Maturity happens in the middle.

Last month, our oldest, Liam, competed in the Commander’s Cup Fitness Competition through Civil Air Patrol. He has always been a natural runner, so I coached him in the 3-mile and 1-mile events during the short time we had to prepare. (Those who can no longer do…teach, no?)

He was the only cadet from his squadron to show up, but he ended up placing sixth overall in the mile with a time of 6:07, a PR for him. He narrowly missed third place (by one stride!) in the three-mile. I watched as he pushed the third-place runner faster and faster, who collapsed at the finish line half a second before Liam. It was hot, and they’d run in direct sun through thick, wet grass, up multiple hills—a tough course, even for experienced runners. I felt like my heart would burst with pride, remembering what those kinds of courses felt like as a high school cross-country runner.

Liam had had two different medical procedures, one on each foot, requiring recovery time in the weeks leading up to the competition, and we were out of town on multiple trips in May, so we ended up training for about a week total. I taught him to run with proper form, how to breathe, how to sprint the last 200 yards, and how to strengthen his supporting muscles with cross-training exercises. But a YouTube video I found on racing the mile was particularly insightful.

In this video, the runner describes best practices for achieving a PR in a mile race. He gave tips on how to warm up sufficiently, how to pace yourself throughout the four laps around a track, and how to really push it at the end. The first two laps, you’ll be running off adrenaline and keeping up your race pace. And at the last lap, you’ll find that extra push because you know the end is near, and the natural response is to give it all you’ve got.

The third lap, he noted, was the one that would require the most effort.

Halfway through.

In the middle, things get harder. Whereas the first half of the race, excitement and nerves feed your muscles, and it’s easy to give it all you’ve got at the finish line, the beginning of the second half is when you hit resistance. Here is where you notice that the run really takes more effort. Adrenaline moves aside to make way for good, old-fashioned determination. The third lap becomes work, and if you don’t lean into it and push yourself harder, you’ll begin to slow down or even risk injury.

And isn’t that just a metaphor for life? For work, for parenting, for reaching goals, for a fulfilling marriage? For anything at all worth doing—at some point, we will recognize the shift, where our inspiration begins to slink away, our vision becomes blurry, and we hit a proverbial wall. It takes more effort just to maintain progress, and if we don’t give more, we’ll slow down. It’s a decision point. We either lean into the heavy, the difficult, and meet it with increased effort and tenacity, or we let it wear us down and weaken us from that point forward. One thing is for sure: maintaining the status quo isn’t going to work.

Here is where, I stressed to Liam, you will have to remind yourself why you chose to do this. You’ll no longer have adrenaline, but purpose, to propel you further.

It can make us nervous knowing that things will eventually get tough, but we have a choice to either let it catch us off guard and knock us backward or to expect the resistance—to welcome it, embrace it, and allow it to produce perseverance, strength, and maturity in us—the very traits that will carry us over the finish line.

I have found this to be true in marriage. In the beginning of our relationship, romance was effortless. We were riding the high of hormones, and love lifted us through courtship. Our enthusiasm about the relationship encouraged spontaneity and affection. But after 20 years of marriage, something different, deeper, has had to emerge, or we would risk moving backward against the resistance. In the mid-life season of raising older kids, homeschooling, caring for a pet, and juggling home life with a demanding career, we’ve hit the point where perseverance, not puppy love, fuels our marriage.

We reached the inevitable decision point of our middle-age marriage: coast toward complacency, or intentionally inch toward intimacy. The latter requires more effort on both of our parts, but the former would do nothing to serve our family in the long run and would only weaken it one weary month after another. We are choosing to cling to our why and to each other, making the extra effort to keep the home-fires burning.

I have also found this to be true in my health. At almost 42, I’m approaching the entryway of perimenopause, and the healthy habits I had in my 20s and 30s are no longer producing the results I’m after. I can no longer eat like a 13-year-old boy and not immediately and persistently feel the after-effects. I can no longer endure 45-minute HIIT workouts without feeling the symptoms of a bad flu.

