Run The Mile You’re In, by Ryan Hall: Review and Highlights
Never run alone.
Ryan Hall knew this from his first run in the eighth grade: a 15-mile jaunt around a lake, prompted, he says, by the Holy Spirit. From that day forward, he’s led an incredible life in running—Olympic athlete, world-record holder in the half-marathon—chasing the vision God gave him as a teenager.
Hall never ran alone—his faith was always with him—but that doesn’t mean his path was easy, or always clear, or without devastating setbacks.
“Run The Mile You’re In” is set up in 26 chapters, one for each mile of the marathon. Each conveys a hard-earned lesson in faith, seasoned with the time and perspective to look backwards to see how God was always leading him forward and deeper in relationship with him.
Hall’s book is loaded with insights and inspiration. Here are key lessons I took away.
Small promptings by the Holy Spirit can lead to big things—if we respond
We shouldn’t ignore intuition and shouldn’t be afraid to act on it:
If I hadn’t acted on my God - given vision to run around the lake, I never would have had the opportunity to run at Stanford, meet my wife, compete on two Olympic teams, travel around the globe, and live out all the amazing experiences I’ve had as a result of running. And all of this came from a God - inspired seedling of a thought, one that I could have easily dismissed.
Moving forward with the prompts we receive can be life-changing.
God is more concerned with the posture of our heart than the outcomes of our actions
Hall was discouraged when he fell short of his performance goals. Eventually, he felt prompted to move to another kind of goal: setting the correct attitude and mindset, and maintaining that through training and competition regardless of outcomes.
I shifted my focus from performance goals that I couldn’t control to heart goals that I could control and live out every practice, every race, every day. I discovered that for me to perform at my highest level, I needed to believe that anything is possible with God — and that I could trust Him completely with the outcomes of my competitions — but that my focus needed to be not on my performance but instead on my heart.
Find peace by releasing your expectations of how God will move
Anyone with faith struggles with this. We want God to move in our lives in a specific way and right now.
God has other ideas. Other lessons to teach us. So we fail to trust him, getting frustrated and disappointed because he’s not doing what we want, when we want.
But what he wants is for us to trust him. To trust him above our own desires. To trust him above our circumstances.
At times , frustration led me to focus not on what God was doing but rather on what God wasn’t doing that I expected Him to be doing. It can be very easy for me to build a case against God , and when I do that, my relationship with Him isn’t very healthy.
Hall’s shift matured him and deepened his faith. He held fast to this idea:
no matter what happens, have a heart that is unoffendable toward Him.
God knows better than we do.
Build monuments to the times God helps and leads us.
One way to build trust in God is to remember all the times God has stepped in and helped us.
My collegiate career, as well as my entire running career, endured because of a few glimpses of hope, glimpses that I felt God gave me to encourage me to keep going and pursue my vision and my dream of one day running with the best runners in the world. I felt that God was clearly instructing me to build “monuments” around these glimpses of hope much in the same way He instructed Israel in the Old Testament to build monuments (a pile of rocks, in this case) at places where God did remarkable things for Israel.
When things don’t go our way, it’s important to remember the times God has helped us. Personally, I do this with journaling. I started a “3G Journal” this year, recording moments of growth, gratitude, and grace.
At the end of this year, I’ll be stunned by how often God showed himself in my everyday life. And I’ll have stronger faith for having noticed, recorded, and reviewed those moments.
Many ways to build monuments. Journaling is a great one.
If you’re a person of faith who is into fitness, I’m sure you’ll enjoy this quick and powerful read. Even if fitness isn’t your thing, though, Hall has much to share about how to navigate this race called life—and how to never run it alone.
Kindle highlights for Run the Mile You're In
My highlights from Run The Mile You’re In.
Mile 1: Vision
I could hear was God giving me a desire I’d never had before. I felt like He was giving me the aspiration to run around the lake. The desire wasn’t overly obvious; it was more as if I had an itch that could be relieved only by attempting the feat.
If I hadn’t acted on my God - given vision to run around the lake, I never would have had the opportunity to run at Stanford, meet my wife, compete on two Olympic teams, travel around the globe, and live out all the amazing experiences I’ve had as a result of running. And all of this came from a God - inspired seedling of a thought, one that I could have easily dismissed.
We then began the run with a walk, which became my custom throughout my running career, of about 100 meters as a way to warm the body up before beginning a slow jog.
my immense fatigue had quieted my mind and all of the distractions around me and the only thing left was His voice.
I discovered that when I am exhausted , I can more easily pray and — more important — hear His voice .
