Central Abbotsford

As many of you likely noticed, I was not at church this past weekend. And as some of you are aware, the reason for that was that I had traveled into town to prepare to run the BMO Vancouver Marathon on Sunday morning, primarily because I am running out of sermon illustrations, and I thought this would be a great source of them. Be prepared in the months to come!

I’m sure that those illustrations will come in due time, but for this newsletter I wanted to share a very cool story about answered prayer on the race course itself. As last week went on, it became clear that the temperature on Sunday was going to be higher than anticipated. On most May weekends this would be more than welcome, but it wasn’t something that I was tremendously excited about.

The race started at 8:30am under clear blue skies. The first half of the course is quite hilly, but with the sun still relatively low in the sky and the course travelling through Pacific Spirit Park, and the UBC Campus, it did offer a reasonable amount of shade for a while, along with a refreshing, albeit short-lived, breeze at about the 14km sign. Things were going all right so far.

Once I had passed the halfway mark, though, the struggle began. A nice downhill from UBC into Point Grey was very scenic, as the view of Vancouver Harbour opened up quite beautifully; however, from this point on there was not much in terms of shade for the rest of the race, just in time for the sun to approach its peak in the sky and the temperature to rise even further.

The course crosses into downtown Vancouver over the Burrard Bridge at the 30km point. That bridge is less than a kilometre long but at that time it felt like it was about 10 miles. A few minutes after making it over and entering the seawall along English Bay, my family was on the side of the course cheering me on and mercifully providing me with a full bottle of Gatorade!

However, whether due to the heat or the fact that I was now past the point of my longest training run (or both), a few minutes later the first strong leg cramp hit my right calf, forcing me to slow to a walk. I’m sure the seawall around downtown and Stanley Park is lovely, but I don’t remember much about it. For the next 8km, I alternated walking and jogging every 30 seconds or so as my leg repeatedly cramped and released. I don’t recommend it!

Now, the Vancouver marathon has a lot of technology going for it, and one of those aspects is a website that lets you track the runners as they progress through the course. However, as we learned, it is an inexact science. Since they don’t have the budget (presumably) to put GPS trackers on each of the thousands of runners, there are sensors on course that track you every 10km and your progress is projected based on how fast you have gone to that point. You might anticipate the problem.

Having a sudden and considerable slowdown shortly after 30km meant that my tracker was humming along at a much brisker pace than the real me was! And so, while the virtual me was approaching the 40km sensor, the real me was still a few kilometres back battling through the cramps. And so the tracker stopped at 39.9km. For about 15 minutes. Understandably, my family (who were now waiting for me near the finish line) were growing concerned.

In one of my walk breaks, I was able to text my plight back to Andrea so that at least she knew that the real me had not collapsed on the side of the course. You may be wondering where the prayer aspect comes in – all of this is prelude to that!

A number of friends and family had been corresponding with Andrea about how I was doing, and so, in that moment, she recruited several of her friends who have been part of her Bible study for many years to pray for me. And, let me tell you, God answers prayers.

Just after the 41km marker, the course finally departs the dreaded seawall and finishes up on the streets of downtown Vancouver. And right at that point, with prayers being heard by God for this silly pastor’s cramped leg, they cleared up entirely! My race data shows that the fastest kilometre of my race came on a gentle downhill early on. The second-fastest was the last kilometre, uphill, after battling cramps for an hour and being unsure whether I’d even be able to finish.

Don’t underestimate what He can do when you pray. From the big things in life down to a leg cramp, God hears and answers prayers. And of all the things that I learned this past weekend, that was probably the thing I needed to remember the most.