“Let Us Run with Patience the Race That Is Set Before Us”

In my role as a business ethics professor, I have the blessing of teaching about 350 students a year, and I absolutely love it. One of my core goals is to help my students prepare to thrive by increasing their ability to make gospel- and principle-based decisions about work and life. Because the course is so focused on decision-making, I have met with many students one-on-one to talk about major life choices and challenges. Some feel that the pace of life is way too fast and that they can’t keep up. Some have questions they can’t currently answer, and others feel frustrated because they have waited a lot longer than they had anticipated for righteous desires to be fulfilled.

These life concerns can seem all the more overwhelming during the young adult years—what Elder Robert D. Hales called “the decade of decision”¹—during which the choices a young adult makes will have a significant impact on how the remaining decades will unfold. I have prayerfully thought about how to help my students—and anyone else who feels weary in their mortal journey—to find the renewed strength they need to keep going with faith and patience. To frame some key principles, I want to relate a true story I heard a few years ago that still surprises me to this day.

The Cliff Young Story

In 1983 a 61-year-old farmer contacted the organizers of a 544-mile ultramarathon from Sydney to Melbourne, Australia, and asked to be registered for the race.² Since the other entrants were well-known and proven ultrarunners—with some holding records³ and others bearing sports sponsorships—this farmer’s request was met with skepticism.

“Do you know how long this race is?” the officials asked. “What makes you think you can complete it?”⁴

The farmer insisted that he understood how long the race was and that he believed he could finish it. Being from a poor farm family who couldn’t afford horses or four-wheelers, he had often run in his knee-high gum boots to round up nearly 2,000 sheep over a very large area in advance of a storm, sometimes running for three days to round up the entire flock.

On the first morning of the race, the other runners showed up with experienced support teams in mobile homes with showers and nice beds. In contrast, this farmer drove up in a rusty old van, with an inexperienced road crew and one pair of running shoes.⁵ Though viewed with curiosity, no one took this old farmer seriously as a contender.

However, to the shock of the entire nation and the global racing world, this 61-year-old farmer named Cliff Young not only won the ultramarathon but also beat the previous record by two days, finishing the 544 miles in 5 days and 15 hours.

How did this happen?

Based on my reading of Cliff’s biography and other articles detailing this astonishing result,⁶ a key reason Cliff Young won was that almost nothing went right for him the first day of the race.

So what went wrong?

First, during the initial hours of the race, due to a poorly marked section of the course, Cliff got lost following another runner who didn’t know the way.⁷ This experience galvanized Cliff’s resolve not to mimic what other racers were doing, but rather to run this race by doing what felt right to him.

Second, to make up for getting lost and running slower than his competitors, Cliff ran a couple more hours on the first night than he had originally planned. His road crew was already asleep and failed to have dinner ready for him, so Cliff just ate something cold out of a can and then collapsed in exhausted sleep.⁸

Third, Cliff’s crew chief, Wally, was responsible for waking Cliff up at six in the morning to get an early start. But when the alarm went off, Wally nodded back to sleep. He then awoke with a start, ran to the vehicle where Cliff was sleeping, and said, “Cliff, get up. I’ve slept in. It’s past six!”

Cliff bolted upright, put on his shoes, and tore down the road, thinking his competitors were already running. But when the sun didn’t come up for what seemed like hours, Cliff finally asked Wally what time it was.

Embarrassed, Wally said it was four in the morning. He had accidently set the alarm for two thirty rather than six. Cliff had barely slept two hours that night.⁹ But instead of getting upset or calling it quits, he just kept moving forward one step at a time. He found that he could run all day just fine with two to three hours of sleep while eating very simple food out of a can. His resilient response helped maximize his running time each day. The unanticipated difficulties he experienced during the first part of the race led to unexpected advantages and drastically changed the outcome of the race—and made Cliff a symbol of Aussie grit and determination.

In a very real way, our lives are much like an ultramarathon that tests the limits of our spiritual endurance. The apostle Paul taught, “Let us run with patience the race that is set before us.”¹⁰ This mortal experience, which has been carefully designed as part of our loving Heavenly Father’s plan, is meant to help us develop as disciples of His Son and reach our fullest potential. However, this experience can feel overwhelming at times.