God spoke to me that I would one day run with the best runners in the world and that I would also be given the gift of helping others through my running.
Mile 2: Purpose
I believe that we each have a mission to accomplish and that we have been designed in such a way that we are not lacking anything to accomplish it. Everything we need is already inside of us. We just have to find it and figure out how to cultivate it.
I believe that He wants to show us what we were created for more than we want to find it, so He is going to reveal to us that purpose. Our job is simply to watch for it and act on it.
Mile 3: Sacrifice
As you train harder and harder, you must adjust your mind to believe that you aren’t training as hard as it wants you to believe it is. That’s why training in a group can be so powerful.
once we cease to be impressed by the size of our challenges, our ability to overcome them grows exponentially.
Achieving our fullest potential in any endeavor requires focus, which is made possible only through sacrifice, because focusing completely on one thing requires that we take our eyes off everything else.
I walked through the quad one day, I said a silent prayer to God. I told Him that because I didn’t have any friends, I needed God to be my friend. It was in this loneliness that my faith went from a belief in God to a relationship with Him.
sacrifices seem like sacrifices only at the time you make them. Sacrifices are things God is calling us to give up for our own good.
the way to enter my God - given destiny is through the door of focus, which can be opened only with the key of sacrifice.
Mile 4: Goals
I had given everything inside of me to achieve my goals in high school only to fall well short of them. And so I thought that maybe I had been pursuing the wrong goals.
I shifted my focus from performance goals that I couldn’t control to heart goals that I could control and live out every practice, every race, every day. I discovered that for me to perform at my highest level, I needed to believe that anything is possible with God — and that I could trust Him completely with the outcomes of my competitions — but that my focus needed to be not on my performance but instead on my heart.
“Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life ” ( Prov . 4 : 23 NLT ).
It may seem counterintuitive to believe that heart goals are more powerful than performance goals, but I’ve experienced it to be true. Jesus was more passionate about people’s hearts than about their behavior. Over and over, Jesus encouraged His followers to pay attention to their hearts.
My approach to setting goals of the heart was to pick one heart condition I wanted to go after in each competition. A heart goal would be running the Boston Marathon out of a heart of courage, knowing that if I already have Jesus, there is nothing better to add to my life than what I already have . A goal like this enabled me to run free of failure and full of courage.
to achieve my heart goal, I needed to put it in the forefront of my mind, similar to how I used to put times or places I wanted to achieve in the forefront of my mind. A way to do this was to turn that goal into a declaration or mantra that I repeated as I ran.
“For the eyes of the LORD move to and fro throughout the earth that He may strongly support those whose heart is completely His. ” I want my heart to be completely His , because there is nothing better than being that intimate with God.
In all things, I want to think about my heart more than I think about my performance.
Mile 5: Failure
Moving forward involves having a vision for your future that is bigger than the heartbreak you are going through.
God is the ultimate Father and will never fail us. He shows up exactly how we need Him to in every situation. We just need to take off the glasses of our expectations so we can see Him.
I like to look at failure as resistance training. Now that my hobby is weightlifting, I realize more than ever that the best way for me to get stronger is to fail.
We can experience failure for years and years . I think about Joseph in the Bible enduring imprisonment for years before realizing his God - given dream to help protect God’s chosen people from the famine that was to come.
Moses fleeing Pharaoh , only to hang out in the desert for forty years before acting on his mission to lead Israel out of slavery.
Mile 6: Positive Focus
Whatever we fix our minds on grows
My pastor, Bill Johnson, often says, “ I can’t afford to have a thought about myself that God doesn’t have about me. ”
Even if you can easily shake off a person’s negative comments, I would still argue that it is better not to surround yourself with such people or even to view their comments. The wrong people can so easily distract us from our God - given mission.
Like Jesus , we must be set on pleasing God and no one else.
let us focus on the delight of our Father as we walk securely and confidently
Mile 7: Humility
opened up my heart and mind to the idea that God hadn’t designed me to be a miler. I dabbled in longer races, and I discovered that when you’re functioning within your giftedness, things click.
if I start with a little — maybe just one small step in the right direction — those virtues will grow. Discipline begets discipline. Self - control grows self - control. Patience results in more patience.
A beautiful thing happens when we let go of our pride and trust our creator. When we trust, we experience peace — the peace of not having to be in control, the peace of knowing that God is good and has good plans for us.
I don’t necessarily think that while I focused on shorter distance races, God caused all my struggles in order to wear down my pride. I see them more as a natural consequence of having pride in my heart.
He is much better at showing me the way than I am at determining it on my own.
