by Kate Laack
I am not a natural runner. In grade school, I dreaded the first warm day of spring when my gym class was forced outside to run some odd number of laps around the school building that roughly amounted to a mile. I admit that I would stop and walk on whatever side of the building was safe from the critical eyes of my teacher.
But my attitude shifted entirely after college when, in the summer of 2011, I decided to train for my first half marathon. I had recently graduated, would be starting my first full year of teaching in the fall, and had just moved into my first apartment alone. Life was changing, and change was hard. So to cope, I decided I’d willingly do something harder. Thus, I started to run.
I learned a lot that first summer of training: how to build endurance; how to recover through cross-training; how to plan meals and nutrition around workouts and how to build muscle. But the biggest thing I learned was that every distance runner I met had a “why.”
The “why” was first explained to me as the thing that will keep you putting one foot in front of the other when your body and mind are ready to quit. The “why” has to be strong and tangible. It has to be bigger than pain, doubt, and physical limitation. It has to be something that gives you perspective, a reason to do something ridiculous…like running 13.1 (or eventually 26.2) miles. It has to hold up when your body, your reason, and even your spirit feel broken. My “why” has evolved, but over 20 half marathons and 4 full marathons, I’ve always made sure that I’m able to define it before I start preparing for a race. More than any workout plan, it has been the thing that has gotten me through some of the toughest moments of running.
When, last summer, I felt the nudge to run another marathon, I first had to make sure I could define my “why.” I’d finished my third marathon in 2019 and had been pretty certain at the time that I didn’t need to run another one. In fact, the only reason I’d run that one was because a dear friend had decided it was the one marathon she was going to run in her whole life, and she asked me to be a part of it with her. For one race, she became my “why.”
But four years later, Covid had up-ended my usual training and racing routines. Teaching was weirder and harder than ever. Josh and I had finished the mammoth task of building our house. It felt like there was a void where distance running had been, and if I was honest with myself, I could define a very clear, very personal, “why” again.
As I started to train, I felt strong, and fast, and better than I had through any of my three previous training schedules. At some point, I started to believe that the 2023 Grandma’s Marathon could be my fastest marathon yet. I was having fun. I was going to celebrate at the finish line, arms wide open in triumph.
So there really shouldn’t have been any reason that, come race day, my legs cramped so badly at mile 16 that I called Josh from the course to say I didn’t know if I would make it to the finish line. If you want to know how cruel that little voice in your head can be, physically deplete yourself, then try to run eight, nine, ten more miles. Oh! And time yourself doing it. You’ll go to a dark place.
Never in my life have I needed my “why” more than I did in the two hours it took me to finish the last ten miles of that race. Never have I learned more about myself than I did holding fast to the one, personal mantra that got me to the starting line in the first place. I clung to it. Prayed through it. And when I finally saw Josh at mile 26, we both burst into tears because the result was both so disappointing, yet so satisfying. To have finished at all was nothing but guts and sheer willpower.
People often ask me why I distance run, and I have two or three well-worn responses that I might give. But none of them speak to the deep, essential “why” that drives me through a marathon. Those “whys” are too innate, too personal. But they’ve all had one thing in common. They’ve led me to a better understanding of self. Does it take a marathon to do that? Maybe not. But I know no better way to tap into the pure grit and strength of the human spirit.
Kate Laack is wife to Josh, teacher, theater director, musician, author, and distance runner. Since becoming a runner in 2011, she has completed over 20 half marathons, 4 marathons, and 5 triathlons. At Calvary, she serves primarily at the piano with the worship team, but don’t be surprised to also find her ushering at the 9AM service or leading a book study.