Sometimes I pray for rain.  Sometimes I pray for sunshine.  Sometimes I pray for a cool front.  Sometimes I pray for more sleep.  I always pray that what I am doing will help someone else.  And these days, I am praying for something else: just to survive each workout.

My running mileage and intensity is going through the roof.  After only 3 days this week, I am already over 23 miles.  My legs are dead.  I am exhausted.  But somehow, I must keep going.

Yesterday’s run was not something I was looking forward to.  It was going to be a very long workout with some long intervals.  I started out with my 30 minute warm-up and the legs were (as usual) feeling a little dead.  After the 30 minutes, I stopped and stretched a bit while drinking some Gatorade.  In reality, I was trying to avoid hitting the start button because what followed were 5 intervals of 5 minutes each at a 7:10 to 7:35 pace with a 3 minute jog between them.  I did not want to start!

So I started saying some prayers.  Actually, it was one prayer. “God, get me through the first 4 intervals and I will take care of the last one.”  About 10 seconds after saying it, I added, “God, if You get me through the first 4, I know You will be doing the last one as well.”  And then I hit the button.

I am not going to lie and say they were easy and I was floating on clouds the whole time.  Not the case.  But I did do all five of them and hit my paces on every one.  I even fought through a cramping stomach on the third one and still made my pace.  So for that, Thank You God!

I ended up running over 10 miles during this “speed workout”.  And even though it was exhausting, I did it.  One more down.  One step closer.  One more prayer answered.