Mile 8: Relationships
Funny how the little things in life — like signing an autograph with a Bible verse — can lead to such significant alterations in the trajectory of our lives , like who we’re going to marry.
He created us so we could be in relationship with Him . Even apart from creation , God is in relationship with Himself (God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit ) .
we need to look at our relationships and not our accomplishments as our true legacy.
God answers me over and over that greatness comes in the context of and through community.
serving others , especially when you’re doing it in your area of giftedness , is one of the most gratifying and satisfying things you can do in life .
Mile 9: Identity
“What’s the last thing you knew , beyond a shadow of a doubt , that God called you to do? ” My mind flitted back to the day I had sat in the beautiful Stanford Memorial Church and asked God for wisdom about where I should go to college.
I hadn’t finished what God had sent me there to do.
Even though I can hear from God, get a sign from God, and even receive a word of prophecy, I can still doubt myself. The question is this: Why do I doubt myself despite all God has told me and shown me?
often my biggest problem isn’t what is happening in my life. Rather, it is how I see myself.
start by asking, “ What is true about me? ” Better yet , ask, “ What is true about who God is, and what does the answer to that question show me — who has been made in His image and likeness — about who I am?”
Mile 10: Belief
prepare simple declarations to counter the negative thoughts that go through your mind when things get tough.
My job is to put out the fire of self - doubt and declare what is true about that runner and guide them to a place where they can speak powerful truths over themselves.
Mental toughness starts with the belief that you are mentally tough, and it is nurtured through positive declarations.
“ For as he thinks within himself, so he is ” ( Prov . 23 : 7 ).
We do need to practice discernment, but we also must believe that God wants to communicate with us and is speaking to us. We must believe we do hear from God.
Mile 11: Success
My collegiate career, as well as my entire running career, endured because of a few glimpses of hope , glimpses that I felt God gave me to encourage me to keep going and pursue my vision and my dream of one day running with the best runners in the world . I felt that God was clearly instructing me to build “ monuments ” around these glimpses of hope much in the same way He instructed Israel in the Old Testament to build monuments ( a pile of rocks , in this case ) at places where God did remarkable things for Israel.
I forget the times God has shown up in my life unless I mark them by writing about them,
As I focused on the positive things He had done and remembered the vision He had given me for my future, I was able to muster the strength to pick myself up off the ground and continue to put myself out there.
At times, frustration led me to focus not on what God was doing but rather on what God wasn’t doing that I expected Him to be doing. It can be very easy for me to build a case against God , and when I do that, my relationship with Him isn’t very healthy.
Monuments are just that — reminders that we should be thankful for what God has done in our lives.
When I got back from those races , I would “ retire ” the jersey and shoes in my closet . Every time I got dressed in the morning , I’d see my singlets and shoes as monuments to what God had done,
Mile 12: Comparison
one of the biggest lessons God taught me : stop competing.
I love how Jesus responds to Peter’s comparing himself with John : “ You follow Me. ” That’s the same response I felt God giving me whenever I compared myself with others.
if we focus on Jesus and our journey, and are thankful for what God is doing and has done in our lives, then good things almost always happen.
the best way to compete is to strive for personal excellence.
Mile 13: Celebration
In training , you want your body to feel like a sponge. You want to feel like you are absorbing all of the hard training , and you should be noticing that your workouts are slowly getting better.
During my short run , I felt like the Holy Spirit was telling me, “ I want you to celebrate like you just won the Olympic Trials. ” My response was something like, “ Are you serious? ! ” In my emotional and physical state, I couldn’t have been farther from feeling like celebrating. Yet again I forced myself to obey,
I felt something shift and my depression began to lift .
Despite my negative reaction to the encouraging word, though, I continued to feel the shift that was slowly happening in my spirit.
It’s not always instant. Sometimes that shift takes awhile.
even though I didn’t have the faith to partner with the word I had been given, I could align myself with the faith of someone who did believe in God’s power to change my heart and my body.
I think perhaps the reason God is able to laugh at life’s circumstances is because He knows what is going to happen in the end . He sees the whole picture.
When we are battling tough circumstances or fighting depression , we need to ask God to show us the end.
we have access to this future knowledge much in the same way that the guest preacher had access to a prophetic word over my future.
God may not give us a video play - by - play , but He can restore our focus on the big picture instead of on the small , day - to - day happenings that can trip us up.
And the more we partner with God to see our circumstances the way He sees them , the more hope we are filled with and the more empowered we will be to live our destiny.
