Answered Prayer in Murky Water

I pulled my MINI to the grass shoulder of a rural, lineless road. As I answered my wife’s text message, tears dripped down my cheeks. It was the third time I had cried in the past 15 minutes. I would cry again a couple times on my 7.5-hour trip home from the Chester River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

God had just answered a couple of prayers in a way I hadn’t anticipated.

Last Saturday night, as my parking team and I prepared to welcome our church guests onto the asphalt, I asked each team mate how we could pray for them. To make it fair, I had to come up with a request for me. I asked that they’d pray for me to experience humble confidence in my week ahead.

See, I was heading to a convention to teach marketing seminars; and people in my audiences often say a lot of things that can (and often does) go to my head—words like expert, genius, and guru. This year, a dude even paid $15 to have that sentiment written on the wall at the Howl at the Moon bar in Louisville.

I did my best to graciously accept the praise, especially after watching one of the most humble, accomplished men I’ve ever met be recognized by his peers for his life’s achievement.

Throughout my short time at the convention, my industry peers would regularly ask me, “What’s your next big adventure?” And I would tell them, “Well, I’m actually leaving here early to swim a two-mile race in Maryland—upstream a mile, around a buoy, and then back.” I made it sound easily conquerable and segued into, “Oh, and I’m hiking across the Swiss Alps in six weeks.” I had prayerfully steeled myself for the professional praise but had left my personal ego exposed.

Fast forward to the morning of the swim event. I had posted to Facebook that my goal time for my first ever river swim was 90 minutes but that I was prepared to swim almost two hours. On the way to the meet, I was amping myself for the race, rocking out in my car down a welcomingly-flat and deliciously-straight road by my parents’ house. And by that I mean that I was doing 104mph between the walls of corn and wide shoulders. Thankfully, the Queen Anne’s County sheriff deputy waited to gun me at a point when I had slowed to 75mph (in a 55mph zone).

I didn’t know then that the light blue citation on my passenger seat would prove to be an omen that my day was about to downshift.

As I walked to the registration tent, I asked the guy who had parked next to me what to expect from the experience. As I borrowed sunscreen from a half-Ironman athlete, I borrowed more advice. I was realizing that my preparation had fallen short of robust. My plan was to let everyone else in my heat take off first and then follow slowly in their wake.

The horn sounded, and I knew I was in for an adventure. What I didn’t know is that 200 yards into the race I would develop a searing pain in my right psoas—the muscle that wraps around your pelvis to connect your quadriceps muscle to your spine. I only know this because of the months of physical and massage therapy I endured last year on my left psoas.

Here’s the problem: I don’t swim like anyone else. I freestyle for 28 strokes, flip over to my back for 100 kicks, and then repeat. (My upper body doesn’t get tired as quickly this way; so, I can ramp up my training in a short amount of time.) I couldn’t resort to free-styling the entire race, and the first mile was upstream and against the incoming tide of a river that opens to the Chesapeake Bay. My now-feeble kicks were (1) erratically directed as I zig-zagged all over the place and (2) basically just holding me in place. Only my spaced sets of 28 freestyle strokes moved me toward the next buoy.

I joked with a triathlete friend at the convention, “My swim stroke looks like the kind where someone asks if you’re okay.” That turned out to be prophecy as a patrol boater, a sea kayaker, and another swimmer asked me if I was okay. “I just have a different stroke. I sprint then kick,” was my first answer. “I’m good,” was my second answer. “I’ve got a bit of a cramp,” was my third answer.

Over and again, I repeated to myself something my buddy tells himself during his ultramarathons, “If this is as much as it will hurt, then I can keep running.”

Approaching the first buoy, I was tied for last of the blue-capped swimmers—the “two milers.” At some point, the woman blue capper with me slowed. A while later, I never saw her again. I wondered if she had taken the offer of the boats and kayaks along the course: to get a free ride back to the marina—and an unfinished race.

My left eye had started burning, and I didn’t know why. I just left it closed as much as possible. Actually, I closed my eyes during a lot of my kicking—between orienting peeks into the sunshine. A couple times between the half-mile buoy and the mile buoy, I prayed, “God, please take this pain; or help me learn what you have for me in it.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but it had taken me roughly two hours to reach the turnaround buoy. By this point, a kayaker followed me off to the left. Outside of occasional swimmers from the longer races swimming toward me, I was otherwise alone. When I got to the buoy, the kayaker again asked if I was okay. She gave me some Gu, and I learned I could stand in this part of the river. As my feet began to sink into the muck, I felt the sudden grip of a Charlie horse clamp around my left calf. The lady under the wide-brimmed hat then gave me water, and the bulk of the cramping subsided.

I told my Good Samaritan, “Well, time to head back. I didn’t drive all this way not to finish.”

The tide pushed me toward the shore, now an asset. The current now made my strokes more fruitful. Through the haze, the finish line now lingered in front of my face instead of behind my feet. My chest and shoulders were dead, but hope found all the strength left in my muscle fibers.

Right before I got to the half-mile buoy, my left knee started throbbing—probably a symptom of the earlier cramp and my gangly kicks. When I got to that floating yellow triangle I punched it, my fist driven by multiple emotions. Within minutes, I could hear the crowd at the beach—well, what was left of the crowd, as the catering tent’s smorgasbord had just opened.

I hobbled through the finish gates without looking at the clock and had to come back to see what it said. The Velcro ankle bracelet I was wearing will let me know what my official time was when the times go live online next week, but it was roughly 157 minutes. That’s almost exactly 70 minutes longer than it took me to swim two miles in the pool last Saturday. That’s right: almost double the time in the water than I had trained.

I walked to the bathroom to rinse the sand from my feet for the drive home. In the mirror, I saw a face with a swollen left eye and a puffy right eye—something I haven’t seen after a training swim. Both eyes would be blurry for hours—even when rinsed with occasional tears.

In that same mirror, though, reflected the face of a finisher.
I had finished last by a large margin, but I had crossed the finish line.

I had done it, but I wouldn’t say I had conquered it.

My impetuousness had been tempered with humility, and yellow-vested prayers had been answered.

During the drive home, I wondered if God had answered my kicking prayers, too, and tried to find a lesson he might have woven into the experience. An unexpected song appeared in my playlist. Its lyrics included: “Though your heart and flesh may fail you, I’m your faithful strength. I am with you wherever you go. Come to me. I’m all you need. Come to me. I’m your everything.” I cross-referenced those loose Bible quotes with the one that says God’s strength shines through our weakness.

God gave me enough pain tolerance and strength to finish. He let me know that he was just as near and sovereign in the tough, painful stuff through which I’ve been kicking back home away from social media. He provided a wife who texted, “I’m proud of you!” His mercy hid the police car two miles farther down the road then I deserved. He allowed me to feel both the weight and the cost of my ego.

He let me accomplish something hard and know that I hadn’t done it alone.

I’m going to guess that he found those lessons more valuable gifts than a respectable swim time.