Weekend Wanderings

In light of the upcoming Summer Olympic Games I thought I'd share this  inspiring story I read in The Sacred Romance by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge.

“A 19th-century Scottish discus thrower lived in the days before professional trainers and developed his skills alone in the highlands of his native village, making his own discus from the description he read in a book. What he didn’t know was the discus used in competition was made of wood with an outer rim of iron. His was solid metal and weighed three or four times as much as those being used by his would-be challengers. This committed Scotsman marked out his field the distance of the current record throw and trained day and night to be able to match it. “For nearly a year, he labored under the self-imposed burden of the extra weight, becoming very good. He reached the point at which he could throw his iron discus the record distance and traveled south to England for his first competition. When he arrived at the games, he was handed the official wooden discus — which he promptly threw like a tea saucer, setting a new record, a distance so far beyond those of his competition that no one could touch him. For many years he remained the uncontested champion."