Mile 14: Unoffendable
Their devotion, love, and affection toward God could not be broken by results. No matter what God chose to do and no matter whether they liked His decision , nothing could change their hearts toward Him.
a miracle that happens in the physical is amazing, but it won’t last forever, whereas a miracle that happens in your heart, if cultivated, will last for a lifetime.
I still don’t fully understand why things played out the way they did that day, but I can clearly see how close and present God was as I endured the flames that threatened to consume me. I could have walked away from my first Olympic experience bitter, frustrated, heartbroken, and angry at God , but He was in the furnace with me, helping me navigate the rocky road faced by all Olympic athletes who find themselves finishing off the podium.
Waves of discouragement hit me from time to time through the following months, but I always came back to what God taught me about being unoffendable toward Him as I trusted in His goodness.
Removing my expectations of how I want God to show up and shifting my eyes toward what God is doing in and around me is a daily goal, because I see this as the primary way I can be thankful to God rather than offended toward Him.
no matter what happens, have a heart that is unoffendable toward Him.
Mile 15: Pain
I found myself asking God how to handle pain, and eventually I felt He led me to Hebrews 12 : 1 – 2 : “ Therefore , since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. ”
When He gave up His spirit on the cross , He called out , “ It is finished ” ( John 19 : 30 ) , and all of humanity now had access to God through Jesus ’ blood , as was made evident by the tearing of the veil in the holy of holies
The Cost of Discipleship . Bonhoeffer says that we shouldn’t look down the road ahead at what is too hard for us , but rather we should set our eyes on Jesus , who is right in front of us , and say , “ He leads the way ; I will follow . ”
God always supplies , by His grace , all the strength we need for each moment to accomplish His purposes .
I need to remind myself to just run the mile I’m in .
I’ve had to learn to let my performances flow out of my body rather than try to force them to happen . It’s all about having the mentality that my best performance wants to come out , and all I have to do is let it come out .
when it feels like the pain is encompassing you , go into your mind’s eye and picture the suffering Christ on the cross , who was thinking of how much He loves you . Letting our hearts and minds fill with love is the most powerful
Mile 16: Faith
to begin what I called faith - based coaching . I began this journey because I sincerely believe that God has all the answers to everything in life , with no exceptions —
The first lesson God taught me as my coach is that greatness comes forth from community .
When I started out with God as my coach , I would sit down with a pen and paper and ask Him questions . This was a bit of a transition for me , because my prayer times were usually more like my talking at God than my giving Him space to speak back . But I’ve discovered that if I’m not asking God questions , I’m not creating room to hear Him .
Sure enough , though , when I started asking Him questions , He started answering them . And one of the first questions I asked God is , Where does strength come from ? The answer wasn’t what I expected or even wanted to hear : rest .
It is vain for you to rise up early , to retire late , to eat bread of painful labors ; for He gives to His beloved even in his sleep ” ( Ps . 127 : 1 – 2 ) .
When it came to planning my daily training , I was hoping that God would give me all kinds of crazy dreams and visions of the perfect workouts I needed to be doing , but that wasn’t my experience . Instead , I felt God reinforcing that He had already brought some amazing coaches into my life to teach me the foundations of training .
I discovered that learning to hear from God is a lot like learning a second language . You first have to spend time listening and trying to decipher what you’re hearing , and you’re guaranteed to make some mistakes in the process .
I’ll be the first to admit that some things I thought I was hearing from God weren’t coming from Him at all . For example , prior to the 2012 Olympics , I felt God was telling me that all of the pieces of the puzzle were going to come together and I was going to run my best race ever .
Quite the opposite happened , and I ended up dropping out for the first time ever because of a hamstring tear .
Hearing from God is like anything else in this life — it takes practice , and most likely we’re going to get it wrong from time to time — but failure shouldn’t discourage us from hearing His voice and lead us to just settle for
Failure to hear God correctly should just be instructional and lead us to more accurately hear Him in the future .
One of the greatest lessons I learned about hearing God’s voice had to do with my heart condition in both training and racing : how you do what you do is more important than what you do .
I was concerned about what workout I was going to do that day , whereas God was concerned about what was going on in my heart while I was doing the workout .
we’re concerned about what is happening on the outside , while He’s concerned about what is happening on the inside .
Running with a heart secure in who I am allowed me to find the sweet spot for my body .
It might appear that the last years of my career proved that having God has my coach was unsuccessful , but I would counter that having God as my coach is what helped me navigate and endure the most difficult season of my running . Every athlete reaches the point where their body gives out or just can’t perform at the same level it once did .
