The First and the Last.

On Sunday, two people finished the London Marathon.

Both crossed the same line. Both ran the same 26.2 miles. One of them did it in 1 hour, 59 minutes, and 30 seconds. The other took 12 hours and 16 minutes.

I want to tell you why both of them are heroes.

The First: Sabastian Sawe and the Two Hour Barrier

Sabastian Sawe is 31. Kenyan. Quiet. Until Sunday morning, the kind of elite marathoner most casual fans couldn’t pick out of a lineup. By Sunday lunchtime he had done what generations of physiologists swore was impossible. He ran an officially sanctioned, record eligible marathon in under two hours.

For context, a year ago the world record was 2:00:35. The barrier of 2:00:00 was a wall. Eliud Kipchoge famously dipped under it in Vienna in 2019, but everyone knew the asterisk: rotating pacers, engineered conditions, no record possible. It was magnificent. It wasn’t real.

Sunday was real. Point to point from Blackheath to The Mall. World Athletics rules. Tested, ratified, in the books. Sawe ran a negative split. 60:29 for the first half, 59:01 for the second. He ran the 24th mile in 4 minutes and 12 seconds, the fastest mile ever clocked inside a marathon. He had been injured in January and only started training in February.

After the race, he barely talked about himself. The man who just moved marathon running’s four minute mile told the BBC, “Approaching the end of the race, I was feeling strong, and my fellow Ethiopian was so competitive, I think he was the one who helped a lot.” A line moved on Sunday that will never move back.

The Last: Clair Roberts and the Finish Line in the Dark

Clair Roberts is 35. From Milton Keynes. Not an elite. Not an athlete by any measure she would recognise. She crossed the finish line at 12 hours and 16 minutes, well after the elite tents had been taken down, after the streets had reopened, after Sawe’s medal was probably already in a drawer somewhere.

She finished last. Of nearly sixty thousand people, she was the final one in.

Seven years ago Clair was in a place where she didn’t want to be alive anymore. She made one phone call, to the Samaritans. That call kept her here. She has volunteered for them ever since, answering the line for the next person on the worst night of theirs. On Sunday she ran 26.2 miles to raise money for the charity that kept her breathing.

She raised around £2,000. She was helped over the final stretch by tailwalkers, volunteers who walk with the slowest runners after the roads reopen, guiding them to a secondary finish line at St James’s Park because The Mall has long since closed. She had never pushed her body that hard before.

She told the BBC, “I was battling a lot of emotions on Sunday. It was so much harder than I thought it would be. But to be the last person to cross that line feels really special, and I’m proud of myself.”

On the Samaritans, she said: “During a really tough time in my life, they saved me from myself. I plunged into very dark times, but it is amazing what one phone call can do.”

The Same Medal

Here’s the strange and holy thing about a marathon. The medal Sawe got is the same medal Clair got. Same ribbon. Same weight. The clock disagrees about who is greater. The medal does not.

The marathon, as an event, has always quietly insisted on something the world doesn’t believe. That finishing is the point. Speed is a category. Perseverance is the discipline.

I’ve run a few marathons myself. I know what 26.2 miles asks of you. And the more I think about Sunday, the more I think the harder question isn’t what those miles took from Sawe. What does 26.2 ask at hour eleven, in the dark, with the volunteers gone home and your legs failing and the only crowd left being the streetlights of central London?

This isn’t false equivalence. Sawe is the fastest marathoner who has ever lived. But the same finish line waits for the fastest human ever timed and the woman who comes in last with the streetlights as her crowd.

The Race Called Life

The writer of Hebrews knew none of this and all of it. Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us (Hebrews 12:1). The Greek word for “race” there is agōn. Agony, struggle, contest. The instruction is not “win.” The instruction is “run, with endurance, the one course set in front of you.”

Paul, near the end, didn’t write I won the race. He wrote, τὸν δρόμον τετέλεκα, ton dromon teteleka, I have finished the race (2 Timothy 4:7). And here is something that has not left me since this last Easter. The verb Paul uses for finished, teleō, is the same verb Jesus used from the cross. Tetelestai. It is finished.

Paul didn’t measure his life in splits. He measured it in fidelity to the course Jesus had already finished for him.

Most of us won’t be Sawe. Almost none of us will be the first at anything. The world will hand its podiums and its records and its trophies to a tiny number of people, and we won’t be them, and that is fine. But every one of us is running. Every one of us has a course. And every one of us will, eventually, come within sight of a finish line.

The question is not how fast.

The question is whether we finished well. Whether we kept faith. Whether we ran for something larger than our own time. Whether we, like Clair, kept moving when the official crowds were gone and the volunteer at our shoulder was the only one left to cheer. Whether, when the line came, we were still on the course.

A Word, If You’re Winning

Some of you reading this are not at mile 22. Some of you are at mile 23 of something that’s actually going well. The career is rising. The work is growing. The kids are thriving. The finish line is close and you’re going to cross it ahead of the field.

I want you to look at Sawe again.

Here’s what struck me about his interview after the most extraordinary marathon performance in human history. He talked first about Kejelcha. The man stride for stride beside him. The runner who, in Sawe’s words, “was the one who helped a lot.” He wasn’t running for history. He was running with someone competitive enough to keep him at world record pace. The history happened on its own.

Before the race, he had also voluntarily asked the antidoping authority to test him more, not less, because Kenyan distance running has been dogged by suspicion and he wanted his name above it.

He told reporters, “For the new generation, it shows to run a record is possible. Everything is possible with a matter of time.”

That is what winning well looks like.

It looks like running for the person next to you, not the cameras above you. It looks like inviting accountability you don’t owe. It looks like an interview that names a friend instead of yourself. It looks like crossing the line and saying, “It’s a day to remember for me,” when half the planet just watched you make history.

If you are winning right now, the temptation isn’t to give up. It’s to forget. To forget who carried you here. To forget the people still running. To forget that your gift was given.

The way to win even further is to win like Sawe. Quietly. Honestly. With your friend in the lane next to you.

A Word, If You’re Tired

If you are reading this and you are somewhere around mile 22 of something hard. A marriage. A calling. A grief. A battle for your own life. Let me say what Sonya Trivedy of the Samaritans said of Clair when she came in long after the crowds had gone home:

“When it comes to something as amazing as completing a marathon, you don’t finish last, you just get to celebrate the achievement for longer.”

The race has already been finished for you. Tetelestai. What’s asked of you now is not speed. It’s the next step.

Two Questions for the Rest of Us

Most of us spend our lives watching the front of the pack. We celebrate the Sawes. We measure ourselves against the people breaking tape and breaking history, and we wonder why we feel behind.

But the back of the pack is where the gospel actually lives.

So two questions.

Who in your world right now could you be a tailwalker for? Not the ones winning. The ones limping. The ones at hour eleven of something hard. The ones who wouldn’t finish if someone didn’t walk the last few miles beside them. Pick a name. Walk with them.

And who could you be a Clair to? Clair didn’t get to The Mall on her own. Seven years ago, a stranger picked up a phone and gave her another day to live. She is the answer to that phone call. Maybe you are someone’s phone call. Maybe you’ve already been picked up off the floor of your own life by grace, and someone in your orbit needs you to be the voice on the line.

The race is not just about finishing your own. It’s about who you carry with you.

Run on.

If this landed, the kindest thing you can do is forward it to one person at mile 22.