“
Like musicians, like mathematicians—like elite athletes—scientists peak early and dwindle fast. It isn’t creativity that fades, but stamina: science is an endurance sport. To produce that single illuminating experiment, a thousand nonilluminating experiments have to be sent into the trash; it is battle between nature and nerve. Avery
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
“
All other trades are contained in that of war.
Is that why war endures?
No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.
That's your notion.
The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
”
”
Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West)
“
The prize never goes to the fastest guy,” Chris replied. “It goes to the guy who slows down the least.” True in endurance sports. And possibly even truer in life.
”
”
Rich Roll (Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World's Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself)
“
That's when I realize how much I don't want to be alone, how sobbing should not be a solitary sport..
”
”
Carrie Jones (Endure (Need, #4))
“
Rowing is perhaps the toughest of sports. Once the race starts, there are no time-outs, no substitutions. It calls upon the limits of human endurance. The coach must therefore impart the secrets of the special kind of endurance that comes from mind, heart, and body. —George Yeoman Pocock
”
”
Daniel James Brown (The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics)
“
Enduring means accepting. Accepting things as they are and not as you would wish them to be, and then looking ahead, not behind.
”
”
Rafael Nadal
“
The smell of the sweat is not sweet, but the fruit of the sweat is very sweet.
”
”
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
“
Fact One: Races are won or lost in key moments. Fact Two: Success in the sport is, above all else, about enduring suffering.
”
”
Chris McCormack (I'm Here To Win: A World Champion's Advice for Peak Performance)
“
The final relationship that cannot be ignored is with disrupters:
They are individuals who cause trouble for sport - inciting opposition
to management for a variety of reasons, most of them petty.
Usually these people have good performance - that's their cover - and so
they are endured or appeased.
A company that manages people well takes disrupters head-on.
First they give them very tough evaluations, naming their bad behaviour
and demanding it change.
Usually it won't. Disrupters are a personality type.
If that's the case, get them out of the way of people trying to do their
jobs.
They're poison.
”
”
Jack Welch
“
Sport, properly directed, develops character, makes a person courageous, a generous loser, and a gracious victor; it refines the senses, gives intellectual penetration, and steels the will to endurance. It is not merely a physical development then. Sport, rightly understood, is an occupation of the whole person, and while perfecting the body as an instrument of the mind, it also makes the mind itself a more refined instrument for the search and communication of truth….
”
”
Pope Pius XII
“
Cycling is an excruciating sport - a rider's power is only as great as his capacity to endure pain - and it is often remarked that the best cyclists experience their physical agonies as a relief from private torments. The bike gives suffering a purpose.
”
”
Philip Gourevitch
“
Over time, a subtle cancer spread: where you have more experts, you create more bystanders. Professionals did all the fighting and fixing we used to handle ourselves; they even took over our fun, playing our sports while we sat back and watched.
”
”
Christopher McDougall (Natural Born Heroes: Mastering the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance)
“
It isn't creativity that fades, but stamina: science is an endurance sport
”
”
Siddharta Mukherjee
“
Performance in an endurance sport, as with many things, is only as good as the weakest link.
”
”
Brendan Brazier (Thrive Fitness: The Program for Peak Mental and Physical Strength—Fueled by Clean, Plant-based, Whole Food Recipes)
“
Life is the most brutal endurance sport of all time!
”
”
David Goggins
“
Whenever an art form loses its fire, when it gets weakened by intellectual inbreeding and first principles fade into stale tradition, a radical fringe eventually appears to blow it up and rebuild from the rubble. Young Gun ultrarunners were like Lost Generation writers in the ’20s, Beat poets in the ’50s, and rock musicians in the ’60s: they were poor and ignored and free from all expectations and inhibitions. They were body artists, playing with the palette of human endurance.
”
”
Christopher McDougall (Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen)
“
Fate was not kind, life was capricious and terrible, and there was no good or reason in nature. But there is good and reason in us, in human beings, with whom fortune plays, and we can be stronger than nature and fate, if only for a few hours. And we can draw close to one another in times of need, and live to comfort each other.
And sometimes when the black depths are silent, we can do even more. We can then be gods for moments, stretch out a commanding hand and create things which were not there before and which, when they are created, continue to live without us. Out of sounds, words and other frail and worthless things, we can construct playthings--songs and poems full of meaning, consolation and goodness, more beautiful and enduring than the grim sport of fortune and destiny.
”
”
Hermann Hesse (Gertrude)
“
the three most important mental skills for success in endurance sports: commitment, confidence, and patience. Taken together, they form what we typically call mental toughness. Mentally tough athletes are hard to beat.
”
”
Joe Friel (The Triathlete's Training Bible: The World's Most Comprehensive Training Guide)
“
One way, he thought, the whole thing of ring fighting was hurting somebody else, deliberately, and particularly when it was not necessary. Two men who have nothing against each other get in a ring and try to hurt each other, to provide vicarious fear for people with less guts than themselves. And to cover it up they called it sports and gambled on it. He had never looked at that way before, and if there was any single thing he could not endure it was to be a dupe.
”
”
James Jones (From Here to Eternity)
“
But the greatest paradox of the sport has to do with the psychological makeup of the people who pull the oars. Great oarsmen and oarswomen are necessarily made of conflicting stuff—of oil and water, fire and earth. On the one hand, they must possess enormous self-confidence, strong egos, and titanic willpower. They must be almost immune to frustration. Nobody who does not believe deeply in himself or herself—in his or her ability to endure hardship and to prevail over adversity—is likely even to attempt something as audacious as competitive rowing at the highest levels. The sport offers so many opportunities for suffering and so few opportunities for glory that only the most tenaciously self-reliant and self-motivated are likely to succeed at it. And yet, at the same time—and this is key—no other sport demands and rewards the complete abandonment of the self the way that rowing does. Great crews may have men or women of exceptional talent or strength; they may have outstanding coxswains or stroke oars or bowmen; but they have no stars. The team effort—the perfectly synchronized flow of muscle, oars, boat, and water; the single, whole, unified, and beautiful symphony that a crew in motion becomes—is all that matters. Not the individual, not the self.
