For the four months that I trained for the New York City Marathon, it wasn’t quite registering in my mind that I would actually be running in it (never mind dribbling it with a basketball)! Then, on the Thursday night before the race, my friend Ron (who ran with me) and I had to go to the Jacob Javits Center to pick up our numbers and time chips. It was there, standing in a huge line, where I saw a giant picture of the Verrazano Bridge hanging from the ceiling. Thousands of people were packed onto that bridge. The picture was humbling. There it hit me: I had become a part of something much greater than myself.

38,000 runners and countless fans lining the streets through all five boroughs of New York City–I planned to dribble 26.2 miles with a basketball in the largest marathon ever assembled! I barely slept that Saturday night, and it really didn’t matter. Adrenaline is quite an amazing thing when you are put in the spotlight.

We arrived three hours early in Staten Island where the madness was to begin. Ron broke out the “Sharpie” marker to write “Ballforlives.com” on my bright yellow shirt. Hey, this was free advertising! Above the web address he wrote “13 million orphans” which I thought was the approximate number of children orphaned by AIDS worldwide. The official number is actually 15 million, which is also about how many children live in the country of Germany. It was a pretty good reminder as to what motivated me to do all this in the first place.

As he marked up my shirt, we began to get a lot of visitors asking us to write their names on their shirts, arms, etc. It was great conversing with these people who were about to attempt the same feat we were. We had never met these people, yet we had a bond with them on this day. Again, we had become a part of something much greater than ourselves, and to make it through, we were going to need each other.

Throughout the morning I felt a little embarrassed that I was carrying a basketball. Our long shorts and big T-shirts already gave away that Ron and I were not runners, and there I was with a basketball in the middle of all these serious runners. Then the Spirit said, “You want to attempt something great and hide it from people? Are you embarrassed about saving the lives of orphans in Africa?” Then Ron took the ball from me and started dribbling it. A beautiful thing about people from Jersey City is that they really don’t care too much about what people think of them. In order to attempt something great, you really can’t.

That’s the thing about going for something bigger than you: when you rise above the masses of people living mediocre lives, you’re going to look weird. Of course there will be strange looks. Of course people will doubt. You know how many times I heard “You’re crazy!” That’s when you stay close to those who believe in you and remember Who it is that you believe in. All the glory was only going to one Person on this day.

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