom I fellowship) that will allow my broad-based participation in ensuring that I live a life that does not allow for hidden things to remain hidden but to be brought to the surface and dealt with in a way that brings a stability and equity to my life and the life of those around me.  As I did this on my runs I found myself running further and further and I found myself really looking forward to the runs with an eagerness to practice shedding the weight of the world that had so ensnared me to bad habits and bad practices that weren’t drawing me closer to God and people but were acting as a way to draw me further into myself and what I wanted out of life creating in me a critical and contrite spirit of trying to prove to others why I was good and justified in my failures of morality and thought life.  See my imperfectness without God only created more imperfectness.  My imperfectness with God creates a way to be transparent before God and man in a way that striving for perfection could never have accomplished.

All my thoughts of imperfectness started with a prophecy about a Savior and to think that from the time these words were uttered by Isaiah to the time that they actually came true in the birth of a Savior was 700 years or so.  It shows me that what the world is desperately seeking, in all of our political turmoil and economic chaos and wars unending is some imperfect leaders who are willing to be imperfect in the midst of a perfect Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  What the world is seeking and they don’t even know how to put into words is a culture and a climate that accept their imperfectness and allow their imperfectness to not disqualify them from the game of life.  This is what we are all seeking and most of us don’t even realize it yet.  Many people approach the season of Christmas and before they will even allow themselves to choose the Christ in Christmas or even culturally put it back into play they will angrily dismiss any word of God because an imperfect church has imperfectly loved or accepted them and because that imperfect body imperfectly accepted and loved them they can’t express faith or belief in a perfect God.  So they will spend Christmas season drinking away or eating away or angering away their anger and bitterness and blame everything except the possibility that God’s plan all along may have been that He desired an imperfect body to show off his perfectness and that we as humans need to do a better job of accepting our imperfectness so the rest of the imperfect people around us can have a better shot at accepting a perfect gift of a relationship with a perfect God that loves our imperfectness.

Being able to move forward into being the you that you were created to be means that perhaps it is time to take the stone of being perfect out of the bag and leave it by the side of the trail.  This will be a significant mile marker for many because it will be the day that you embrace your imperfectness and realize that you will never have it all together enough to be able to accomplish the great things that have already been laid before you.

The year I was turning 50 I decided that on my birthday, at the beginning of July that I would run 50 miles.  No reason and no I hadn’t ever run 50 miles in one day.  But that was what I decided to do and nothing any sane person could tell me was going to change my mind.  Oh sure, really intelligent people said “why not wait until fall when it is a little cooler, it’s not your birthday but it won’t be as miserably hot.”  That one did sound good but both my wife, who goes by the title of “forever girlfriend”, and I both knew I’m not really good at listening to others or doing the wise thing.  So my forever girlfriend and I began to plan for the big day and I put in lots of training miles while traveling around the country for my job.  From January to June I ran in 16 different states, more cities than I care to count and basically pushed myself immensely.  There was one thing I hadn’t planned for though and this is where my forever girlfriend comes in.  I hadn’t planned for the heat but she had.  She purchased a weed sprayer and made nice cold smoothies and planned to jump out of the car every couple of miles and squirt me down to get my core temperature down.  She was absolutely amazing.  However, around mile 41 she did something that just absolutely floored me.  I was struggling bad and was now at a slow shuffle walk and was beginning to question my sanity and whether I could finish this thing.  She had her sister let her out of the car and go park about a mile (it seemed like ten at the time) away and she began to walk with me and talk with me.  And then she did it.  She broke into the most amazing song, The Impossible Dream, with all the hand motions and full voice she could muster after serving me for the last 8 or so hours.  It must have been quite the song because as we reached the car which was parked under some trees right by a ranch on this country road, the rancher came out and asked “is everything okay?”  With that my forever girlfriend and I had quite the laugh because truth is she can’t carry a tune, at least not that day.  And it didn’t matter because for me something broke right there and then.  I began to see how much this incredible creäture meant to me and how much I appreciate her.  Our marriage hasn’t always been perfect but we’ve always gone through everything together.  We haven’t always sung in tune with each other, but we’ve sung anyway and that is when something really deep hit me and I had to pick up a stone from my bag and look at the truth in it and then toss it to the side.  I had carried this stone for quite some time and it was an awfully bitter stone to carry around, full of failures, full of regrets and full of shame.  See I had never been able to produce a child with my lovely forever girlfriend and in church and missions this isn’t an outward big deal but it is like a big deal that never gets talked about or addressed.  See you’ll never be an elder or a deacon or even the perfect missionary if you don’t have children.  That was the stone.  It was born out in a lot of verses, every time somebody uses the verse in 1 Timothy 3 about every person who desires to be an overseer (if you can’t manage your own family, how can he take care of God’s church) and lots and lots of other verses and examples.  Look at your church board, your deacons and elders.  See any without kids or grand-kids?  Most likely not, unless it is the single youth pastor.  And that was the stone I was carrying around and suddenly I had to put truth to it.  But where to find truth to apply to this stone in my life.

Luke 6:34 “But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back.  Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.”  Strange place granted to find truth but here is where the stone has to be dropped off.  Even though life has not gone the way my forever girlfriend and I planned it.  We wanted children, felt like failures for not being able to have children.  But there is a greater truth behind even this pain in life.  We may not have children ourselves but we are children of the Most High.  If we keep carrying stones that weigh us down from discovering who we really are then we are never going to come into the place that the King of Kings, the Most High Creator God has already erected for us.  In order for me to lay that stone down that I had been carrying around for far too long I needed to step into the truth of who I am in God, not who I am in the church hierarchy or structure.  I am an elder in His church, the truth is I may never be an elder or deacon of an organized religious church, and the universal church that is pastored by the Great High God accepts me just as I am.  There are no other qualifications needed for this place of leadership.  1 John 3:16 “This is how we know what love is:  Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.  And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.”

My forever girlfriend taught me something that hot day around mile 41.  She taught me that she was willing to lay down her priorities, her methods and her opinion just to walk with me and serenade me with a song while I was attempting to do something that she knew very well was instrumental in me becoming the man God created me to be.  My song bird may not be able to carry a tune, but she can carry her man across a finish line with laughs and songs like nobody you’ve ever heard before.

So here’s the part of living an ultra life for you.  In the midst of your pain, are you willing to serenade somebody else with a song that is slightly out of tune?  Are you willing to be serenaded with a song that is out of tune by somebody who deeply cares for your well-being?  If you’re not then you’re never going to be able to lay down that stone and begin running your race with perseverance.  If you are then you can look at the heaviest stone in your bag, put truth to it, decide to lay down your life for others and lay that stone right there on the side of the road.  For such a heavy stone you’ll probably have to do this drill more than once but I have faith in you.  After all you’re an ultra marathoner, the fittest in the bunch and you have all the strength and training already behind you to be able to live an ultra life of continually laying down your life for your brothers and sisters.  In this little act of love you will find that your heaviest stone just can’t walk with you any longer.

When I ran my first marathon in October 2011 I weighed in at a svelte 232 pounds, about 22 pounds heavier than I would have liked to.  The reason this is significant is simply this.  Can you imagine what it is like to carry a bag slung over your shoulder with about 20 odd pounds of stones that you’ve picked up along the way?  Probably as uncomfortable as running a marathon with about 20 odd pounds too much weight.  It’s going to slow you down along the way and it’s most likely going to color your experiences in a way where you won’t enjoy them as much as possible.

If you let your experiences be colored by the weight you’re carrying around.

But what if you didn’t have to carry that bag with all those stones around?  Would you feel a little lighter, have a little more spring in your step?  Most likely, just the same as my not noticing that I carried around an extra 20 pounds through Washington DC that day.  On the contrary, I thoroughly enjoyed every single mile, so much that about mile 21 I ran backwards more than a mile to check on some friends and make sure they were doing okay.  I crossed that finish line and it was all such a blur, maybe through the tears, or maybe because the sights and sounds were all just so overwhelming.  I did something that a year earlier I never would have thought possible.  I finished a marathon, plus an extra couple miles, and the joy of crossing that line marked a tremendous period in my life.  In fact, I have not been the same since.  Who I am as a husband, follower of Jesus, business person, runner and friend is so much different from before I ran that first marathon.

And I owe it all to one thing and one thing only.  I actually believed a Bible verse and decided to start living as if I really did believe it.  Philippians 3:12-14 “Not that I have already obtained all this (see verses 1-11), or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.  Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it.  But one thing I do:  Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”  Let’s just concentrate for a second on one little sentence that just sneaks in there but begs us to take hold of it because in this ultra marathon of life if we don’t we are going to miss out on an awful lot of enjoyment and peace.  “But one thing I do:  Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead,……..”  The day I began training for my first marathon I was carrying around a lot more than physical weight, I was carrying around a virtual duffel bag of past regrets, past failures, past should have’s, past what if’s, past second thoughts and even some past victories.  I carried this weight around because I didn’t know what to do with them quite frankly.  I believed the Bible (well most of it), I tried my best to live the Word of God, but I was carrying around so much baggage and not letting go of things that I was weighted down and I didn’t even know it.  I knew what to do with the physical weight, eat right and exercise, rinse and repeat.  Try as I might though and even though this verse is one of my life verses and I can repeat it to you verbatim in the middle of the night if shaken awake, I could not find a training plan to get rid of the past and I just kept carrying it.