”
”
Daniel James Brown (The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics)
“
Some foolish men declare that creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill advised and should be rejected. If God created the world, where was he before the creation? If you say he was transcendent then and needed no support, where is he now? How could God have made this world without any raw material? If you say that he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression. If you declare that this raw material arose naturally you fall into another fallacy, For the whole universe might thus have been its own creator, and have arisen quite naturally. If God created the world by an act of his own will, without any raw material, then it is just his will and nothing else — and who will believe this silly nonsense? If he is ever perfect and complete, how could the will to create have arisen in him? If, on the other hand, he is not perfect, he could no more create the universe than a potter could. If he is form-less, action-less and all-embracing, how could he have created the world? Such a soul, devoid of all morality, would have no desire to create anything. If he is perfect, he does not strive for the three aims of man, so what advantage would he gain by creating the universe? If you say that he created to no purpose because it was his nature to do so, then God is pointless. If he created in some kind of sport, it was the sport of a foolish child, leading to trouble. If he created because of the karma of embodied beings [acquired in a previous creation] He is not the Almighty Lord, but subordinate to something else. If out of love for living beings and need of them he made the world, why did he not take creation wholly blissful free from misfortune? If he were transcendent he would not create, for he would be free: Nor if involved in transmigration, for then he would not be almighty. Thus the doctrine that the world was created by God makes no sense at all, And God commits great sin in slaying the children whom he himself created. If you say that he slays only to destroy evil beings, why did he create such beings in the first place? Good men should combat the believer in divine creation, maddened by an evil doctrine. Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning or end, and is based on the principles, life and rest. Uncreated and indestructible, it endures under the compulsion of its own nature.
[By 9th century Jain (the religion of Jainism) Acharya, Jinasena, in his work, Mahapurana, a major Jain text. The Jains have never believed in any gods as creators of the universe, unlike most other religions, and have focused on acting morally on Earth rather than wasting time supplicating the supernatural.]
”
”
Jinasena (Mahapurana (महापुराण))
“
Mindless performance may be especially helpful in endurance sports because of the supreme importance of the capacity to suffer. The more science and technical detail an athlete incorporates into the training process, the more distracted he becomes from the only thing that really matters: getting out the door and going hard.
”
”
Matt Fitzgerald (Iron War: Dave Scott, Mark Allen, & the Greatest Race Ever Run)
“
Like musicians, like mathematicians—like elite athletes—scientists peak early and dwindle fast. It isn’t creativity that fades, but stamina: science is an endurance sport. To produce that single illuminating experiment, a thousand nonilluminating experiments have to be sent into the trash; it is battle between nature and nerve.
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
“
Life will always be the most grueling endurance sport, and when you train hard, get uncomfortable, and callous your mind, you will become a more versatile competitor, trained to find a way forward no matter what. Because there will be times when the shit life throws at you isn’t minor at all. Sometimes life hits you dead in the fucking heart.
”
”
David Goggins (Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds)
“
Endurance races are a microcosm of life; you're high, you're low, in the race, out of the race, crushing it, getting crushed, managing fears, rewriting stories.
”
”
Travis Macy (The Ultra Mindset)
“
The sole reason I work out like I do isn’t to prepare for and win ultra races. I don’t have an athletic motive at all. It’s to prepare my mind for life itself. Life will always be the most grueling endurance sport, and when you train hard, get uncomfortable, and callous your mind, you will become a more versatile competitor, trained to find a way forward no matter what.
”
”
David Goggins (Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds)
“
Strength is largely a neurologic quality while endurance is largely a metabolic quality. Restating this: Strength depends on the brain’s ability to recruit the greatest number of muscle fibers for a task. Endurance depends on the rate of metabolic turnover of ATP molecules. We use the modifier largely above because these two qualities overlap and are interdependent in endurance sports.
”
”
Steve House (Training for the Uphill Athlete: A Manual for Mountain Runners and Ski Mountaineers)
“
It is of course true that many modern combat sports are extremely demanding in terms of physical force, skill, and endurance. Indeed many athletes are much fitter and better trained than the vast majority of soldiers. However, all those various kinds of sport are based on artificial rules as to what is and is not permitted. Furthermore, and with the exception of fencing, a highly ritualized form of combat to which we shall return, even the most violent ones do not permit the players to use weapons. In their absence, most of those skills are too specialized to be of much military relevance.
”
”
Martin van Creveld (Wargames: From Gladiators to Gigabytes)
“
The white man comes, pale as the dawn, with a load of thought, with a slumbering intelligence as a fire raked up, knowing well what he knows, not guessing but calculating; strong in community, yielding obedience to authority; of experienced race; of wonderful, wonderful common sense; dull but capable, slow but persevering, severe but just, of little humor but genuine; a laboring man, despising game and sport; building a house that endures, a framed house. He buys the Indian's moccasins and baskets, then buys his hunting-grounds, and at length forgets where he is buried and plows up his bones.
”
”
Henry David Thoreau (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Writings of Henry D. Thoreau))
“
CrossFit firebreather eventually discovers: the chief competitive advantage in this sport is the ability to endure discomfort. The willingness to sacrifice comfort is what makes all the other gains possible.
”
”
J.C. Herz (Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness)
“
It was the end of the era of the amateur, a time when everyone had to be a bit of everything. You helped your neighbors build their homes, fight their fires, raise and butcher and preserve their own food. You knew how to repair a weapon, pull a tooth, hammer a horseshoe, and deliver a child. But industrialization fostered specialization—and it was fantastic. Trained pros were better than self-taught amateurs, and their expertise allowed them to demand and develop better tools for their crafts—tools that only they knew how to operate. Over time, a subtle cancer spread: where you have more experts, you create more bystanders. Professionals did all the fighting and fixing we used to handle ourselves; they even took over our fun, playing our sports while we sat back and watched.
”
”
Christopher McDougall (Natural Born Heroes: How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance)
“
I loved that sports gave women a reason to be unpretty, in the traditional sense. It made stamina, strength, endurance, and mental toughness attractive. Flushed cheeks were your makeup, muscles your accessory, and sweat your glitter. I fit in well in this fashion runway show.
”
”
Katie Ray (Don't Kiss the Messenger (Edgelake High School, #1))
“
But that's the thing about cancer. They call it the fight, as if the stronger ones win and the weaker ones lose, but that's not what cancer is at all.
Cancer isn't one of the players in the game. Cancer is the game.
It doesn't matter how much endurance you have. It doesn't matter how much you've practiced. Cancer is the be-all and end-all of the sport, and the only thing you can do is show up to the game with your jersey on. Because you never know... you might be forced to sit the bench for the entire game. You may not even be given the chance to compete.
