tschram

Shi-Quan Nettingham spent his first winter in Minnesota after moving from Las Vegas a little over a year ago running the frigid prairie to train for his longtime goal of running in the Boston Marathon. Nettingham, the Sports Director at KDMA, has been running for nearly 13 years, starting out with track and cross country in high school. It wasn’t his intention, originally, to become so involved in running, as at the time, basketball was his preferred sport. He says he used running as a way to stay in shape in the off-season, but soon discovered a love for the sport. “I kind of just fell in love with it. It’s a healthy lifestyle, and really something that became kind of an addiction,” he says. When he started running, Nettingham says he thought he would be a sprinter. “I never even imagined I was going to be a distance runner, and then my coach said I think we should try, and that’s how I was introduced to it. She persuaded me to do cross country and that’s when I really fell in love with it. It was like I’m not just running in a circle around the track. In cross country, you’re running on different terrain, and you have a purpose – to run somewhere. I was hooked,” he says.

Imagine it is night, you are driving along a lonely country road, you stop at a stop sign and your headlights fail. They just stop working. The car is running fine, but you cannot see the road. The moon is but a sliver. The stars are distant. You cannot see where you are going. There is nothing you can do; so, you wait and hope. In his book Standing on the Promises, Louis Smedes wrote, “Waiting is our destiny as creatures who cannot by themselves bring about what they hope for. We wait in the darkness for a flame we cannot light. We wait in fear for a happy ending we cannot write. We wait for a not yet that feels like a not ever. Waiting is the hardest work of hope.”