Until one day something in my brain and my heart clicked all at once.  Out on a run, why not since all good things happen to me on a run, I was out running around the lake near our house on a very early morning and suddenly it just hit me like a ton of bricks. It hit so hard I had to stop on the path and walk down by the water to make sure I got it mentally sorted out.  See when my wife and I were met at the airport in Norfolk VA after flaming out so abruptly from our time in Kazakhstan, our pastor, mentor and friend met us there.  He didn’t try to soften the blow or come up with great answers but he said one thing that it took me almost three years to process correctly.  He said “feel the feelings, but seek the truth.”  In other words we were going to feel a lot of things and none of the feelings were false, they were all real.  But in feeling the feelings, the rawness of failure and disappointment this incredible man wanted us to look deeper, way past the surface greetings of “how you doing?” because nobody really wanted to hear how crappy I felt that day, it was just a greeting.  There is truth beneath the pain, beneath the disappointment and beneath the past.  However, if you never allow yourself to get to the past, you’ll never discover the trails that have already been developed for you.  That little simple truth began an incredible journey of recovery for me.  I began looking for truth in each and every stone I was carrying in my duffel bag of my past.  Once I took each stone out and began to look for truth in each one I discovered that I didn’t have to put the stone back in my duffel bag of the past anymore.  I could move on from that past and I could strive for the future that was already out there for me.

The following series of posts are intentional ways to begin to see the future of what is out there for you.  By the end of these next ten posts (one every other day) you are going to be taking stones out of your bag and dropping them off.  You are going to find truth in the pain and truth in the failures and truth in the baggage you’re carrying and your load is going to be lightened.  This is not an ending, it is the beginning of your glorious future and I cannot wait to see your future unfold.

There is another series coming up as I get closer to launching my book in another couple of months.  Just to wet everybody’s appetites I thought I would post this short blog about why I do the things I do, what motivates me.  The whole thought starts with the belief that I’ve never met an average person and perhaps this thought below can help you to know a little more about what I’m reaching for.

A chapter of my book is about a couple of people I’ve met along my ultra marathon of life and I can’t wait for you to meet them and learn from them.  These are just a few of the people who have inspired me greatly over the years, there are so many that it would take chapters to tell all of their stories.  One of the things I would most like to point out is simply another little ingredient that I believe we could strive for a bit more.  I can only sum this up one way and that is simply I have allowed myself to be inspired.  I watch people get a degree or get a raise or a bonus and they think they have arrived, that nobody could be greater or smarter than them.  And I feel saddened when I see this in other people simply because I realize they are missing out on some of the most incredible people they could ever be around.  See, I want to, really deeply want to, be inspired by people.  That is why I urge people to tell me their stories, tell me the things they are doing, even if they think they’re just waking up, going to work, coming home and doing it all again the next day.  See somewhere in every person I meet I believe there is something inspiring in them that can make me a better person if I’m just willing to learn from them.  I believe that every person I meet is capable of great things and even if they don’t see those things in themselves then I am going to try to open a window so they can look into themselves and see the greatness inside.  I don’t honestly know where this came from but I do know it takes a constant deciding to not believe that I have arrived, have learned everything I need to know or even to think I am an expert in my field.  I want to be a life long learner, constantly looking to be inspired by your story and that is why I want to get to know so many people.  To me ordinary is average and I’ve never met an average person.  I am constantly meeting people who are anything but average and I deeply wish that this is something that you would begin also.  Living an ultra life is seeing the anything but average in every single person you are blessed to meet and then deciding you can be inspired by them.

I wept the first time I crossed the finish line at my first marathon, the 2011 Marine Corps Marathon.  I wept the first time I finished an ultra distance, my personal 50 miler on my 50^th birthday in 2014.  I wept the first time I actually finished an ultra marathon, the 2015 Antelope Butte 50K after DNFing a race three weeks before.  There is something about finish lines that make my eyes leak and cause water to drip down my cheeks.  I believe it is because as a person working a full-time job and training for ultra marathons there is a lot of sacrifice that goes into the training.  When everybody else is sleeping in I’m up at 5 AM to get a 5-8 miler in before work, I’m skipping lunch so I can get a 4-6 miler in at lunch time.  I’m skipping TV so I can get a core workout in during the evenings or going for another run.  Instead of going to the ballgame or hanging out for beers with friends on Saturday I’m off on a 6-8-10 hour run exploring mountain trails and wearing myself out and then turning around on Sunday to get that back to back long run in.  So when I am able to cross that finish line, it isn’t every single race, usually just the first hard one of the year I know that I have accomplished something really incredible and that the common things in life will never be the same.  There’s something about that FINISH banner above the last timing mat that as you cross it that your entire body, mind and spirit let out a big sigh of relief because you have accomplished a goal that seemed oh so far away when you set it.