”
”
Colleen Hoover (November 9)
“
I have never heard anyone profess indifference to a boat race. Why should you row a boat race? Why endure long months of pain in preparation of a fierce half hour, or even six minutes, that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all its costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph - or even for the glory of having nobly lost? Is life less than a boat race? If a man will give all the blood in his body to win the one, will he not spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?
”
”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
“
Competition perverts true fitness, Hébert believed. It tempts you to cheat; to overdevelop some talents while ignoring others; to keep tips for yourself that could be useful to everyone. It’s a short cut; all you have to do is beat the other guy and you’re done, but the Natural Method is a never-ending challenge for self-improvement. Besides, competitive sports focus on rivalry and class divisions. The Natural Method was all about collaboration; every teacher was a student, every student was a teacher, bringing fresh ideas and new challenges. Raise the bar, but help the next guy over it
”
”
Christopher McDougall (Natural Born Heroes: Mastering the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance)
“
Evie was writhing on the blanket, while Daisy stood over her with arms akimbo.
Hurrying to the pair, Annabelle asked Daisy in consternation, "What is it?"
"The embarrassment was too much for her to endure," Daisy said. "It sent her into fits."
Evie rolled on the blanket, a napkin concealing her face, while one exposed ear had turned the color of pickled beets. The more she tried to control her giggles, the worse they became, until she gasped frantically for air in between yelps. Somehow she managed to squeak out a few words. "What a s-s-smashing introduction to lawn sports!" And then she was snorting with more spasms of helpless laughter, while the other three stood over her.
Daisy threw Annabelle a significant glance. "Those," she informed her, "are conniptions.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Secrets of a Summer Night (Wallflowers, #1))
“
True, every runner wants to quit sometimes. By any definition, becoming a successful athlete requires conquering those psychological barriers, whether you’re sucking air during your first jog or gutting it out in the final four miles of a marathon, axiomatically the toughest. When you push beyond the marathon, new obstacles arise, and the necessary mental toughness comes from raising your pain threshold. All endurance sports are about continuing when it feels as if you have nothing left, when everything aches, when you feel done—but you’re not. You have to get beyond the numbers that, like certain birthdays for some people, just seem intrinsically daunting: fifty miles, one hundred miles, one thousand miles, two thousand miles, and random points in between. At such distances, the sport becomes every bit as much mental as physical.
”
”
Marshall Ulrich (Running on Empty)
“
I think the whole world has essentially been brought up not to be a girl. How do we bring up boys? What does it mean to be a boy? To be a boy really means not to be a girl. To be a man means not to be a girl. To be a woman means not to be a girl. To be strong means not to be a girl. To be a leader means not to be a girl. I actually think that being a girl is so powerful that we’ve had to train everyone not to be that.
”
”
Vanessa Runs (Daughters of Distance: Stories of Women in Endurance Sports)
“
People who think that queer life consists of sex without intimacy are usually seeing only a tiny part of the picture, and seeing it through homophobic stereotype. The most fleeting sexual encounter is, in its way intimate. And in the way many gay men and lesbians live, quite casual sexual relations can develop into powerful and enduring friendships. Friendships, in turn, can cross into sexual relations and back. Because gay social life is not as ritualized and institutionalized as straight life, each relation is an adventure in nearly un-charted territory—whether it is between two gay men, or two lesbians, or a gay man and a lesbian, or among three or more queers, or between gay men and the straight women whose commitment to queer culture brings them the punishment of the "fag hag" label. There are almost as many kinds of relationship as there are people in combination. Where there are -patterns, we learn them from other queers, not from our-parents or schools or the state. Between tricks and lovers and exes and friends and fuckbuddies and bar friends and bar friends' tricks and tricks' bar friends and gal pals and companions "in the life," queers have an astonishing range of intimacies. Most have no labels. Most receive no public recognition. Many of these relations are difficult because the rules have to be invented as we go along. Often desire and unease add to their intensity, and their unpredictability. They can be complex and bewildering, in a way that arouses fear among many gay people, and tremendous resistance and resentment from many straight people. Who among us would give them up?
Try standing at a party of queer friends and charting all the histories, sexual and nonsexual, among the people in the room. (In some circles this is a common party sport already.) You will realize that only a fine and rapidly shifting line separates sexual culture from many other relations of durability and care. The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. Straight culture has much to learn from it, and in many ways has already begun to learn from it. Queers should be insisting on teaching these lessons. Instead, the marriage issue, as currently framed, seems to be a way of denying recognition to these relations, of streamlining queer relations into the much less troubling division of couples from friends.
”
”
Michael Warner (The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life)
“
What I find interesting about rowing,” Dr. Mason was saying, “is that it’s always done backwards. It’s almost as if the sport itself is trying to teach us not to get ahead of ourselves.” He opened his car door. “Actually, when you think about it, rowing is almost exactly like raising kids. Both require patience, endurance, strength, and commitment. And neither allow us to see where we’re going—only where we’ve been. I find that very reassuring, don’t you?
”
”
Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry)
“
I had never been to the Amazon, my jungle experience had mostly come from Central America with some short trips to Borneo, but the Amazon undoubtedly had a mystique all of its own. Surely the trees would be much bigger, the wildlife had to be much richer and more diverse and the people would be that bit wilder and cut off from the outside world. It gave me butterflies to think of spending time in the Amazon. Not knowing the geography of the area in any detail, my dreams were restricted to what I did know. There was a ruddy great river that virtually crossed the whole continent from west to east, and…that was about it. I had heard of expeditions that had kayaked the entire river from source to sea – phenomenal endurance feats taking five-plus months – the problem was I was a rubbish kayaker. Sure, I’d done a bit on the canals in England as a Cub Scout but that cold, depressing experience had been enough to put me off for life. What a dull, miserable sport, instructed by overenthusiastic dickheads in stupid helmets.
”
”
Ed Stafford (Walking the Amazon: 860 Days. One Step at a Time)
“
The Christian race lasts a lifetime, with Christ Jesus as our goal, the prize that awaits us at the finish line in heaven. It can’t be run all-out as a sprint or no one would last the course. Though there was one race in the ancient games where the runners wore full armor, most of the time the ancient runners ran naked, stripping away anything that would slow them down. Obviously the writer of Hebrews was familiar with the ancient sport of running when he advised believers to run with endurance the race God set before them.
