Alex DiVerde
Episode 310
6 JAN 2025
He played football in high school but also competed in track, which became his long-term sport. Having broken a school record in indoor 4x800m relay in high school, he went on to compete for four years at Bradley University where he also broke a school record. Post-college he has continued to run, including five marathons and one 50-mile ultra marathon. He even qualified for and ran in the Boston Marathon. Plus, since 2018 he has backpacked approximately five thousand miles across a handful of trails, including the Appalachian Trail.
Notable guest quotes:
“Both my parents were cradle Catholics, and I was as well… and then both sets of grandparents were devout practicing Catholics as well.”
“Sports were always a big part of, I guess, our family’s life and my life. (I) played the laundry list of common sports that Americans could play growing up. It was mostly soccer, and then track when it came around growing up, and then there was some basketball mixed in there, some baseball mixed in there, and then football and track were the focus in high school.”
“When I was taking a look at schools, I was having a number of, like, D3 schools reach out to me, but I really wanted to go and walk on at some division one school that would take me.”
“I went from playing football and running mostly sprint type training to basically running cross country or distance training. So, I went from running 15 miles a week to 50 or 60, by the time end of freshman year rolled around. So, I was training a lot harder than I ever had and putting way more work into running.”
“I put this, like, being a division one runner on this pedestal and it didn’t exactly live up to what I expected or what I wanted it to be and started looking around a little bit and asking God a little bit, like, ‘Okay… there’s got to be more’.”
“They had a football player for Northwestern come and give a talk basically about his faith experience in college… pretty much as soon as that talk was done, I went up to one of the missionaries that was there and was like, ‘Hey, my name is Alex. I’m going to join your Bible study’.”
“I went on a FOCUS mission trip to the Philippines, and that’s where there was a group of four staff missionaries and maybe 10 or 11 students that went, ministered to the folks in poor areas there, and helped to build some homes while we were there, and it was through that trip and experience that God, very loud and clear, was like, ‘Hey, I’ve given you these talents in other areas for what you’re studying, but I want you to spend a couple years serving with FOCUS after college’.”
“(God is) going to speak to us. He puts these desires on our hearts, and He’s going to speak to us … in the highest of highs and the lowest of lows… I had this idol of being a division one athlete, being able to call that my own, and, to a certain extent, He kind of broke that idol down a little bit, or, helped me to realize that He was the one who gave me those talents, but even though I had good talents at running, there’s much bigger things in life than just running fast around a track.”
“We were in Trinidad and Tobago and the main sport was soccer. So, we’d spend the first half of the day running a soccer camp for the kids in Trinidad and Tobago in the community we were serving at. And then in the second half of the day, we would run – most of the kids were younger, so it probably felt a little bit more like vacation Bible school or religious ed that you might experience here in the States and like that – so we spent a week and a half over winter break doing that year.”
“I find that sports is a very natural way to connect with other people to connect with other men. So, I feel like that is, like, some of the guys there have very much, like, we have come together because we have shared common sports activities and whether it’s running, basketball, I feel like snowboarding and skiing is another very common one being in the upper Midwest and that being something you can do in winter that we spend a lot of time connecting while we’re doing those activities and that definitely helps us to be able to connect together, both together and with God for sure.”