Just as no one believed Cliff Young could finish—let alone win—the race, we may also have doubters—other people, the adversary, sometimes ourselves—who try to get us to believe we cannot make it successfully through life. But through scripture, the Spirit, and patriarchal blessings, you know you are a child of God. Heavenly Father believes in you. Your wise choice to come to this earth and run this all-important race, along with your many good choices since then, can give you growing confidence that you can complete this mortal race and do so in a magnificently successful way. The key for all of us is to fully yoke ourselves to the Savior. To more fully yoke ourselves to Him, I invite us to consider four essential decisions—especially those of you in your decade of decision—that will help us to run with patience this mortal RACE that is set before us.

R: Repent and Realign Regularly

First, decide to repent and realign with the path regularly. Like Cliff Young, we can sometimes get lost, veer off course, or follow someone who doesn’t know the way.

President Russell M. Nelson has taught us to embrace repentance as a joyful daily habit, emphasizing that “nothing is more liberating, more ennobling, or more crucial to our individual progression than is a regular, daily focus on repentance. . . . It is the key to happiness and peace of mind. When coupled with faith, repentance opens our access to the power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ.”¹¹

I also love the perspective Elder Weatherford T. Clayton shared in a BYU devotional several years ago on the realignment aspect of repenting: “Every time we turn more to Christ, we are repenting. . . . When we do things that make us better, kinder, gentler, more sensitive, more spiritual, more virtuous, and truer, we are repenting. . . . [We are] turning [or returning] to Him.”¹²

A few months after I returned home from my mission, someone who I knew well and who was older and more educated than I was at the time took me aside and tried for hours to fill me with doubts about my faith. I felt as if I were in a spiritual cloud, but I continued my habit of reading the Book of Mormon and praying daily. It didn’t feel right to stop these daily habits—even if during this period it was harder to feel heaven’s light—because I knew they had brought answers and blessings to me in the past.

A few weeks after this experience, while reading the Book of Mormon, I had a strong impression to open my mission journal and read about guidance and comfort I had received and lives that I saw changed during my missionary service. As I read, I felt the spiritual cloud begin to lift. Great peace and clarity returned as the power of my own witness from my own “spiritually defining memories”¹³ reaffirmed the truth of the restored gospel.

Embracing the role of joyful repentance and constant realignment to the covenant path will help us run with patience the race that is set before us.

A: Anticipate and Accept Adversity

Second, decide to anticipate and accept adversity. One of my core goals as an ethics professor is to keep my students out of jail. Every Friday morning at the Central Utah Correctional Facility, inmates file into a small chapel for a devotional. As a guest speaker, I have asked,

“If I could take you with me to my ethics classes and have you share the most important lesson you’ve learned from your life’s journey, what would it be?”

One said, “Develop positive coping habits. After my divorce, I turned to things I shouldn’t have to deal with my loneliness.”

Another said, “Diligently cultivate your core significant relationships. I didn’t, and when life went south, I didn’t have the support structure that I needed.”

Another mentioned honoring covenants and said, “I treated my church membership like a mess of pottage, and I really regret it.”

The thing that unifies their stories is that most of these inmates acknowledged they had not responded well to some significant form of adversity.

While we can’t know in advance the specific challenges we will face, each of us will experience significant forms of adversity in our lives—financial difficulties, divorce, chronic illness, the untimely death of a loved one. We can prepare now by accepting this reality, practicing positive coping mechanisms and resilience, and setting our hearts on eternal things that do not change.

Our sense of adversity is closely tied to our perception of the degree to which our experiences align with our expectations. One way to “think celestial”¹⁴ about the future is to try to replace expectations with hopes. It has been said that “expectations are premeditated resentments,”¹⁵ but hopes entail a future-oriented sense of gratitude. While hopes are centered in God and eternal promises, expectations are based on people and circumstances. While hopes are tied to an eternal identity, expectations are tied to mortal roles and identities.

