Only 10 kilometers into the Boston Marathon, Jean Driscoll wanted to pull out of the race.
Two days earlier, she had a bad case of food poisoning and had vomited a number of times. As other racers passed her by, she was feeling nauseated.In the back of her mind, however, was the biblical admonition she tries to live her life by: Commit to the Lord all that you do, and your plans will succeed.
"I remembered I had committed the race to the Lord, and I couldn't pull out," Driscoll said in a telephone interview.
Stretching her muscles, gradually gaining speed, Driscoll ended up winning the women's wheelchair division of the marathon in world record time.
It was her fifth straight victory in the Boston Marathon, and she would go on this year to a seventh win at Boston. As she prepares for the Olympics in Atlanta, the silver medalist in the 800 meters at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona has kept the same principles.
"The Bible talks about praying without ceasing, and I guess I have just taken that to heart," said Driscoll, who has been confined to a wheelchair since she was a teenager. "Every workout has been committed to him."
Her path to spiritual peace and athletic achievement, however, has not come easy. It has been a long road, one symbolically filled with the twin terrors of wheelchair racers - crashes and flats.
In a profile of Driscoll in the July-August issue of the Christian Reader, the wheelchair athlete talks of the difficulties she had to overcome. Born with spina bifida, and club feet, she had to wear heavy metal braces into her early teenage years. At age 14, after a bicycle accident, she lost her ability to walk independently.
"When I was a kid, I was constantly angry at God. I was always asking, `Why me? Why me?' " she recalled recently. "You just don't understand why things like this exist when you know there is a loving God who seems to be taking care of everyone else, (but) not you."
It was not only the taunting of peers that affected her faith. What drove her away from religion was people - including family members - coming up to her and telling her she had too much doubt to be healed.
At faith healing services her parents took her to, she observed phony evangelists interviewing people to turn up information they would later claim was divinely revealed to them.
The witness of Christian friends who let their faith speak in action began to bring Driscoll back to her faith, and a determination to succeed in the circumstances she found her-self in.
Driscoll said she began to encounter a "sympathetic and empathetic" God, "not a judgmental God who is ready to strike everyone down."
"I believe God has a plan for each and every one of us," she said. "I know my life is very full."
In contrast to those who would somehow equate physical illness or disabilities and sin, Driscoll refers to Romans 12:12: "Rejoice in your hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer."