I ran a marathon today.

It was sooo hard, but sooo special. After Daddy Duck dropped me off near the finish line and headed off to find the first spot along the route where he and the ducklings would cheer for me, I stood there, waiting. And shivering uncontrollably! (It was about 30-something degrees.) After standing in a sunny spot for a few minutes, I saw a familiar face in the crowd! (There were thousands of people there, so the likelihood of this happening was pretty slim.) The familiar face was my Bible study leader/mentor/friend from my freshman year of college. I hadn't seen her in years - she doesn't even live in this area.

It turned out that she had taken up running at about the same time as me, and this was the first marathon for both of us.

We lined up in our starting corral, and agreed that we wouldn't try to stay together so that we wouldn't mess up each others' paces. The race began, and off we went.

The first hour went by fairly easily. I kept a steady, easy pace, trying to conserve precious energy. While running on a bridge with a beautiful view of the James river, I heard someone call my name. It was my friend. Turns out, our pace was pretty much the same.

We ended up staying together for the rest of the race. It was such a blessing to have someone to run with. It would have been much harder to run it by myself. A race is a relatively trivial thing in the grand scheme of life and eternity, but this was such a sweet reminder to me of God's care for me, even in those little things. God is so good!

The race was fairly smooth and not too difficult until the last 6 miles. They were long and hard - my hips, legs and feet were complaining very loudly. But, we made it!

The finish was very emotional. It was an incredible feeling to have set such a huge goal and then reach it. And so was it to witness so many others - older people, a guy with a prosthetic leg, people with limps and painful gaits and all the others finishing their races. It was a great. All the cheering people were great. Daddy Duck and my gang were great, scurrying around, waiting, sitting in traffic, just to cheer for me!

Go runners!!