”
”
Various (Daily Wisdom for Women 2015 Devotional Collection - January (None))
“
Tennis is not a game. It's a sport and a puzzle, an endurance test. You do whatever you can to win. it has been my enemy and my friend, my nightmare and the solace to that nightmare, my wound and the salve for my wound. Ask anyone who has made a life in this game, who has been out on the clay before they were old enough to understand the consequences of a strange early talent. I know you want us to love this game —us loving it makes it more fun to watch. But we don't love it. And we don't hate it. It just is, and always has been.
”
”
Maria Sharapova (Unstoppable: My Life So Far)
“
What I find interesting about rowing,” Dr. Mason was saying, “is that it’s always done backwards. It’s almost as if the sport itself is trying to teach us not to get ahead of ourselves.” He opened his car door. “Actually, when you think about it, rowing is almost exactly like raising kids. Both require patience, endurance, strength, and commitment. And neither allow us to see where we’re going—only where we’ve been. I find that very reassuring, don’t you? Except for the flip-outs—of course. I could really do with fewer flip-outs.
”
”
Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry)
“
That's the thing about cancer. They call it the fight, as if the stronger ones win and the weaker ones lose, but that's not what cancer is at all. Cancer isn't one of the players in the game. Canser is the game. It doesn't matter how much endurance you have. It doesn't matter how much you've practiced. Cancer is the be-all and end-all of the sport, and the only thing you can do is show up to the game with your jersey on. Because you never know ... you might be forced to sit the bench the entire game. You may not even be given the chance to compete.
”
”
Colleen Hoover (November 9)
“
LOVE'S DIET To what a cumbersome unwieldiness And burdenous corpulence my love had grown, But that I did, to make it less, And keep it in proportion, Give it a diet, made it feed upon That which love worst endures, discretion. Above one sigh a day I allowed him not, Of which my fortune, and my faults had part; And if sometimes by stealth he got A she sigh from my mistress' heart, And thought to feast upon that, I let him see 'Twas neither very sound, nor meant to me. If he wrung from me a tear, I brined it so With scorn and shame, that him it nourished not; If he sucked hers, I let him know 'Twas not a tear which he had got; His drink was counterfeit, as was his meat; For eyes, which roll towards all, weep not, but sweat. Whatever he would dictate I writ that, But burnt her letters when she writ to me; And if that favour made him fat, I said, "If any title be Conveyed by this, ah! what doth it avail, To be the fortieth name in an entail?" Thus I reclaimed my buzzard love, to fly At what, and when, and how, and where I choose. Now negligent of sports I lie, And now, as other falconers use, I spring a mistress, swear, write, sigh, and weep; And the game killed, or lost, go talk or sleep.
”
”
John Donne (The Love Poems)
“
What I find interesting about rowing,” Dr. Mason was saying, “is that it’s always done backwards. It’s almost as if the sport itself is trying to teach us not to get ahead of ourselves.” He opened his car door. “Actually, when you think about it, rowing is almost exactly like raising kids. Both require patience, endurance, strength, and commitment. And neither allow us to see where we’re going—only where we’ve been. I find that very reassuring, don’t you? Except for the flip-outs—of course. I could really do with fewer flip-outs.” “You mean flips.” “Flip-outs,” he insisted, getting in his car. “Yesterday one of my kids hit the other with a shovel.
”
”
Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry)
“
Homer's Hymn to the Earth: Mother of All
O universal Mother, who dost keep
From everlasting thy foundations deep,
Eldest of things, Great Earth, I sing of thee!
All shapes that have their dwelling in the sea,
All things that fly, or on the ground divine
Live, move, and there are nourished—these are thine;
These from thy wealth thou dost sustain; from thee
Fair babes are born, and fruits on every tree
Hang ripe and large, revered Divinity!
The life of mortal men beneath thy sway
Is held; thy power both gives and takes away!
Happy are they whom thy mild favours nourish;
All things unstinted round them grow and flourish.
For them, endures the life-sustaining field
Its load of harvest, and their cattle yield
Large increase, and their house with wealth is filled.
Such honoured dwell in cities fair and free,
The homes of lovely women, prosperously;
Their sons exult in youth’s new budding gladness,
And their fresh daughters free from care or sadness,
With bloom-inwoven dance and happy song,
On the soft flowers the meadow-grass among,
Leap round them sporting--such delights by thee
Are given, rich Power, revered Divinity.
Mother of gods, thou Wife of starry Heaven,
Farewell! be thou propitious, and be given
A happy life for this brief melody,
Nor thou nor other songs shall unremembered be
”
”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
“
Homer's Hymn to the Earth: Mother of All
Published by Mrs. Shelley, "Poetical Works", 1839, 2nd edition; dated 1818.
O universal Mother, who dost keep
From everlasting thy foundations deep,
Eldest of things, Great Earth, I sing of thee!
All shapes that have their dwelling in the sea,
All things that fly, or on the ground divine
Live, move, and there are nourished—these are thine;
These from thy wealth thou dost sustain; from thee
Fair babes are born, and fruits on every tree
Hang ripe and large, revered Divinity!
The life of mortal men beneath thy sway
Is held; thy power both gives and takes away!
Happy are they whom thy mild favours nourish;
All things unstinted round them grow and flourish.
For them, endures the life-sustaining field
Its load of harvest, and their cattle yield
Large increase, and their house with wealth is filled.
Such honoured dwell in cities fair and free,
The homes of lovely women, prosperously;
Their sons exult in youth's new budding gladness,
And their fresh daughters free from care or sadness,
With bloom-inwoven dance and happy song,
On the soft flowers the meadow-grass among,
Leap round them sporting—such delights by thee
Are given, rich Power, revered Divinity.
Mother of gods, thou Wife of starry Heaven,
Farewell! be thou propitious, and be given
A happy life for this brief melody,
Nor thou nor other songs shall unremembered be.
”
”
Percy Bysshe Shelley (The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 1)
“
…we encourage you to trust your coping plan over the long haul. It is useful to acknowledge your small and daily successes, such as facing things you would typically avoid. There will likely be daily examples of slipups, too, but, similar to looking at a garden, we encourage you to focus on the flowers as much, if not more so, than you do the weeds.
As an aside, both of us have taken up bike riding in the past few years. In our appreciation of the multiday, grand stage races in Europe, such as the Tour de France, we have seen a metaphor that helps to illustrate the goal of coping with ADHD. These multiple stage bike races last from 3 or 4 days on up to 3 weeks. Different days are spent climbing steep mountain roads, traversing long flat stages of over a hundred miles that end in all out sprints to the finish line, and individual time trials where each rider goes out alone and covers the distance as quickly as possible, known as “the race of truth.” The grand champion of a multiday race, however, is the rider whose cumulative time for all the stages is the fastest. That is, if you ride well enough, day-in and day-out, you will be a champion even though you may not be the first rider to cross the finish line on any single day’s race.