By seeing our lives through this lens of hope, we are more able to anticipate and accept adversity as a vital, meaningful part of the journey. This helps us run with patience the race that is set before us.

C: Cleave unto Christ and Covenants

Third, and most importantly, decide to cleave to Christ and to the covenants He makes possible. In contrast to Cliff Young’s inexperienced road crew, Jesus Christ has been leading and empowering souls to successfully complete this mortal race for a very long time.

We have been taught that we can be endowed with this Christ-centered covenant power through the temple.¹⁶ I learned this lesson during one of the most difficult periods of my life when I, like some of my students, felt weary and totally overwhelmed.

When I began my PhD in organizational behavior at the University of Washington 20 years ago, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Very dense reading and an intense class schedule caused deep fatigue and stress. Though I was praying for strength, I felt a crushing sense of inadequacy and quiet desperation that lasted for months.

“I can’t do this,” I said to my wife, Cathy. “I can’t keep up. This is way harder than I thought it would be.”

Around the time that these self-doubts and my weariness peaked, I had an impression that said, “I can help you if you spend more time with me.”

I felt that the best way to spend more time with Him—with the Lord—was in His house. Initially it seemed that adding frequent temple trips to my busy schedule was impossible; time was the critical resource I thought I didn’t have. But I knew what I was currently doing wasn’t working, and I felt assurance that blessings would follow if I tried to fulfill my covenants to put the Lord and His work first. So I made a personal commitment to attend the temple several times a month.

As I began spending more time in the temple, things started to change significantly. My intense fears about my ability and the future began to melt away. The peace I felt in the temple spilled into other areas of my life. I started to see my path more clearly and to feel hope. In gentle ways, like Lehi’s family, I felt as if I were being led in a more direct course through my graduate school wilderness.

While most of the time this added strength manifested itself in subtle ways, there were some very obvious blessings, including a dissertation sample that fell miraculously into my lap.

When I had told my dissertation advisor that I wanted to study the role of humility in leadership, he said, “That’s fine, Brad, but I have no idea where you’d find a real-life sample to gather data about that.”

However, a couple of weeks later he called me into his office, and with a confused look on his face, said, “Brad, this has never happened to me before. Yesterday a local leadership coach contacted me and said he was interested in having a scholar examine his approach to leadership training. He said that his main goal was to teach leaders to embrace humility.”

My advisor, a very well-known scholar and an agnostic, said, “Brad, what’s going on? This doesn’t just happen.”

Then he kind of squinted, pointed at me, and said, “Have you been . . . praying?”

This sample was a huge tender mercy to a struggling doctoral student and formed the foundation of the research I have been doing for 15 years. Despite my slow start in my PhD program, I finished one year ahead of the rest of my class, and I know I could not have done this without the added strength that comes through Christ and covenants.

Cleaving to Christ and covenants, especially through seeking Him in His holy house, will help us run with patience the race that is set before us.

E: Endure to the End

Fourth, decide that you will never, ever give up, that you will endure to the end.

When asked about his strategy for the race, Cliff Young simply said it was “to run to the finish line.”¹⁷ He told his crew that if he began this race, there was no way he was going to stop until he reached the end.¹⁸

Taking steps—one foot in front of the other, over and over—in a race seems rather simple and repetitive, yet these steps accrue across long distances and lead to impressive and inspiring accomplishments. Similarly, making continual spiritual progress in our mortal marathon happens through simple and repeatable steps that include heartfelt prayer, scripture study, joyful repentance, service, and renewing and striving to live covenants. Any one of these steps enacted in isolation results in spiritual momentum. But when we combine all these steps together, our strength and our momentum really begin to build, and we begin to love the race.

These sanctifying steps and holy habits help us endure or survive spiritually and represent the individual work President Nelson has pled for us to do in order to have the Spirit with us in our daily lives.¹⁹ The word for spirit comes from the Latin word spirare, which means “to breathe.”²⁰ Just as runners are able to increase their lung capacity over time to enhance their physical endurance, President Nelson, in effect, is asking us to get ourselves in spiritual shape for what is coming by increasing our spiritual lung capacity to receive the divine breath of the Spirit in a daily, ongoing way.

