He ran 52 marathons in 52 weeks.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad, number 1078, to upgrade your mental game today by telling yourself a better story, because the most important story you hear is the story you tell yourself. And this message is dedicated to Terri Wurzbacher who carries a cause bigger than herself.

Here’s the upgrade:

you naturally want to avoid suffering, but upgraded thinking knows that suffering for someone else transforms pain into purpose.

Here’s the story:

It was the mid-1990s. Karl Gruber was running six-mile stretches down the gravel roads of rural Ohio when the thought hit him: I’ll run 52 marathons in 52 weeks to raise money and awareness for leukemia. Not a marathon here and there. Fifty-two. One per week. For a year straight. He joined the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team-In-Training. And like every runner in that group, he was matched with a local patient. Karl’s was a five-year-old boy named Glen.

When Karl first met him, Glen looked like any other kid. Then his health declined fast. A bone-marrow transplant from his sister—his best hope—didn’t take. A little over a year after that first meeting, Glen’s mother called. Glen had passed. His entire family was around him. Glen’s mother’s final words to him were, “Go to Jesus, baby.”

That moment stoked the fire. Karl locked the door to his home and loaded into the car his Golden Retriever, Bo, to drop him off at his parents, where he would stay for the next year. And on May 5, 1996, he ran the Cleveland Marathon—number one. Over the next twelve months, he ran marathons across North America. Trail marathons around the Kilauea (kee-lou-WAY-ah) volcano in Hawaii. A track marathon in Ohio: 104 laps. The streets of Montreal in the rain. Olympia, Washington, in a downpour. Number 51 was the Boston Marathon—the Holy Grail of running. Number 52 was Big Sur in California.

65,000 miles driven. 60,000 miles flown. Thousands of his own dollars spent. Fourteen-hour solo drives through the American heartland, talking himself into the next 26.2 miles. And on every single one of those drives, every mile of every race, Karl thought about that little boy. Karl Gruber was not an elite marathoner. He was a disc jockey from Ohio who loved to run. But he was willing to do the thing that breaks most people: keep going when it hurts, week after week, for someone else’s life. Bill Bowerman, co-founder of Nike, said it: “The real purpose of running isn’t to win a race. It’s to test the limits of the human heart.”

Karl tested those limits. And he did it tethered to a purpose that was bigger than his pain. The rate of remission for leukemia patients today is better than ever. Karl played a small part in that. An ordinary person. An extraordinary year. And one little boy who inspired it.

The better story to tell yourself is, “When I run for something bigger than myself, the hurt doesn’t matter.”

Do you have a purpose that is running on the inspiration of something bigger than yourself?

Tell me a story of someone whose purpose became their strength to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “Have you done a project to raise money for a charity?” You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in the World, by going to fromchad.gumroad.com. The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are always available at www.fromchad.com.