Similarly, managing ADHD is an endurance sport. You need not cope perfectly all day, every day. The goal is to make progress, cope well enough, handle setbacks without giving up, and over time you will recognize your victory.
Just keep pedaling.
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J. Russell Ramsay (The Adult ADHD Tool Kit)
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Circuitry for self-confidence depends on a child’s ability to locate identity over observable behavior; this comes from growing up in a family that focuses more on what’s “inside” a child (enduring qualities, feelings, ideas) than what is “outside” (accomplishments, outcomes, labels). In regard to your child’s sports team, for example, inside stuff might be her effort in practice, her attitude when winning and losing, and her willingness to try new things; outside stuff might be her number of goals or home runs, or labels like “most valuable player.” When it comes to academics, inside stuff might be willingness to try a bonus math problem, spending time on studying, and showing enthusiasm about a subject; outside stuff might be a grade, a test score, or a label like “smartest kid in class.
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Becky Kennedy (Good Inside: A Practical Guide to Resilient Parenting Prioritizing Connection Over Correction)
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There is an inherent, humbling cruelty to learning how to run white water. In most other so-called "adrenaline" sports—skiing, surfing and rock climbing come to mind—one attains mastery, or the illusion of it, only after long apprenticeship, after enduring falls and tumbles, the fatigue of training previously unused muscles, the discipline of developing a new and initially awkward set of skills.
Running white water is fundamentally different. With a little luck one is immediately able to travel long distances, often at great speeds, with only a rudimentary command of the sport's essential skills and about as much physical stamina as it takes to ride a bicycle downhill. At the beginning, at least, white-water adrenaline comes cheap.
It's the river doing the work, of course, but like a teenager with a hot car, one forgets what the true power source is. Arrogance reigns. The river seems all smoke and mirrors, lots of bark (you hear it chortling away beneath you, crunching boulders), but not much bite. You think: Let's get on with it! Let's run this damn river!
And then maybe the raft hits a drop in the river— say, a short, hidden waterfall. Or maybe a wave reaches up and flicks the boat on its side as easily as a horse swatting flies with its tail. Maybe you're thrown suddenly into the center of the raft, and the floor bounces back and punts you overboard. Maybe you just fall right off the side of the raft so fast you don't realize what's happening.
It doesn't matter. The results are the same.
The world goes dark. The river— the word hardly does justice to the churning mess enveloping you— the river tumbles you like so much laundry. It punches the air from your lungs. You're helpless. Swimming is a joke. You know for a fact that you are drowning. For the first time you understand the strength of the insouciant monster that has swallowed you.
Maybe you travel a hundred feet before you surface (the current is moving that fast). And another hundred feet—just short of a truly fearsome plunge, one that will surely kill you— before you see the rescue lines. You're hauled to shore wearing a sheepish grin and a look in your eye that is equal parts confusion, respect, and raw fear.
That is River Lesson Number One. Everyone suffers it. And every time you get the least bit cocky, every time you think you have finally figured out what the river is all about, you suffer it all over again.
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Joe Kane (Running the Amazon)
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The magnitude of the satisfaction that a triathlete experiences upon crossing a finish line is directly proportional to the amount of suffering he has overcome to to get there. This reward knows no ability. Even the slowest of the slow can push themselves beyond existing limits and finish with tremendous satisfaction. But winning often demands and inspires the greatest suffering and thus confers the greatest sense of pride. Often, because of the nature of competition, it is precisely he who has the most guts who is the fastest and experiences the most intense fulfillment at the finish line.
Theoretically, then, the most deeply satisfying experience a triathlete could have in the sport (and among the best in life) would occur at the finish line of a race in which he has overcome as much suffering as he could possibly ever endure, and knows it.
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Matt Fitzgerald (Iron War: Dave Scott, Mark Allen, and the Greatest Race Ever Run)
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This kind of parenting was typical in much of Asia—and among Asian immigrant parents living in the United States. Contrary to the stereotype, it did not necessarily make children miserable. In fact, children raised in this way in the United States tended not only to do better in school but to actually enjoy reading and school more than their Caucasian peers enrolled in the same schools. While American parents gave their kids placemats with numbers on them and called it a day, Asian parents taught their children to add before they could read. They did it systematically and directly, say, from six-thirty to seven each night, with a workbook—not organically, the way many American parents preferred their children to learn math. The coach parent did not necessarily have to earn a lot of money or be highly educated. Nor did a coach parent have to be Asian, needless to say. The research showed that European-American parents who acted more like coaches tended to raise smarter kids, too. Parents who read to their children weekly or daily when they were young raised children who scored twenty-five points higher on PISA by the time they were fifteen years old. That was almost a full year of learning. More affluent parents were more likely to read to their children almost everywhere, but even among families within the same socioeconomic group, parents who read to their children tended to raise kids who scored fourteen points higher on PISA. By contrast, parents who regularly played with alphabet toys with their young children saw no such benefit. And at least one high-impact form of parental involvement did not actually involve kids or schools at all: If parents simply read for pleasure at home on their own, their children were more likely to enjoy reading, too. That pattern held fast across very different countries and different levels of family income. Kids could see what parents valued, and it mattered more than what parents said. Only four in ten parents in the PISA survey regularly read at home for enjoyment. What if they knew that this one change—which they might even vaguely enjoy—would help their children become better readers themselves? What if schools, instead of pleading with parents to donate time, muffins, or money, loaned books and magazines to parents and urged them to read on their own and talk about what they’d read in order to help their kids? The evidence suggested that every parent could do things that helped create strong readers and thinkers, once they knew what those things were. Parents could go too far with the drills and practice in academics, just as they could in sports, and many, many Korean parents did go too far. The opposite was also true. A coddled, moon bounce of a childhood could lead to young adults who had never experienced failure or developed self-control or endurance—experiences that mattered as much or more than academic skills. The evidence suggested that many American parents treated their children as if they were delicate flowers. In one Columbia University study, 85 percent of American parents surveyed said that they thought they needed to praise their children’s intelligence in order to assure them they were smart. However, the actual research on praise suggested the opposite was true. Praise that was vague, insincere, or excessive tended to discourage kids from working hard and trying new things. It had a toxic effect, the opposite of what parents intended. To work, praise had to be specific, authentic, and rare. Yet the same culture of self-esteem boosting extended to many U.S. classrooms.
