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.
Life is the greatest experiment. Each of us is an experiment of one-observer and subject-making choices, living with them, recording the effects.
Fitness has to be fun. If it is not play there will be no fitness. Play, you see, is where the process. Fitness is merely the product.
If marathoners finish they win.
Sport is an essential element of education.
I will not last forever. But I am damn well going to know I have been here.
If you want to win anything – a race, yourself, your life – you have to go a little berserk.
Exercise: you don’t have time not to.
Have you ever felt worse after a run?
Fitness is just a stage you pass through on the way to becoming a racer.
Success rests with having the courage and endurance and, above all, the will to become the person you are, however peculiar that may be. Then you will be able to say, I found my hero and he is me.
To make your life a work of art, you must have the material to work with. The race, any race, is just such an experience.
Sport is singularly able to give us peak experience where we feel completely one with the world and transcend all conflicts as we finally become our own potential.
Running is just such a monastery- a retreat, a place to commune with God and yourself, a place for psychological and spiritual renewal.
Why race? The need to be tested, perhaps; the need to take risks; and the chance to be number one.
If you want to find the answers to the Big Questions about your soul, you’d best begin with the Little Answers about your body.
Every runner is an experiment of one.
I have a bumper sticker that Bowen created that says Regardless of my kids grades, they have an ‘A’ in my book’. Without play the child that still lives in all of us will always be incomplete. And not only physically, but creatively, intellectually, and spiritually as well.
People begin running for any number of motives, but we stick to it for one basic reason-to find out who we really are.
On the roads, I can see truth revealed whole without thought or reason. There I experience the sudden understanding that comes unasked, unbidden. I simply rest, rest within myself, rest within the pure rhythm of my running. And I wait.
There is no substitute for learning to live in our bodies.