Mile 17: Worship
I felt freer and lighter than I had ever felt because my connection with God was so much deeper now , resulting in my feeling more loved by God than ever . When you really experience the love of God , you can’t help but go through life feeling light and free .
being connected to God brings freedom , relaxation , and joy , allowing one to perform at new levels .
sometimes it’s the small things that disrupt our spirits , because often our guard isn’t up with the small things .
worshiping God through anything is simple , really — it’s just doing whatever you are doing with the heart posture that it is for Him .
Mile 18: Declaration
“Truly I say to you , whoever says to this mountain , ‘ Be taken up and cast into the sea , ’ and does not doubt in his heart , but believes that what he says is going to happen , it will be granted him ” ( Mark 11 : 23 ) .
This experience continues to remind me not to put time limits on the dreams I’m believing will happen . I easily could have stopped declaring I was going to run 2 : 04 after failing the first time , but I would have missed that declaration’s fulfillment .
let us not just declare in our weakness ; let us also declare the deepest dreams in our hearts and speak life into every area that seems hopeless .
What even are my deepest, no-restrictions dreams?
Mile 19: Fearless
Coupled with having a secure identity was the vision God had given me for my running . Strong vision plus a secure identity allows you to risk everything without the fear of failure . It’s a potent combination .
Fear has always made me feel heavy and tight . Whenever I was running out of fear , I felt locked up , and nothing good ever came from it .
Mile 20: Love
I found that whenever I believed that maybe I couldn’t do this , I was always right . Whatever I doubted , I partnered with , and that partnership became a reality .
one of my favorite things about being on the starting line was that it felt like a blank slate .
Mile 21: Partnering
Many of the injuries and fatigue issues I battled throughout my career were because I wasn’t good at partnering with my body . I had the wrong mindset of believing that my body and my mind were functioning in opposition to each other , which is common reasoning in the endurance community .
I’ve learned that my body , mind , and spirit are all on the same team , wanting to operate as a unit to accomplish a common goal .
When I started viewing my body as being on my side , I found that I was able to truly listen to my body and get much better results .
knowing God is the true victory we are all so hungry for .
I felt like God was telling me not only that my victories would help others be victorious but also that my disappointments would result in other breakthroughs .
I still tend to force my body to do something because I’m rigidly following a schedule or have some rules in my head about what I should do , whether it’s a nutrition regime or my weightlifting program . The problem with this “ living by the law ” mentality is that it doesn’t allow room for the Holy Spirit to invade and influence how I am living or training .
the goal isn’t to follow a plan as much as it is to follow the Holy Spirit , who is right in front of us and wants to lead us into our own promised land .
consider the areas where we have strict rules in place and ask God if He wants to invade those areas with His guidance .
keep following tried and true principles that have been passed down from generation to generation and to always look to the Holy Spirit to give me moment - by - moment guidance .
Mile 22: Victories
sometimes the biggest victories we experience are not our own . They are victories we can share in because we played a part in someone’s win by encouraging them and supporting them .
Teaching!
When my view of success is so small that it’s all about me and my performance , my life is deeply unfulfilling . But when I open up my definition to include the success of others and the collective , I’m much more satisfied . Rick Warren says in his memorable opening sentence of The Purpose Driven Life , “ It’s not about you . ”
Mile 23: Seasons
prayed for comfort . And I felt God answer , “ It was never meant to last forever . ”
sometimes seasons just end because there is an ending point . Once I was able to remove the shame , I was able to find peace to transition to the next season .
Many of the principles I learned to train for running are also used in weightlifting , and vice versa .
Often , lessons we learned in one season are meant to help us in future seasons , so even if you are coming out of a rough season , take solace in the fact that it was not a waste . The lessons you learned through your trials will help you on your journey in this new season .
Ecclesiastes 3 ( vv . 1 – 8 ) : There is an appointed time for everything . And there is a time for every event under heaven —
we must be able to identify the end of one season so we can enter the new season . Things can get confusing , hard , and frustrating for us whenever we try to drag one season into another .
Mile 24: Consistency
same fatigue I’d felt prior to my retirement . Once again , running was teaching me a valuable lesson : if in a new season you try to do what you’ve done in a previous season , it’s not likely to work .
Mile 25: Closure
My plan for marathons has always been the same : go out hard and give God a chance
always want to give Him a chance to strengthen me .
What I’ve learned since the World Marathon Challenge is that for something to grow , something else usually has to die first .
Mile 26: Victorious
there is nothing I can possess that is more valuable nor is there anything I can accomplish that is greater than knowing God and being in a right relationship with Him .
Copyright © 2022 - Matt Tillotson