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Amanda Ripley (The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way)
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Time management also involves energy management. Sometimes the rationalization for procrastination is wrapped up in the form of the statement “I’m not up to this,” which reflects the fact you feel tired, stressed, or some other uncomfortable state. Consequently, you conclude that you do not have the requisite energy for a task, which is likely combined with a distorted justification for putting it off (e.g., “I have to be at my best or else I will be unable to do it.”).
Similar to reframing time, it is helpful to respond to the “I’m not up to this” reaction by reframing energy. Thinking through the actual behavioral and energy requirements of a job challenges the initial and often distorted reasoning with a more realistic view. Remember, you only need “enough” energy to start the task. Consequently, being “too tired” to unload the dishwasher or put in a load of laundry can be reframed to see these tasks as requiring only a low level of energy and focus.
This sort of reframing can be used to address automatic thoughts about energy on tasks that require a little more get-up-and-go. For example, it is common for people to be on the fence about exercising because of the thought “I’m too tired to exercise.” That assumption can be redirected to consider the energy required for the smaller steps involved in the “exercise script” that serve as the “launch sequence” for getting to the gym (e.g., “Are you too tired to stand up and get your workout clothes? Carry them to the car?” etc.). You can also ask yourself if you have ever seen people at the gym who are slumped over the exercise machines because they ran out of energy from trying to exert themselves when “too tired.” Instead, you can draw on past experience that you will end up feeling better and more energized after exercise; in fact, you will sleep better, be more rested, and have the positive outcome of keeping up with your exercise plan. If nothing else, going through this process rather than giving into the impulse to avoid makes it more likely that you will make a reasoned decision rather than an impulsive one about the task.
A separate energy management issue relevant to keeping plans going is your ability to maintain energy (and thereby your effort) over longer courses of time. Managing ADHD is an endurance sport. It is said that good soccer players find their rest on the field in order to be able to play the full 90 minutes of a game. Similarly, you will have to manage your pace and exertion throughout the day. That is, the choreography of different tasks and obligations in your Daily Planner affects your energy. It is important to engage in self-care throughout your day, including adequate sleep, time for meals, and downtime and recreational activities in order to recharge your battery. Even when sequencing tasks at work, you can follow up a difficult task, such as working on a report, with more administrative tasks, such as responding to e-mails or phone calls that do not require as much mental energy or at least represent a shift to a different mode. Similarly, at home you may take care of various chores earlier in the evening and spend the remaining time relaxing.
A useful reminder is that there are ways to make some chores more tolerable, if not enjoyable, by linking them with preferred activities for which you have more motivation. Folding laundry while watching television, or doing yard work or household chores while listening to music on an iPod are examples of coupling obligations with pleasurable activities. Moreover, these pleasant experiences combined with task completion will likely be rewarding and energizing.
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J. Russell Ramsay (The Adult ADHD Tool Kit)
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The difference between sport climbing and the big-wall linkups that Alex specializes in is like the difference between sprinting and distance running. One relies primarily on power, the other on endurance. Alex is a long-distance thoroughbred, not a sprinter, and no matter how hard he trains, he will never be able to pull as hard as the world’s best sport climbers, guys like Chris Sharma, Adam Ondra, and Alex Megos; just like how Haile Gebrselassie will never beat Usain Bolt in the hundred-meter dash—and Bolt will never beat Gebrselassie in the 10,000 meters. The point is that while sport climbing and big walls are part of the same sport, they’re entirely different disciplines. One of the things that makes climbing unique, though, is that the different disciplines can be combined. The Dawn Wall, which combined powerful cutting-edge sport climbing with the drawn-out effort of a medieval siege, is a perfect example.
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Mark Synnott (The Impossible Climb: Alex Honnold, El Capitan, and the Climbing Life)
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Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations. And by this, in an especial manner, we acquire wisdom and knowledge, and see and hear, and know what are foul and what are fair, what are bad and what are good, what are sweet, and what unsavory; some we discriminate by habit, and some we perceive by their utility.
By this we distinguish objects of relish and disrelish, according to the seasons; and the same things do not always please us. And by the same organ we become mad and delirious, and fears and terrors
assail us, some by night, and some by day, and dreams and untimely wanderings, and cares that are not suitable, and ignorance of present circumstances, desuetude, and unskilfulness. All these things we endure from the brain, when it is not healthy, but is more hot, more cold, more moist, or more dry than natural, or when it suffers any other preternatural and unusual affection.
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Hippocrates (On the Sacred Disease (Illustrated))
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Before Chris passed away, I’d volunteered to coach Angel’s soccer team in our local recreational league. It was a commitment I vowed to keep. I was determined to show those little girls how to succeed on the soccer “pitch,” as the field is sometimes called.
I may have gone a little overboard. I mean, how many six-year-old girls have the misfortune of being coached by the wife of a SEAL?
Day One:
“We start by running!” I shouted enthusiastically. “Everyone run around the park. Let’s go.”
“The soccer field, Mrs. Kyle?” asked a player.
“No! The entire complex. Come on!”
I’m guessing it was maybe five or six times as far as they’d ever run before--or maybe ten or twenty--and a good deal farther than many teams with considerably older players ran. But the girls were good sports about it. We built endurance and worked on drills, and we had fun--you never knew when the coach might grab one the of the players and twirl her around enthusiastically for doing a good job.
“I’m taking goal,” I’d say when shooting practice wasn’t going well. “Anyone who can hurt me gets an extra piece of candy!”
I gave out a lot of candy that afternoon.
We were a young team and a little rough at first, but we got better as we went. It was fun to watch the transition many of the girls made over the length of the season--they not only got in better shape and learned to play soccer better, but they seemed more confident as well.
I will guarantee one thing: they slept pretty well the nights after practice.