There are two things that I want to hear as I cross the finish line of life (hopefully when I’m 126, 74 years from this day).  The first is from Matthew 25:21 “….Well done, good and faithful servant!” and the second is from 2 Timothy 4:7 “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”  There will be many finish lines in our lives and it is important that we stay focused on the attitude of our finishes.  Every finish that you have in life should be because you have trained and disciplined yourself to be able to cross that line and as you cross it you will sense the spirit of relief of a job well done, a faith well-kept.  You may not always look the best when you cross the finish line, that is part of the fight but the ability to cross that finish line means that you went beyond the ordinary to carry out the extraordinary.  Someday when your days on this earth are finished you will cross the ultimate finish line and rising to greet you will be the King of All Ultra Runners, the One, the Risen Savior and when He greets you that day my greatest prayer for you will be that you hear these words in that still small voice, “Well done, good and faithful servant!”

Living an ultra life means there will be many finish lines in your life and that with each and every single one that you will have the feeling of having accomplished something major and that you will always hear the words “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

In one of my ultras last year I had made it through the very last aid station and was only three miles from the finish of a 50K on an extremely hot day when I came upon another runner that was really struggling bad, weaving back and forth along the road and bending over about every five steps dry heaving.  Everything within me was saying “run on, don’t stop” but one thing I have learned in this crazy running world was that someday I am going to need help so I better be willing to lend a hand.  My wife had met me at the last aid station and the plan was that we were going to cruise into the finish together but as I stopped alongside the struggling runner I knew that he really needed a hand so I walked with him, poured some water on him and then handed him off to my wife, knowing she had her cell phone and we were coming into cell coverage soon and maybe she could find this man’s friends or wife or something.  This actually happens a lot in ultra races and it is one of the things that I really love about this sport.  There are so many people willing to help….the incredibly awesome people who volunteer at aid stations, the family and friends who drive into remote places to cheer you in and out of aid stations and of course the corps of awesome runners who are always willing to reach out and urge you to keep going, to slow down and run with you for a bit or even to share their water or nutrition with you in a pinch.  I firmly believe that what makes us better as ultra runners is our willingness to take our eyes off of ourselves and be on the lookout to always help a fellow runner.

Helping others along the way is an incredible way to about our regular lives also.  When is the last time you stopped to help somebody with a broken down car along the highway?  Or that homeless guy curled up under the bridge?  Or the young mother trying to corral her clan in the grocery store?  When was the last time you noticed a co-worker looking kind of down and offered an encouraging word or even just stopped what you were doing to acknowledge they were alive?  When was the last time you said “hey” to the geek, the nerd, the awkward one in your life that just isn’t cool enough for you?  When was the last time you offered somebody in ministry a text or phone call just to say “love you” or “thank you” and didn’t expect anything in exchange for your brief encounter?  I love this passage in Philippians 2:1-4 “Therefore if you have any encouragement from being unified with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the spirit…….then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.  Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit.  Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of others.”  When we take our eyes off of ourselves and the goals and dreams and plans we have and look to others our finish lines are oh so very much more significant.  I remember after I finished that race, disappointed my wife wasn’t there a little but really proud of the fact that she was willing to help somebody else out and glad I was there at the moment to slow down and take a little time to help the guy out that it meant just as much if not more to be than my finish.  And when that gentleman crossed the line I cheered as loud for him as if I had known him all my life.  See there is something that happens in us when we take our eyes off ourselves and put them on ours.  We are filled with more life and energy than we were before even when we are giving of our lives and our energy.

Living an ultra life means keeping your eyes peeled to see others in need of a helping hand and slowing down long enough to give them the help they need instead of just passing by hoping somebody else does it.

I was running the other day with a friend and as we ran I kept on experiencing this weird, new pain in the arch of my right foot.  About three miles in it was really bothering me and I had slowed to a walk and actually was whining a bit about my arch.  The friend I was running with simply said “try loosening your shoe lace.”  I did so and the next thing I knew the pain and uncomfortable feeling was gone and I nailed five really good miles after that. Three of those miles were in a pace that I had not experienced in quite a while.  It all stemmed from two things that are very inter related here – the first being having friends that are willing to see flaws in your running stride and willing to offer suggestions. The second is that you actually listen to them and don’t wait until you stop doing what you are doing to make adjustments but make those adjustments on the move.  This is a huge part of ultra running success because mile twenty is nothing like mile five and mile forty is so far different in the way your body reacts to foot plants and nutrition and water that the mental part of making necessary adjustments is just as important as the physical ability to run long distances.  Those people who can’t or won’t make the adjustments on the move are more likely to receive the dreaded DNF (Did Not Finish) instead of crossing or sometimes crawling across the finish line.

