Running on Faith by Jason Lester

Author:Jason Lester
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter 6

God’s Got Your Back

“God sends a cross, but He also sends the strength to bear it.”

—Leo Tolstoy

I was crying my eyes out and I shouldn’t have been. I was making my way to the starting line of the 2008 Ultraman World Championship, the race I’d had my eye on for two years. This was the culmination of a dream for me, the reward for endless hours of pounding the roads and hitting the bike and hammering lap after lap in the pool. I should have been feeling joyful and grateful to God, but I wasn’t. In reality, I felt alone. Lost. Like nobody had my back.

For one thing, I was tired. After the 2008 Ironman World Championship in Kona the month before, I was wiped out. It was my mind more than my body that was tired. I had either raced or trained nonstop for ten months, and I needed a break. Instead, after only one day off following the Ironman, I resumed training. Unlike most Ironman athletes, who finish their season with the Ironman World Championship, then go home and rest up during November and December, I couldn’t afford time off. I still had a huge race left, and I was having a rough time getting my head into it.

I had temporarily cut off most contact with my friends and family because I knew I needed to be alone to focus. I let one person—Dave, my coach—into my world as much as I could. He needed to know how I was feeling, but I didn’t tell him that I was spent. I remember lying on the couch in my rented apartment in Portland, where I had gone to train with Dave for a couple months, and thinking, I can’t do another day of this, getting up early, training three sessions a day. I wasn’t inspired. I was beat up, and I missed my friends and family. I missed having a social life. I felt like I was in prison.

I knew what I needed. I called Dave and told him I was going back to Hawaii. I needed to be there. I wanted to feel the heat, have the island beneath my feet, and be around the area where I would race. Just the thought of being back in Hawaii got me stoked. I landed and it was hot. I needed that heat because the race would be hot.

The day of the race I was up at 3:30 in the morning, consuming high-calorie carbohydrate drink to ensure that my muscles stored every possible molecule of fuel (a process called “topping off”). Then my friends and crew members Doug and Annette accompanied me down to the pier where the race would begin. That was when I started to get emotional. It all hit me hard—everything I had gone through to get to this point, everything I had lost and sacrificed to follow my dream. I suddenly missed my father more than I had since the day he died. I wished

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