January 8, 2012
The Badwater Ultramarathon is a 135 mile foot race run through Death Valley in July. Temperatures during the race routinely reach 130 degrees. To finish the race, a person must be in extraordinary physical condition, a person must carefully manage food and water intake and constantly monitor body temperature. Scott Jurek is arguably the world’s best ultramarathon runner. He routinely competes in races of 100 miles or more and wins most of the time. Jurek’s first ran the Badwater in 2005. He entered the race as the favorite to win. Around the 60th mile, Jurek’s body overheated. He was nauseous. He could barely walk. The race leaders were more than 10 miles ahead. For 10 minutes, Jurek submerged himself in an ice bath and remained as still as a corpse. Jurek shared the conversation he had with himself during those 10 minutes after the race. “Your done.” He told himself. “You’d have to do something completely incredible to win this race. Like what? Like starting all over again. Like pretending you just woke up from a great night’s sleep and the race hasn’t even started yet. You’d have to run the next 80 miles as fast as you’ve ever run eighty miles in your life. No chance. Right?” Jurek got up, came back, won the race, and did so in a record time of 24:36.[i]
Jurek’s come back story is an incredible one. It could even be described as miraculous. As incredible as Jurek’s come back was, it can be just as difficult, if not more so, to come back to sobriety from the brink of addiction, to come back to integrity after betraying someone you care about, to come back to a place of joy after the death of a loved one. Jurek is an extraordinary athlete with an extraordinary gift. Only a handful of people on earth can come back from where he found himself to do what he did. But, Christ’s baptism teaches us that anyone, even the most average of Joes and Jills, can come back from the depths of sinfulness and despair to live lives of fullness, goodness, and joy, if one pins one’s faith in Christ Jesus.
The gospels quickly move from