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Taya Kyle (American Wife: Love, War, Faith, and Renewal)
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He carries the past around like a bottle of antacids in his pocket. You outlive your wife, then your colleagues and friends, then your accountant and building doorman. You no longer attend the opera, because the human bladder can only endure so much. Social engagements require strategy and hearing-aid calibrations. Every sports coat you own is too big because you continue to shrink, your shoulders like a rumor behind all that fabric. You are waiting to die without ever thinking about death itself. It's a face at the window, peering in. You live in three rooms of your twenty-room triplex, whole areas cordoned off like cholera wards. You live among the ruins of the past, carry them in your pockets, wishing you'd been decent and loving and talented and brave. Instead you were vain and selfish, capable of love but always giving less than everything you had. You held back. You hoarded. You lived among beautiful things. The paintings on your walls, the Dutch rivers and kitchens, the Flemish peasant frolics, they give off fumes and dull with age, but connect you to a bloodline of want, to shipbuilders and bankers who stared up at them as their own lives tapered off. Like trees, they have breathed in the air around them and now they exhales some of their previous owners' atoms and molecules. They could last for a thousand years, these paintings, and that buoys you as you drift off, a layer just above sleep. Skimming the pond, Rachel used to call it, or was that something you once said to her? You should turn everything off in the room, but you don't. You let the lamps burn all night.
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Dominic Smith (The Last Painting of Sara de Vos)
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No matter where you are on the pathway of your life, please don’t let the pain of an imperfect past hinder the glory of your fabulous future. You are so much more powerful than you may currently understand. Splendid victories—and outright blessings—are coming your way. And you’re exactly where you need to be to receive the growth necessary for you to lead the unusually productive, extremely prodigious and exceptionally influential life that you’ve earned through your harshest trials. Nothing is wrong at this moment, even if it feels like everything’s falling apart. If you sense your life’s a mess right now, this is simply because your fears are just a little stronger than your faith. With practice, you can turn down the volume of the voice of your scared self. And increase the tone of your most triumphant side. The truth is that every challenging event you’ve experienced, each toxic person that you’ve encountered and all the trials you’ve endured have been perfect preparation to make you into the person that you now are. You needed these lessons to activate the treasures, talents and powers that are now awakening within you. Nothing was an accident. Zero was a waste. You’re definitely exactly where you need to be to begin the life of your most supreme desires. One that can make you an empire-builder along with a world-changer. And perhaps even a history-maker.” “This all sounds easy but it’s a lot harder in reality,” shouted a man in a red baseball cap, seated in the fifth row. He sported a gray t-shirt and ripped jeans, the type you can buy torn at your local shopping mall. Though this outburst could have seemed disrespectful, the pitch of the participant’s voice and his body language displayed genuine admiration for The Spellbinder. “I agree with you, you wonderful human being,” responded The Spellbinder, his grace influencing all participants and his voice sounding somewhat stronger, as he stood up from his chair. “Ideas are worth nothing unless backed by application. The smallest of implementations is always worth more than the grandest of intentions. And if being an amazing person and developing a legendary life was easy, everyone would be doing it. Know what I mean?
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Robin Sharma (The 5AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life.)
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drink only enough to satisfy your thirst. Appropriate here is Tim Noakes' conclusion in his book Waterlogged: The Serious Problem of Overhydration in Endurance Sports “Your body will tell you what it needs if you just listen.
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Michael P. Ghiglieri
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The company even drew unlikely customers. From rural Arkansas, operating just five comically cheap-looking stores—a rounding error compared with the largest retailers—Sam Walton made his way to an IBM conference for retailers. While he shied away from investing anything in any emotional aspect of retailing, delivering the lowest prices meant mastering logistics and information. To one speaker at the conference, Abe Marks, modern retailing meant knowing exactly “how much merchandise is in the store? What’s selling and what’s not? What is to be ordered, marked down or replaced? . . . The more you turn your inventory, the less capital is required.” Altering his first impression, Marks found that Walton’s simpleton comportment masked his genius as a retailer, eventually calling him the “best utilizer of information that there’s ever been.” A little over two decades later, Sam Walton would become the richest man in America; he would attribute his competitive advantage to his investment in computing systems in his early days. The small-town merchant who expected that knowing his customers’ names or sponsoring the local Little League team would give him some enduring advantage simply didn’t understand the sport. American consumers, technocrats at heart, rewarded efficiency as reflected by the prices on the shelves, not the quaint sentiments of a friendly proprietor. To gain this efficiency, information systems were seen as vital.
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Bhu Srinivasan (Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism)
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PhD, identifies self-control as a foundational element of reaching success. Attaining a goal, at the most fundamental level, essentially requires doing, in a given moment, what you often don’t feel like doing, or feels like you are not capable of doing. That’s where training in self-control kicks in. When I have already run 60 miles and have 40 more to go, do I feel like running 40 more? I love running, but of course I don’t feel like running 40 more miles after running 60! No one does. However, I have reached the point where my self-control is such that, unless I’m suffering a serious physical injury that prevents me from taking a step, I know I’m not going to stop; I know I’m going to continue on for 40 miles, come hell or high water.
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Travis Macy (The Ultra Mindset: An Endurance Champion's 8 Core Principles for Success in Business, Sports, and Life)
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To put it into practical terms, when you’re doing something you don’t like, instead of thinking about how much it sucks, reappraise it. Say to yourself, “This is good mental training. . . . It will make me stronger, more resilient, and more prepared to take on other challenges in my life.
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Travis Macy (The Ultra Mindset: An Endurance Champion's 8 Core Principles for Success in Business, Sports, and Life)
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Pierre believed sports should be competitions among men and exist for no other aim than honor or glory or achievement. He believed athletics had the power to achieve something close to peace, taking his inspiration from the Olympic Truce of the ancient Greek games and an agreement that prevented the host country from being attacked while the Olympics were ongoing.
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Adin Dobkin (Sprinting Through No Man's Land: Endurance, Tragedy, and Rebirth in the 1919 Tour de France)
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Lifting didn't erase the burden of my trauma, but it reminded me again and again that I could endure hard things.
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Alyssa Ages (Secrets of Giants: A Journey to Uncover the True Meaning of Strength)
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That’s what makes you grow. That’s where the potential lies. If only nice things happen to us, we get soft. We have got to “die” a little every day to really live.
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Bertalan Thuroczy (Believe, Live, Run: A story about having faith)
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When in a state of flow while running, it feels as though the passing of times speeds up.
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Bertalan Thuroczy (Believe, Live, Run: A story about having faith)
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I fell into climbing, so to speak, a willy-nilly response to a crushing bout of depression that began in my mid-thirties. The disorder reduced my chronic low self-regard to a bottomless pit of despair and misery. I recoiled from myself and my life, and came very close to suicide. Then, salvation. On a family vacation in Colorado, I discovered the rigors and rewards of mountain climbing, and gradually came to see the sport as my avenue of escape. I found that a punishing workout regimen held back the darkness for hours each day. Blessed surcease. I also gained hard muscle and vastly improved my endurance, two novel sources of pride.
