Once you have decided that winning isn’t everything, you become a winner.
Of all the races, there is no better stage for heroism than a marathon.
Life is a positive-sum game. Everyone from the gold medallist to the last finisher can rejoice in a personal victory.
To keep from decaying, to be a winner, the athlete must accept pain – not only accept it, but look for it, live with it, learn not to fear it.
Nothing is more certain than the defeat of a man who gives up.
The true runner is a very fortunate person. He has found something in him that is just perfect.
Exercise is done against one’s wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse.
The desire to run comes from deep within us – from the unconscious, the instinctive, the intuitive.
The obsession with running is really an obsession with the potential for more and more life.
For every runner who tours the world running marathons, there are thousands who run to hear the leaves and listen to the rain, and look to the day when it is suddenly as easy as a bird in flight.
The mind’s first step to self-awareness must be through the body.
I have met my hero, and he is me.
The difference between a jogger and a runner is an entry blank.
Anything that changes your values changes your behaviour.
The music of a marathon is a powerful strain, one of those tunes of glory. It asks us to forsake pleasures, to discipline the body, to find courage, to renew faith and to become one’s own person, utterly and completely.
The real competition is against the little voice inside you that wants to quit.
Play is where life lives.
I run each day to preserve the self I attained the day before and to secure the self yet to be.
Do not tell me what to do, tell me what you do. Do not tell me what is good for me, tell me what is good for you. If, at the same time, you reveal the you in me, if you become a mirror to my inner self, then you have made a reader and a friend.
Because until we write it down, we don’t know what is actually at the root of our lives.