I was not a runner in my forties. I was a guy who ran occasionally, when guilted into it, and who believed the people who ran marathons were fundamentally different from me in some way I couldn't define but couldn't argue with.
Then I put "run a marathon" on my life goals list — the list I started keeping after reading Mark Batterson's Wild Goose Chase. And I had to either do it or admit I'd written things on my list I didn't actually intend to pursue.
I trained for eighteen months. I ran that race. And I crossed the finish line and cried — not because it was over, but because I'd understood something in miles 20 through 26 that I'd only read about before. Something about the spiritual life that my body finally taught me in a way my mind never could.
"The body is wiser than the mind in many things. What it learns under duress, it keeps." — Dave Barry
Miles 1 Through 18: Everything Is Fine
The first eighteen miles of a marathon are, honestly, manageable if you've trained properly. You've done runs this long. Your body knows the territory. You're tired, but it's a familiar tired. You can still think clearly. You're still making decisions. You still feel like yourself.
This is roughly what the first decade of serious faith feels like, in my experience. You're learning. You're growing. The practices work. Prayer connects. The community is life-giving. You can see progress. It's genuinely good.
Mile 20: The Wall
Mile 20 is where the marathon actually begins. Your glycogen reserves are depleted. Your muscles are running on something closer to will than fuel. The gap between where you are and where you're going is both very real and very manageable — but only if you stay in it rather than start doing the math about how much farther you have to go.
The ultramarathon community has a name for the mental state that gets you through this: present-moment awareness. Not thinking about the finish. Not thinking about mile 22. Thinking about this step. The next step. That one. Just that one.
Contemplative Christianity has been teaching this for two thousand years. The Desert Fathers called it watchfulness — the discipline of being fully present to what is actually happening in this moment, without rushing past it into what you wish were happening or what you're afraid might happen next.
What the Body Taught Me
I've read about the dark night of the soul. I've read about spiritual dryness, about the seasons when God feels absent, about the middle chapters of a life where the early enthusiasm has faded and the destination isn't visible yet. I've counseled people through those seasons. I thought I understood them.
I understood them better after mile 20.
Because what gets you through the last six miles is not excitement. It's not willpower, exactly. It's a practiced commitment to the next step — one that was built in training, in thousands of ordinary miles that felt like nothing at the time. You can't improvise grit at mile 20. It's either already there from the long, boring, unglamorous middle of training, or it isn't.
The spiritual life is exactly the same. The person who endures the hard season is the person who built a practice in the easy seasons. The daily prayer when nothing seems to happen. The Scripture reading that doesn't always feel alive. The community you show up to even when you're not getting much out of it. Those aren't wasted miles. They're the miles that will get you through mile 20.
What I'd Tell Someone Starting Out
Don't train for the finish line. Train for mile 20. Because the finish line takes care of itself if you've built the capacity to stay in it when it gets hard.
The same is true for faith, marriage, leadership, and any long project worth doing. The early gains are visible. The middle miles are invisible and essential. And the finish — when it comes — will mean something in direct proportion to the invisible work you put into the miles nobody saw.
I'm 55 now. I don't run marathons anymore — the knees have asked me politely to find other expressions of stubbornness. But I think about that race more than almost anything else I've done. Because what I learned at mile 20 is the truest thing my body has ever taught me.
Don't quit. Take the next step. Just that one.