Letting Go to Move Forward

I ran my first marathon in 1998, the Chicago Marathon, and I trained for it alongside my pastor at the time, who took his job as my unofficial coach far more seriously than I ever asked him to. He taught me pacing. He taught me a training schedule. He taught me, in more detail than any human needs, about fuel, which sounds simple until you’re the one standing at mile 9 trying to decide if a gel packet is salvation or a mistake you’ll regret for seventeen more miles.

What he could not teach me was how to trust that I’d be okay without a backup plan for every possible disaster.

So, I showed up to that starting line with a small arsenal strapped to my body. Extra socks. Extra fuel. Enough gear to survive a disaster that was never actually going to happen. I told myself this was preparation. It was fear, dressed up nicely enough that I couldn’t recognize it as fear. And under the fear, if I’m honest, was something uglier. I did not want to be the woman who showed up unprepared and quit. I would rather have hauled the entire expedition on my back than let anyone watch me fail for lack of trying hard enough.

It made me so tired. By mile 20, I wanted to lie down somewhere near Chicago’s Chinatown and let the race go on without me. A man on the sidelines, trying to help, shouted that I only had 6.2 miles left. I wanted to climb that barricade and tell that man he does not get to use the word only. Not to me. Not at mile 20. It wasn’t the miles that were the problem. It was everything I’d insisted on hauling with me for no reason except that I couldn’t stand the idea of needing something I hadn’t already provided for myself.

I learned exactly nothing from that. I ran my second marathon the same way, because apparently humiliation has to lap me more than once before it sticks. But by my third, the Quad Cities Marathon in 2013, I was working at a running store, spending my days trying to sell people gear I’d quietly stopped believing they needed. Somewhere in there, without deciding to, I became a minimalist. My shoes. My outfit. Myself. That’s it. And that race, the one where I finally let myself run without a hedge against catastrophe, is the only one I remember as joy instead of survival. I noticed the skyline. I looked up. Less wasn’t a compromise. It was the whole difference.

I think about this every time I read Hebrews 12. Throw off any extra baggage, the writer says, and get rid of the sin that trips you up and fix your eyes on Jesus. For a long time, I read that as two different instructions, one about clutter and one about morality, like the writer got distracted halfway through the sentence. I don’t think that anymore. What I was hauling at mile 15 in 1998 was sin, not a lesser cousin of it. It just didn’t look like the kind we usually confess out loud. It looked like believing I had to save myself. It looked like trusting my own preparation more than I trusted God to catch me if I fell apart in public. That’s not caution. That’s a quiet refusal to need grace, and I’ve been practicing it since long before I ever laced up a pair of running shoes.

Here’s what I didn’t expect. I didn’t get through that third marathon because I finally willed myself into enough faith. I got through it because I wasn’t running it alone, and I never had been. My pastor with his spreadsheets. The coworkers at that store who kept correcting me even when I didn’t want correcting. People at mile markers I never met and will never see again, shouting exactly what I needed to hear at the moment I needed to hear it. Hebrews calls this a great cloud of witnesses, which sounds lovely and slightly abstract until you realize it has actual names. Mine does, anyway.

None of them ran it for me. I still had to take every one of those steps myself. But I have never once finished a race, or a hard year, or an honest prayer, without somebody else’s fingerprints on it somewhere.

I wish I could tell you I’ve since become the kind of person who travels light through every hard season. I have not. I still pack for disasters that never come. I still let self-reliance pass for faith more often than I’d like to admit. I’m slowly learning to call that what it is instead of something gentler. It’s the sin that so easily entangles me, to borrow the writer’s phrase, dressed in gear I convinced myself was responsible. What I have is one race, thirteen years ago, where I found out what it feels like to run without hedging against my own collapse, and some days, that memory is the only evidence I’ve got that grace might actually hold me without a backup plan.

May you notice what you’re holding on to that was never yours to carry, and may you have the honesty to call it what it is instead of something gentler. May you remember the specific people who trained you, corrected you, and showed up at your mile markers with exactly what you needed, whether or not you wanted to hear it. May you learn to run the whole race free of the sin that so easily entangles you, not just for one good mile of it, trusting that the same grace that got you this far will keep meeting you at every mile ahead. And may you take the next step today, believing that grace, not your own preparation, is what actually gets you there.