Resolving to endure to the end by daily embracing the renewing power of the gospel’s sanctifying steps that invite the Spirit’s daily companionship will help us run with patience the race that is set before us.

Conclusion

In closing, I bear witness that because of Jesus Christ we can not only complete this mortal marathon, but we can also do so with magnificent success. Resolutely making the decision in our own hearts to repent and realign regularly, to anticipate and accept the role of adversity, to cleave to Christ and covenants, and to endure to the end will yoke us to Christ in a relationship of continual renewal.

And so “let us run with patience [and with Jesus] the race that is set before us” and let Him, who is “the author and finisher of our faith,”²¹ help and renew us every step of the way. I testify that He lives. I testify that He loves each and every one of us and that this is His work. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

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Adapted from a BYU devotional speech Bradley P. Owens, a professor in the Romney Institute of Public Service and Ethics, delivered on June 11, 2024.

Illustrations by Julian Rentzsch

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Notes

1. Robert D. Hales, “To the Aaronic Priesthood: Preparing for the Decade of Decision,” Ensign, May 2007, 48.
2. See Julietta Jameson, Cliffy: The Cliff Young Story (Melbourne, Australia: Text Publishing, 2013).
3. See Jameson, Cliffy, 60.
4. See Jameson, Cliffy, 57. This conversation is inferred from documentation that race organizers originally viewed Cliff as “some old geriatric” who could ruin the whole event by dying during the race.
5. See Jameson, Cliffy, 89.
6. See Jameson, Cliffy; Terrell Johnson, “Cliff Young Gave Us a Whole New Way to Run Long Distances,” Half Marathoner, October 10, 2023 (reposted from 2021), www.thehalfmarathoner.com/p/cliff-young-gave-us-a-whole-new-way; Genevieve Carlton, “The Incredible Story of Cliff Young, the Potato Farmer Who Miraculously Won a 544-Mile Marathon at Age 61,” All That’s Interesting, July 2, 2023 (updated February 23, 2024, edited by Maggie Donahue), allthatsinteresting.com/cliff-young.
7. See Jameson, Cliffy, 96.
8. See Jameson, Cliffy, 103, 105.
9. Jameson, Cliffy, 106–12.
10. Hebrews 12:1.
11. Russell M. Nelson, “We Can Do Better and Be Better,” Ensign, May 2019, 67; emphasis added; see 2 Nephi 9:23; Mosiah 4:6; 3 Nephi 9:22; 27:19.
12. Weatherford T. Clayton, “Rock of Our Redeemer,” BYU devotional address, March 14, 2017. See also Thomas S. Monson, “Choices,” Ensign, May 2016, 86; Dale G. Renlund, “Repentance: A Joyful Choice,” Ensign, November 2016, 121–24.
13. Neil L. Andersen, “Spiritually Defining Memories,” Ensign, May 2020, 18–22.
14. Russell M. Nelson, “Think Celestial!” Liahona, November 2023, 117–20.
15. Saying quoted in Holly Hudson, “Managing Unrealistic Expectations,” Life Skills, YA Weekly, Week 2, April 2021, churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ya-weekly/2021/04/managing-unrealistic-expectations. See also Neil Strauss, The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships (New York: Dey Street Books, 2015), 255: “Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.”
16. See Anthony Sweat, “We Need an Endowment,” BYU devotional address, April 5, 2022.
17. Paddy Upton, “Slow and Steady Wins the Race,” Sports Coaching, January 27, 2020, paddyupton.com/2020/01/27/slow-and-steady-wins-the-race.
18. Cliff Young had firm resolve. On the first night of the race, he fell and injured his shoulder to the point that he couldn’t lift his arm to put on a rain jacket. When this happened, he still had more than 400 miles to run—yet he stayed in the race (see Jameson, Cliffy, 101–2, 111, 151).
19. See Russell M. Nelson, “Revelation for the Church, Revelation for Our Lives,” Ensign, May 2018, 93–96.
20. This insight was brought to my attention by my friend and mentor Barry Rellaford; see Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. “spirit” (n.), etymonline.com/word/spirit.
21. Hebrews 12:2.