Johnson's Journey in Life: You can do hard things

Have you ever had a task ahead of you or set a goal and then you felt that it was all unrealistic?

I had that exact experience.

After running a 5k back in July with some friends, we decided that we could take on anything. Basically, we had a runner's high. We signed up to be in a relay race of 38 miles. Yes, you read that right. Running 38 miles split up between us. It is the Temple to Temple relay race at BYU-Idaho. One member begins running at the Rexburg, Idaho temple and then your team ends up at the Idaho Falls, Idaho temple. We were crazy. Of course, our runners high was gone by September when it was time for the race. We thought "what in the world were we thinking signing up?" We all looked at the route of our leg of the race and got our t-shirts... there was no turning back.

I learned a couple of really neat things from this experience.

1. You can do hard things.

2. We must keep moving forward in life.

3. We are not meant to move through life alone.

It amazes me what are bodies are able to do. We each finished our leg of the race, many of us not stopping once. When you put your mind to something, you can do it! You can do hard things! I ran the first leg of the race. As I was running I was thinking about how we are all progressing through life. Since I started the relay I felt kind of unproductive. I felt like my part was small compared to the other team members who ran closer to the end of the race and were getting to finish point. Sometimes in life we feel like we aren't moving very far. I was running against the bitter wind and it was hard to see the difference I was making. Sometimes life feels like that. We get hit with something, like the wind, that pushes us a little further back than we would like. But we have to keep moving forward. In our case, moving forward towards the temple. We did it and we did it as a team. I believe we were each able to make our leg of the race so great because our team was there cheering each other on. I couldn't of done it by myself. A support system is awesome. We all felt so accomplish when we ran through the finish line at the Idaho Falls temple.