Running Quotes

Hey listen, I already have a complete list of silver linings. It's the goddamn cloud that's killin me.

~ John L. Parker Jr.

He wanted to impart some of the truths Bruce Denton had taught him, that you dont' become a runner by winning a morning workout. The only true way is to marshal the ferocity of your ambition over the course of many days, weeks, months, and (if you could finally come to accept it) years. The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials. How could he make them understand?

~ John L. Parker Jr.

You would think it best to save your breath for running, but I often find screaming helps.

~ Mark Lawrence

At paces that might stun and dismay the religious jogger, the runners easily kept up all manner of chatter and horseplay. When they occasionally blew by a huffing fatty or an aging road runner, they automatically toned down the banter to avoid overwhelming, to preclude the appearance of show boating (not that they slowed in the slightest). They in fact respected these distant cousins of the spirit, who, among all people, had some modicum of insight into their own days and ways. But the runners resembled them only in the sense that a puma resembles a pussy cat. It is the difference between stretching lazily on the carpet and prowling the jungle for fresh red meat.

~ John L. Parker Jr.

Even though I can’t tell others whether they should chase their marathon dreams, I highly recommend they do something completely out of character, something they never in a million years thought they’d do, something they may fail miserably at. Because sometimes the places where you end up finding your true self are the places you never thought to look. That, and I don’t want to be the only one who sucks at something.

~ Dawn Dais

I could feel my anger dissipating as the miles went by--you can't run and stay mad!

~ Kathrine Switzer

Nearly all runners do their slow runs too fast, and their fast runs too slow. Ken Mierke says. So they're just training their bodies to burn sugar, which is the last thing a distance runner wants. You've got enough fat stored to run to California, so the more you train your body to burn fat instead of sugar, the longer your limited sugar tank is going to last.-The way to activate your fat-burning furnace is by staying below your aerobic threshold--your hard-breathing point--during your endurance runs.

~ Christopher Mcdougall

Your body will argue that there is no justifiable reason to continue. Your only recourse is to call on your spirit, which fortunately functions independently of logic.

~ Tim Noakes

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.

~ Christopher Mcdougall

Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn't live to love anything else. And like everything else we love-everything we sentimentally call our 'passions' and 'desires'-it's really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run.

~ Christopher Mcdougall

You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn’t live to love anything else…We were born to run; we were born because we run

~ Christopher Mcdougall

Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by,” Kerouac wrote. “Trails are like that: you’re floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you’re struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak… just like life.

~ Christopher Mcdougall

An itchy feeling began to work its way through my body, as though a thousand mosquitoes were circulating through my blood, biting me from the inside, making me want to scream, jump, squirm. I ran.

~ Lauren Oliver

Their hearts, lost in thought, slowly tick away time. When we pass each other on the road, we listen to the rhythm of each other's breathing, and sense the way the other person is ticking away the moments.

~ Haruki Murakami

Vigil couldn't quite put his finger on it, but his gut kept telling him that there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love running. The engineering was certainly the same: both depended on loosening your grip on your own desires, putting aside what you wanted and appreciating what you got, being patient and forgiving and undemanding.

~ Christopher Mcdougall

Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain.

~ Christopher Mcdougall

A typical race morning usually starts out looking like a scene from a zombie movie: individuals or pairs of people walking down a deserted street, all headed in the same direction.... Inevitably, regardless of the weather, U2's Beautiful Day streams out of loudspeakers.

~ Sarah Bowen Shea

The Tarahumara would party like this all night, then rouse themselves the next morning to face off in a running race that could last not two miles, not two hours, but two full days. According to the Mexican historian Francisco Almada, a Tarahumara champion once ran 435 miles, the equivalent of setting out for a jog in New York City and not stopping till you were closing in on Detroit.

~ Christopher Mcdougall

But most of all I was inspired by the stirring examples of all the other runners. In some pictures they would seem like tiny dots in a mosaic, but each had a separate narrative starting a few months or a lifetime earlier and finishing that day in the New York City Marathon, the race with 37,000 stories.

~ Mark Sutcliffe

The traditional approach to an unknown risk is avoidance.

~ James F. Clapp Iii

He ran his hand up and down his left achilles tendon. Very tender, better pay attention to it and back off if it gets any worse. Maybe ice it. The old Injury Evasion Fandango. Did it ever end?

~ John L. Parker Jr.

I just run. I run in void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.

~ Haruki Murakami

Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk.

~ Stephen King

Movement is the essence of life.

~ Bernd Heinrich

There are many challenges to long distance running, but one of the greatest is the question of where to put on's house keys.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

What else is there to do in this world but love other people?

~ James E. Shapiro

I wasn't particularly worried; running is overrated anyway, and sport only makes you sweaty and smug and wears out the knees.

~ Jasper Fforde

When I go to the Boston Marathon now, I have wet shoulders—women fall into my arms crying. They're weeping for joy because running has changed their lives. They feel they can do anything.

~ Kathrine Switzer

Elite runners are genetically gifted, sure, but without intense training, those gifts are wasted. Their training creates a strong work ethic that leaves humility in its wake. There are no short cuts in marathoning, so anyone who is a marathoner has worked hard.

~ Jeff Horowitz

There are no standards and no possible victories except the joy you are living while dancing your run. You are not running for some future reward-the real reward is now!

~ Fred Rohe

There was no let-up. The tempo was always moderate but steady. If a new guy decided to pick up the pace, that's where it stayed, whether he finished with the group or not. You showed off at your peril.

~ John L. Parker Jr.

He was filled with loss and an off-brand of nostalgia for events that were supposed to become part of his past but now wouldn't at all. In the mind's special processes, a ten-mile run takes far longer than the minutes reported by a grandfather clock. Such time, in fact, hardly exists in the real world; it is all out on the train somewhere, and you only go back to it when you are out there. He and Mize had been through two solid years of such regular time-warp escapes together. There was something different about that, something beyond friendship; they had a way of transferring pain back and forth, without the banality of words.

~ John L. Parker Jr.

And then there's the perverse joy of subtly working in references to marathon training in daily life, say at the post office or while waiting outside my first-graders' classrooms at the end of the school day.

~ Sarah Bowen Shea

Though Jack Nubbins was extremely talented, Quenten Cassidy had viewed the Specter; when he reached down through the familiar layers of gloom and fatigue he generally found more there than a nameless and transient desire to acquire plastic trophies. He and Nubbins were not even in the same ball park.

~ John L. Parker Jr.

Kim was, as always, utterly happy while running, in accord with nature, in harmony with the universe, in touch with the truth that was in him, full of love for all creatures even to the lowliest insect.

~ Susan Trott

...the big increases in heart and blood volumes that occur by the 12th week of pregnancy should have the same effect as 'blood doping'. This partially explains the outstanding performances of several female athletes from Eastern bloc countries who were at this stage of pregnancy when they competed in the 1976 Olympics.

~ James F. Clapp Iii

O.K. I'm running out of appetite. Let this swirl— a bit like Crab Nebula— do for now.

~ Charles Olson

There's one rule of thumb that suggests that you need one day of recovery for every mile run in a race. Another rule of thumb...suggests one day...for every kilometer run in anger.

~ Hal Higdon

Train, don't strain.

~ Arthur Lydiard

When we run away from something. We're usually running away from ourselves.

~ Anthony T. Hincks