Faith Is Central to Marathoner Ryan Hall's Approach The marathoner Ryan Hall worshiping in Redding, Calif., at Bethel Church, which he joined with his wife, Sara, last August. REDDING, Calif. - Ryan Hall rocked slightly, palms up, closing his eyes or singing softly to lyrics projected on giant screens at the evangelical Bethel Church. Other worshipers jubilantly raised their arms and swayed and jumped in the aisles. A band played onstage and a woman waved a fabric flag like a rhythmic gymnast. Sara Hall helping her husband stretch before a training run. Ryan Hall visits a massage therapist and a chiropractor weekly. He spends time each day on what he calls self-therapy, a series of stretches and exercises. Thin and blond and boyish at 29 - flight attendants still asked his age when he sat in an exit row - Hall wore jeans and a blue shirt labeled with the shoe company that sponsored his running. At the 2011 Boston Marathon, he ran a personal best of 2 hours 4 minutes 58 seconds. No other American has run faster. The Boston course is not certified for record purposes because of its drop in elevation and its layout. Still, of the 29 fastest marathon performances in 2011, Hall's was the only one by a runner from a country other than Kenya or Ethiopia. His next marathon will come Aug. 12 at the London Olympics. On a Sunday in March, Hall firmly believed he could challenge the East Africans for a gold medal. "Light a fire in me for the whole world to see," he sang. The Bible downloaded on his iPhone, Hall read along with Psalm 68: "Let God arise and his enemies be scattered." He took notes as Bill Johnson, the pastor, casually hip in a sports coat and jeans, spoke to hundreds of worshipers about risk-taking, saying, "If you live cautiously, all your friends will call you wise, but you won't move mountains." The sermon seemed particularly resonant with Hall, a Stanford graduate with a degree in sociology, a surfer-dude mien and an approach to running that is experimental and unorthodox. He has pushed the boundaries of conventional training, seeking to confront the dominant East Africans and the unforgiving way that the fastest marathons have become something like 26.2-mile sprints. He coaches himself, running alone instead of with an elite training group here in Northern California, two hours above Sacramento, where the flat land of the Central Valley begins to buck and heave like a rodeo bull. For the Olympic marathon trials in January in Houston, Hall trained entirely at sea level, contravening a widely held belief that altitude training is necessary to increase oxygen-carrying capacity and enhance performance. Although he has incorporated some altitude training for the Olympics, Hall has headed to the highlands of Flagstaff, Ariz., for weeks, not months, at a time. He runs 100 miles a week instead of the typical 120, taking one day off each seven days. Every seven weeks, he runs once a day instead of twice, the standard regimen. Hall has yet to win a major marathon. He finished 10th at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. After taking fourth at Boston in the spring of 2011, he finished fifth at the Chicago Marathon last fall. His preparation for the London Games has been complicated by foot problems, disappointing tuneup races and an acknowledgment that his initial training strategy - to try to shatter the world record - did not work. But Hall remains flexible, adaptable. He has four weeks until the Olympic marathon to refine a new approach begun over the past month. "Sometimes, you have to fail your way to the top," Hall said in his open, easy manner in March. Thomas Edison found a thousand ways not to make a light bulb before he got it right. Underpinning his running is his faith. The marathon is so isolating in its training, so impossibly fast at the elite level, so restricting to two performances a year for most top runners, that many athletes seek a purpose larger than themselves, something to believe in more than the numbing miles of roadwork. For some, it is their families or an escape from poverty. For others, it is their religion. "If you run without any reason, you are just chasing the wind," said Wesley Korir, the reigning Boston Marathon champion from Kenya. During the 2011 Chicago Marathon, Hall began singing praise to the Lord. Freestyling, he called it. Korir joined in. "Come Lord Jesus, come," the two runners sang as they ran. Come Holy Spirit, come. After finishing second at the 2011 United States half-marathon championships, Hall went to drug testing, a standard procedure. Asked on a form to list his coach, he wrote: God. You have to list the name of a real person, a doping official said. "He is a real person," Hall responded. Conversing With God