Every weekend I like to go for a long run, so last Saturday when I was in Alabama on the Nootbaar Institute’s “Faith & Justice” trip, I left the hotel about 6:45am to explore. I soon noticed several other runners, a surprising number, and then noticed they were all wearing racing bibs. I then rounded the corner and stumbled upon a road race preparing to start.
I asked one of the runners about the schedule, and he said that a half-marathon was starting at 7am, and a 5k would follow at 7:15am. I looked at my phone and saw that it was 6:50am. After two seconds’ worth of thinking, I raced back to my hotel, up to my fifth floor room to snag a credit card, then back to the race site to see if I could register for the 5k. The gun for the half-marathon went off just as I made it to the registration table, and I was the last person to register for the 5k. Once registered, they provided a bag full of race goodies, which led me to realize that I had nowhere to store it, so I ran back to the hotel a second time to store it during the race, then raced back to the starting line just a few minutes before the 5k began.
There were 500+ runners in the 5k, and I may not have been fully awake, but when the gun went off I took off and won my old-man age group and came in maybe 10th or 11th overall. Life is just funny sometimes.
I’m not 100% sure why I’m telling you all this story. Maybe just an encouragement toward physical fitness. But maybe the encouragement is this: When you walk out the door each morning to face another day, keep your eyes open — you just never know what you might discover.
Starting to Look Up 