The Day I Changed My Mind About Running

This weekend, hundreds of people will stop and remember a woman whose life and death has impacted their lives in powerfully unexpected ways. A majority of them never met her.

It's somewhat alarming to confess that someone I never had a single human interaction with has profoundly changed how I perceive being human. On the other hand, it's opened my eyes to the possibilities we all have as humans. We have miracles within us. We don't need to see or forsee them, we don't have to know their names or where they live, we don't have to know where they came from or where they will go.

We simply have to believe in them. 

Meg Cross Menzies has helped me believe in miracles. Not water into wine or walk on water miracles. She's made me believe that simple human kindness - a heart that humbly turns away from self worship and instead runs lovingly outward toward others - can change the world in ways that resembles, well,  walking on water. 

I have this book I want to write. It's called: 
​

When I Changed My Mind About Running
Running Changed My Mind
My Heart
And My life ​

Long title for a book, right?

​When I look back on my life since Meg died, though, those words seem inadequate. They seem way too few to describe the miracle that's happened in my life, and the miracles I've seen take place all around me. 

​After Meg died in 2014, I wrote this in the blog post I wrote at the time (God's Newest Angel, One With Years Of Experience): 

By the time I finished my run today, I wasn't much more clear as to why God would take a family's angel before they were ready for her to leave.  But one thing was crystal clear.  I know what God has done with his newest angel.

Soon after she arrived, God said, Meg, there's a couple of people trying to put together a memorial run for you this Saturday.  They have the best of intentions, but they're thinking too small.

I wrote that after I went on my longest run in over a decade. Maybe even two decades. A run I ran in response to a call to run for Meg that day to honor her life. I was but one of 100,000 runners around the world who answered that call. At the time, I thought Meg's miracle was going to be found in the vastness of that unimaginable response.

I thought it would be found in the number of people who would discover Meg's love for running and maybe make it a love of their own. In the number of people who would become more aware of their personal safety when they ran, and that of runners when they drove. It would be found in the number of people who would be reminded no breath is promised, and in turn, would begin to treat with newfound gratitude every breath they have. 

Maybe her miracle showed up in those places. It sprayed and sprinkled all over those areas in life. But when Meg insisted to God that we were thinking too small, I don't she wasn't thinking far and wide. I think Meg was thinking deep. 

Meg didn't have much interest in her name running famously around the globe. Instead, I think, she had a final wish, a yearning, to humbly take up rest in a quiet corner of each of the hearts that would ultimately encounter her story.   

She found a corner in my heart. She found it in an odd way - through running. Not that first day when I ran for Meg. But some run after that. That's where the odd comes in. Because before I ran for Meg, I hated running. My high school football coach once trucked us 13 miles away from the practice field. On a hot summer day, he dropped us off and told us he'd see us back at the field. I walked almost the whole way. With every breath of the route I vowed to hate him and anything to do with running the rest of my life. 

I eventually grew to respect that coach. But, oh, how I honored that vow to hate running. I honored it like a religion. Right up until the day Meg found that quiet corner in my heart. The day Meg changed my mind about running. 

Through running, Meg led me to an unforseen discovery. This place I'd commited to forever hate -  running - became my own quiet corner where I could be at ease in life.  All these years I'd hated running based on a memory painted with exhaustion and struggle and impossible. As it turns out, running can be a place of peace and reflection and personal discovery.

Two years into hanging out in this space, I found myself longing to run a marathon. Ok, longing might not be the right word; my mind hadn't changed THAT much about running. But I was feeling pulled to take on what many feel is a pinnacle running accompishment. So in November of 2016, about 35 years after cursing the sport along with every bumper sticker that ever bragged about it, I became a marathoner. 

I've come to say about crossing that marathon finish line:
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The memory of a marathon finish line is rooted far more in what you CAN DO than it is in what you JUST DID. 

My First Marathon - Richmond 2016

That's not exactly what I thought the moment I crossed the finish line. That thought was reserved for "Holy Jesus, I'm not dead."  But the discoveries I made in the aftermath of that race have been the biggest reward of tackling a marathon. Some of the biggest rewards of my life, really. I discovered my mind had been hijacked by fear. I discovered that in my years of sitting on the couch, my mind had been lulled into a state of complacency and apathy. As a result, I was living with little concern for myself and others - not surprising when you're afraid of your own life and indifferent to everyone else's. 

But running, excellerated by that marathon experience, was changing my mind. I now had the confidence to try things I'd never dreamed of trying. I started a podcast and began running for special causes. I started interacting with people in a way that was opening my eyes to just how many other minds and hearts in this world had been overcome by fear. I made it a point to look more deeply into the eyes of people who were hurting on the other end of the kind of apathy and indifference my life had fallen into. 

I never thought the day would come when I would not hate running, but it did. I actually changed my mind about running. And that surprised me.

I never thought the act of running could ever change the way my mind thought. The way it worked. But it did. And I found that mysterious.

But when the change in my mind began filtering into the way my heart beat, and who it was beating for - well, I wondered if I had run across a finish line into the open arms of a miracle of sorts. 

In the midst of this miracle I find myself wondering at times if those are Meg's arms. In the quiet space of running, I sometimes find myself speaking into that quiet space of my heart where she lives: hey Meg, this miracle - is that you?

She doesn't answer. 

But when I'm with the people she's brought into my life, when I experience the love of their connection, the strength of their encouragement, when I find myself treasuring their success and health and happiness more than I crave my own, I hear her say,  "you're no longer thinking too small." 

I don't know if running can change the world. But I know this. When I changed my mind about running, running changed my mind, then my heart, and then my life. And I believe somewhere in there is the miraculous path to changing the world. 

​I'm going to keep running along that path. 

Run the Bluegrass Pre-race Dinner 2018