God Is My Coach - The Amazing Faith of Olympic Runner " Ryan Hall " interviewed on CNN and CBN - Watch Video
Thin and blond and boyish at 29 — flight attendants still asked his age when he sat in an exit row — Hall wore jeans and a blue shirt labeled with the shoe company that sponsored his running. At the 2011 Boston Marathon, he ran a personal best of 2 hours 4 minutes 58 seconds. No other American has run faster.
Husband and wife Ryan and Sara Hall are two of Americas premier distance runners. Both were California high school superstars and All-Americans at Stanford University (where they met). Ryan has posted the best-ever American times in the Half Marathon and Marathon and has represented the US in the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Sara has won several premier road races, including the Drake Relays Grand Blue Mile and the US National Road Mile Championships. She has been a two-time world team member for the US at the World Indoor Track and Field Championships. Guided by their faith, and seeking a way use their athletic success in service of others, Ryan and Sara co-founded The Hall Steps Foundation in the Fall of 2009 in order to fight poverty through better health. During the 2011 Chicago Marathon, Hall began singing praise to the Lord. “Come Lord Jesus, come,” the two runners sang as they ran. “Come Holy Spirit, come.”
After finishing second at the 2011 United States half-marathon championships, Hall went to drug testing, a standard procedure. Asked on a form to list his coach, he wrote: God.
You have to list the name of a real person, a doping official said. Hall Said, “He is a real person”.
Hall said that God spoke to him regularly, giving him training plans, even a race strategy for the London Olympics. He does not hear a voice; rather, he will pray or scroll through workouts in his head and a heightened thought will give him a sense of peace, grace, empowerment. Or a passage from the Bible will seem particularly relevant and urgent. Hall is still learning to distinguish his own thoughts from what he believes are God's words to him. And sometimes, he has done workouts that in retrospect seem unwise -- a thigh-shredding hill run in Flagstaff, a bicycle time trial a week after the Boston Marathon.But Hall has also found biblical reinforcement for his training. He takes one day off a week, just as God rested on the seventh day. Every seven weeks, for restoration he runs only once a day instead of twice, an allusion to Exodus 23:11 and the admonition that farmers should leave their fields fallow every seventh year.
At night, he rubs his legs with anointing oil, another reference to Exodus and the belief that the human body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.In his prayers, he thinks of entering Heaven, and imagines running through the gates as if into a great stadium filled with people raising a joyful noise. He hopes to be just off the shoulder of the leader, but he won't attempt a late kick. "The goal of my life," he says, "is just to follow in the footsteps of Jesus as closely as I can."
The Faith of Olympic Runner Ryan Hall - CBN