Predawn in Logan, she rose from her motel room bed and showered, waking herself against the dark with the aroma of Dial soap and deodorant. Then she layered her clothing, thin shorts under sweat pants, a binding sports bra under a snug sweat grabbing sport shirt, under a sweatshirt. Lastly, she stretched clean socks over her calloused feet, slipped on her running shoes, and laced them snugly. Her long dark hair she had tied back in a pony-tail. Out into the chilly indigo air she joined a flock of similarly attired strangers on a bus that drove them through the twisted canyon roadway, up into the snowy places where the race began.
Meanwhile, her mother slept.
We of the lumber legs woke with the sun, then sat in nice leather chairs attached to engines and wheels with nice heaters and air conditioners and drove up to Logan, an hour or so away from home, with poster board signs we had splattered with colorful words of good cheer and encouragement to our daughter, Sarah.
We planted ourselves on the corner of a gentle intersection, not too busy, but right along the race route. We pulled our nice compact nylon red, white and blue cheer chairs out of their carrying bags and plopped ourselves into them. The dew had already burned itself back to heaven by then, and when runners began to appear we could see that the outer layers they had worn in the morning were tied around their waists. We clapped and cheered for each individual runner, and each little cluster. It amazed me how fresh some of them looked, after 20 miles of running. It amazed me that anyone could still be running after 20 miles of running! And the thought of over six more miles to go; well, that was beyond my understanding. In the first place, why would anyone want to do that? Just, why?
But then you’d see someone with long legs and a lean torso and broad shoulders that held steady in the up and down rhythm of the motion, and you’d say that maybe they were made to do this and it’s awesome that they get to. It’s such a foreign concept to me. But just as many of these runners, in this race, were the most unlikely looking. Like, if I was in an elevator with them and we had one minute to analyze each other, I would never in a million years guess that they would participate in a marathon.
Yet here they were, doing it. It kind of blew me away.
We strained our eyes and stretched our necks looking for our girl. Then, sure enough, one of us spotted her down the road, working her legs like oars on a row boat, her arms dutifully pumping beside her like pedals on a bike. We stood from our lazy chairs and waved our signs in the air, screaming, whistling, and rearranging ourselves to get closer to her when she passed.
She smiled, grunted her love through her heaving chest, threw us her extra clothing and set her eyes forward, never breaking her stride.
I’m not sure what I was expecting. I probably wasn’t expecting – and hadn’t thought it through. Usually, in the past, when we have waited for our kids in an attitude of celebration it was at the conclusion of an event. Flowers after a performance, ice cream after recitals, the kind of thing where you all give hugs and talk about how wonderful they were. But this, this was not the end. This was the cheer in the hardest lap, the CPR after the drop to the floor. OK, maybe that’s a bit dramatic. But I realized, at this first of multiple marathons for this daughter, that she was smack in the heart of a hard thing when I was ready for her to be done. And with that realization came a profound appreciation for her gifts. My Sarah is multi-faceted and uber-talented. For her, since she has had this body at least, if she determined to achieve something over which she had objective power, then by golly she did it. Her dogged determination is a blurse, a blessing and curse in one, because most things are not purely objective. Other people and situations have some of the power and bring in subjectivity. She is still in the process of learning, like the rest of us, that we cannot control other people. And, thankfully, because she loves God, she is also learning to let Him mold her as much as she molds herself. That’s not an easy thing for people who are by nature super capable and used to achieving big things.
After Sarah whisked past us there on the road outside of Logan, we gathered up our lawn chairs and her outer layer of clothing and our little bag of starchy goodies and our posters and loaded them back in the car. We shifted all of it, including ourselves, to the park where the finish line and portable bleachers were arranged. A giant digital clock clicked away, the crowd ebbed and flowed, cheers rose and fell in audible swails as the racers crossed the line. One by one they ran past the finish line, stopping for only a few seconds, their fingers stretched over their knee caps, their heads lowered as their chests pumped down and up, then off they went again, jogging or walking to cool down their overtaxed muscles.
There were tables with juice and water and cookies and fruit. There was a large tent with massage tables lined up like hospital gurneys. And there were photo booths and first aid stations. But mostly there was love and pride and grace, all covered in massive amounts of sweat.
Our Sarah was not born a runner. She was not, by godly design, built that way. She has the short Connors legs and the Parrish hips and petite shoulders and arms. I'm by no stretch of the imagination athletic. And though her dad did letter in track in high school and college, his events did not involve distance. They involved strength, and I suppose she inherited that. The fact that this girl has achieved this thing, worthy of remark, still inspires me. No one can ever take from her the fact that she has achieved this, more than once.
When she was four years old I had told Sarah she would have until she turned five to figure out how to not suck her thumb. I didn’t hang it over her very often, though I occasionally reminded her in nonthreatening moments that she could do this hard thing since she was getting to be a big girl now. On her 5thbirthday, when I tucked her in bed, I asked her if she knew what else this day meant. She looked at me with her liquid brown eyes, her thumb happily planted between her little-girl lips. She looked me right in my weepy eyes and pulled her thumb out, causing an audible pop as her lips closed against themselves. She kept her eyes focused on me as she pulled her little soft legs up toward her chest, there in her big girl bed, and tucked her hand between her knees. I don’t remember ever again seeing her suck her thumb.
My first-born daughter teaches me still the beauty of the human mind when it marries the human heart. She has survived things, trust me, that pretty much every other person I know would never have withstood, including medical school, residency, four pregnancies and other major stressers. They have taken their toll on her. But they have also made her shine. It’s the agitation of fibers against metal that makes it shine, like the sweet little collection of marathon medals that hang on a hook full of ribbons in some quiet corner of her closet.
