The way to activate your fat-burning furnace is by staying below your aerobic threshold – your hard-breathing point – during your endurance runs.
Distance running demands a brain-body connection that no other creature is capable of.
If you can run six miles on a summer day then you, my friend, are a lethal weapon in the animal kingdom. We can dump heat on the run, but animals can’t pant while they gallop.
Know why he could do it? Because no one ever told him he couldn’t. No one ever told him he oughta be off dying somewhere in an old age home. You live up to your own expectations, man.
Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry,” Mark Twain used to say.
In ‘Tarahumara’ land, there was no crime, war or theft. There was no corruption, obesity, drug addiction, greed, wife-beating, child abuse, heart disease, high blood pressure, or carbon emissions. They didn’t get diabetes, or depressed, or even old: 50-year-olds outran teenagers.
Humans are built for endurance, not speed. We’re awful sprinters compared to every other animal. We try to run our races as if they were speed races, but they are not. They’re endurance races. Even a marathon, the way it’s run now, it’s not an endurance contest.
We’ve got a motto here-you’re tougher than you think you are, and you can do more than you think you can.
Anyone can do running. Running should be easy. It should be fun. It should include everyone. It shouldn’t be a punishment for eating cheesecake, which is what we’ve turned it into.
We run when we’re scared, we run when we’re ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time.
The words of the social critic Eric Hoffer were ringing true: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket.”
Running is the heart of what it means to be human.
If you read folklore and mythology, any kind of myths, any kind of tall tales, running is always associated with freedom and vitality and youthfulness and eternal vigor. It’s only in our lifetime that running has become associated with fear and pain.
We wouldn’t be alive without love we wouldn’t have survived without running maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.
Faced with the almost inescapable conclusion that it had been selling lemons, Nike shifted into make-lemonade mode. Jeff Pisciotta became head of a top-secret and seemingly impossible project: finding a way to make a buck off a naked foot.
For nearly 2 million years, our ancestors survived and thrived and spread across the planet because they could run other mammals into heat exhaustion.
Deny your nature, and it will erupt in some other, uglier way.
When it comes to mentors, you can’t beat survival.
Even Charles Darwin, that human decoder ring of bizarre behavior, found the idea of saving a stranger’s life to be a total head-scratcher.
You don’t have to be fast. But you’d better be fearless.