These same two principles of having friends willing to speak into your life and then actually making the adjustments as you continue running your own race are vitally important as well.  We don’t often think that we are heading toward a DNF in life but how many people do we all know who along the way get sidetracked from the good things in life for the things in life that don’t lead toward a successful race like alcohol, drugs, pornography or a million other addictions out there?  We do this in subtle ways when we refuse to listen to a friend or dismiss what they are telling us.  Jeremiah 17:23 “Yet they did not listen or pay attention, they were stiff-necked and would not listen or respond to discipline.”  I confess that I have been like this much of my life, thinking that I knew where I was headed and didn’t need to listen to other people but my running life has really awoken in me the desire to be teachable and always ready to listen to others in a way that the people who are important around me and quite frankly have life experiences I don’t have yet will be willing to share with me and that I will listen and make the necessary adjustments.  Jeremiah goes on to discuss what happens when we are willing to be careful to obey and the adjustments that we make always lead to better life experiences.

Living an ultra life means constantly being willing to make adjustments on the go and being willing to listen to the suggestions of others around us.

One of my first trail runs I learned the hard way that it was going to be nothing at all like road running.  I learned going up that you can’t run every hill but who knew that going downhill was not going to be a picnic.  I’m cruising down this hill with all the twists and turns and doing just like the YouTube video I had watched beforehand showed with my arms out instead of pumping up and down and using little skip steps instead of out-and-out strides when what to my ever-loving mind should suddenly happen…….smack, fly, thud down real hard.  I hit a tree root with my up foot as I was bringing it forward to plant and the next thing I knew I was learning how to fly and I never even wanted to be a pilot.  The landing of course was less than graceful with the full chest thud and the skid along the path and the glasses flying and my water bottle getting squished under my body and my pride………….well let’s just say there was a couple hiking up the hill and I knew they were doing everything they could to keep from laughing as they helped me gather my glasses and dust myself off so pride was way out of the picture by now.  See the video didn’t show a tree root sticking out into the windy path that was sort of ridged up on the right side and I never saw it and that root, that obstacle in my path to running success tripped me up.  As I finished running down the mountain……much more cautiously…..I kept thinking about how I could prepare myself for these obstacles and what to do the next time I encountered the obstacle to a clear running path and I concluded there was only one thing to do.  Prepare myself for obstacles and train to gather myself up from the obstacle and not let it deter me from doing what I had the desire to do.

Life hits us with the same type of obstacles although they don’t often seem like a tree root.  They appear as the overbearing employer, the teacher who isn’t satisfied with anything you do, the significant other that can’t be pleased, the children who won’t ever see things your way, the God that doesn’t just give you all the desires of your heart.  We see these things as obstacles although in our whiny moments we won’t call them obstacles, we call them other worse names that I won’t even go into here.  And it all stems from a common human emotion…..we WANT.  It seems like a simple thing but it is oh so incredibly true.  We WANT stuff….a new car, a better job, more pay, better vacations, better grades, a better more loving significant other……we desire and when we don’t get what we desire we often times pout.  Psalm 20:4 can be a very confusing verse because it says “May he give you the desire of your heart and make all your plans succeed.”  See God wants to give me the desire of my heart and he wants my plans to be successful.  But here’s the secret to this…….ready……I mean really ready because this may not be what you wanted to hear……….God does want to give you the desires of your heart but not only is it not going to be a clear running path with no obstacles but He requires something of you.  Psalm 20:7-9 is the secret ingredient to preparing yourself for the obstacles that will come your way in your pursuit of the desires God lays on your heart.  “Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.  They are brought to their knees and FALL, but we rise up and stand firm.  Lord give victory to the king!  Answer us when we call!”  You will trip over obstacles and fall, it’s part of running your own race.  However, if you trust in the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind and all your understanding then He will enable you to rise up and stand firm and continue the race.

Living an ultra life means as you run your own race that you prepare for the obstacles and that you learn to pick yourself up every time from these obstacles and keep moving forward.  Stop trying to avoid them or blithely think they don’t exist because you’re so awesome.  Chances are if you prepare for obstacles you are going to see them before they trip you up but even when you don’t you will still be able to pick yourself up and move on.