It now takes increased effort just to maintain my current level of fitness, but achieving and maintaining optimal health in my 40s requires a completely new game plan that I like to call “Suck it up, buttercup.” I can either accept that I have to give it more effort and make the necessary changes to gain strength and vitality, or I can get weaker from here on out.

For me, this means laying off the sweets and the empty carbs. It means getting my derriére in gear multiple times a week to lift weights and go for walks, jogs, or a game of tennis. It means getting to bed at a decent time, drinking lots of water, and eating lots of plants. Basically, it takes discipline and a constant reminder of my why—to have the energy and health to enjoy a full, satisfying life with my family.

As I’m writing this, my kids have been back home for a week after spending half of June in Mississippi with their grandparents. The time was good for them, but I didn’t realize how much I needed the time to myself. Parenting older kids has been a fresh kind of difficult that I wasn’t exactly prepared for. When they were little, a lot of parenting was black-and-white. Challenging but simple. These days, they are all growing both intellectually and spiritually, which has been exciting but also really intense. Like, I’ve prayed for them to know God on a deeper level but kind of thought that could happen instantly and miraculously, and without me having to be so involved. (I kid, I kid, but seriously, why can’t He leave me out of it and handle it Himself?)

Turns out, their maturity is a daily grind of endless questions, deep conversations, corrections, and accountability. It’s late-night visits to our room to ask existential questions with no quick answers. It requires a level of patience and equanimity that I didn’t know I was capable of. It’s an arduous process, and it’s been completely draining. I needed a couple of weeks to get my head back in the game. I needed time to rest, to regain my composure, and come up with a better strategy for the more demanding workload in this season of parenting.

No one really likes the middle. When I was on the cross country team, I would start off races fast, picking off my opponents like lint on a sweater. But midway through the race, when I was wheezing and sweating, I’d panic. Scared I wouldn’t have enough left to finish the race, I’d go into survival mode and slow down, conserving my energy until the finish line was in sight.

I was an average runner. I had the endurance to last for miles only if I went slowly, but I was afraid to push myself past what I thought were my limits to see just how much speed I could gain. (I also had undiagnosed, untreated asthma, as it turns out. Now that I have an inhaler, I understand that it’s possible to run without wheezing and gasping for air.) So one day, when Liam was practicing mile tempo runs, he complained to me after his first mile that he was tired and didn’t feel well, so his next mile would most likely be slower. I informed him that negative self-talk was all in his head, and I wanted him to try to push past that feeling and see how well he could run the next mile. (I of course made sure it wasn’t true heat exhaustion or something serious.) He got annoyed with me, but I told him I knew he could push past what he thought was his limit and do more, faster. I jokingly told him to use that irritation toward me to fuel his next run. He not only completed the next mile but shaved 20 seconds off his time.

On the day that he was sitting in the podiatrist’s office, waiting on the doctor to perform his second procedure, he asked me why God allowed us to go through trials. He said he’d prayed for healing for his foot and didn’t understand why God didn’t answer his prayer.

After reminding him that, sometimes, God chooses to heal in ways different than we would have thought—in this instance, the procedure would bring the relief he needed—I shared that God is more concerned with our maturity and strength than he is our comfort level. I reminded him of the words spoken in the book of James: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, when you encounter trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work in you so that you will become mature and complete, not lacking anything.” Maybe this procedure was an exercise in endurance, faith, and reliance on God’s grace, and he should embrace what it could produce in him.

It’s easy to run our race with fresh legs and a full tank of energy, but the good stuff—the deep, lasting stuff—is formed in us during adversity, when we feel the burn in our lungs and muscles. As Rocky Balboa says, “Going that one more round when you don’t think you can, that’s what makes all the difference in your life.”

It’s in the middle, when we encounter resistance and choose to persevere, to lean in, to dig deep—that’s when we gain strength to finish the race before us.