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Beck Weathers (Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest)
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This book asks quite a lot of you in your quest to be fit and fierce. Twelve minutes of exercise, though astoundingly short in terms of the benefits they provide, is still not trivial. You are swinging a heavy weight for dozens, even hundreds of times a day. There had better be a pretty good reason why. There is! The kettlebell swing, with its mix of cardiovascular effort and fat-burning, muscle-building, strength-training may well be the best single exercise! Your kettlebell swings reward you, per swing, and per minute: • You look better! Fat loss, muscle tuning, body shaping, booty toning and posture improvement benefit your appearance, just as they improve your endurance, strength and health. • Your body is reshaped rapidly and muscles strengthened by your swings. Flab on your arms is replaced by functional muscle. Flabby thighs become sleek. • Your training makes you smarter. Well, at least helps you think better. Your swings flood your brain with fresh, oxygenated blood and top it off with a dose of testosterone. • Your general physical abilities improve markedly. You are better able to move, to carry things, to pick up kids, to play sports, to make love, to respond to emergencies with strength and endurance. • Your swings help your posture, allowing you to stand tall. The posterior chain, so well worked with kettlebell swings, includes the key posture muscles. • Your training makes your butt look smaller! Actually your butt becomes shapelier, as the gluteal muscles in the buttocks are key lifters of the kettlebell. You strengthen and shape you entire posterior chain. This focused exercise lifts, firms, tightens and highlights these assets. Each swing makes your butt look better! • The kettlebell swing may be the most effective single exercise for your heart. Swinging the weight rapidly brings your heart into the training zone.
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Don Fitch (Get Fit, Get Fierce with Kettlebell Swings: Just 12 Minutes a Day to Lose Weight, Prevent Sitting Disease, Hone Your Body and Tone Your Booty!)
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The muscles can only perform to the degree that the mind is able to cope. Endurance sports are therefore a game of “mind over muscle.
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Matt Fitzgerald (How Bad Do You Want It?: Mastering the Psychology of Mind Over Muscle)
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To become the best athlete you can be, you need to become really good at coping with the characteristic forms of discomfort and stress that the endurance sports experience dishes out, beginning with perceived effort and extending to the many challenges that are secondary to it, such as fear of failure.
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Matt Fitzgerald (How Bad Do You Want It?: Mastering the Psychology of Mind Over Muscle)
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My own term for a highly developed overall coping capacity in endurance sports is mental fitness.
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Matt Fitzgerald (How Bad Do You Want It?: Mastering the Psychology of Mind Over Muscle)
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The Fremantle Football Club has needed me. But I have needed the Fremantle Football Club more - it owes me nothing at all. All the players and coaches who have represented the club, the staff, our sponsors and corporate supporters, our members and fans, and the families of the players - we have all endured. For me looking in the rear view mirror, it’s about celebrating us and our journey, not just one person.
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Matthew Pavlich (Purple Heart)
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But all of that silent, solitary time running, riding, or swimming—becoming comfortable with discomfort, persisting despite all of his biological impulses telling him to slow down or tap out—had remodeled his psyche. “Endurance sports gave me some understanding of what it was to push to deeper levels and find new layers within myself,” he told me. “When I stopped doing triathlons, I still had this sense of adventure. This need to explore those edges where I’d find a new, better part of myself.
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Michael Easter (The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self)
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successful athletes slipping seamlessly into careers in banking and finance owing to their grit and work ethic leaves countless former athletes adrift. After knowing no other life for years, many of the riders I know and respected – cyclists far better than me, with Olympic medals and World Championship titles to their name – have struggled to adjust to life after retiring, ending up homeless, sleeping in their cars, or with depression so severe they take their own lives. The work ethic and ability to endure on the bike rarely map as easily onto other pursuits as young athletes are made to believe, and often the demons that you were trying to exorcise through the sport catch up with you after you’re no longer racing.
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James Hibbard (The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels)
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You cannot change your height, the width of your hips, the length of your feet, or any of several other anthropometric variables affecting endurance performance that I have discussed in this chapter. You can’t change your genetic potential for leanness, either. But you can reduce your body-fat percentage (and thereby adjust your weight) to the level that is optimal for performance in your chosen endurance sport given your unchangeable genetic constraints.
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Matt Fitzgerald (Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance, 2nd Edition (The Racing Weight Series))
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The common methods of performance weight management work—they improve performance—and are therefore more or less required for sustained success in endurance sports. Dieting, in contrast, tends to sabotage performance, making sustained competitive success difficult or impossible.
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Matt Fitzgerald (Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance, 2nd Edition (The Racing Weight Series))
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Anticarb sentiment in the endurance sports community is an ideological spillover from the weight-loss diet culture.
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Matt Fitzgerald (Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance, 2nd Edition (The Racing Weight Series))
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The most successful football linebackers are massive because their job is either to be immovable (offensive linemen) or to move the immovable (defensive linemen). Tennis players typically have average builds because their sport requires a combination of qualities—quickness, power, leverage, balance, and stamina—that favors no extremes of size or shape. Endurance sports, of course, tend to favor two related characteristics: low body weight and lean body composition (or a low body-fat level). This is the case because endurance racing demands the ability to move economically so that a high work rate (or speed) can be sustained for a long time and a low body weight and lean body composition contribute to movement efficiency.
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Matt Fitzgerald (Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance, 2nd Edition (The Racing Weight Series))
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In short, this country has developed a ridiculous blind spot: the power and glorification of money. This is truly an affliction. It is holding us back as a nation, as a community. The true heroes of America are not the new Internet billionaires or the overpaid sports stars and movie actors or the wise guys who jack up their companies’ stocks. The true heroes of America are the men, women, and teenagers who go to work for a modest wage, fulfill their responsibilities to their families and friends, and are kind and generous to others—because that’s the right way to live.… The working people of the United States are the most important ingredient in the enduring American story. But
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Bill O'Reilly (Keep It Pithy: Useful Observations in a Tough World)
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We debated, and he offered praise. He always wanted to know how I came up with things. No one else has ever been so intensely interested in what I think. He never wanted me to be simply “pretty” or “a good girl.” His desire was for me to think, to develop internal endurance. He encouraged me in sports, challenged me to think. He helped develop my political sensibility and demanded that I respect people, cultures, and religions. I was never to assume that my truth is the only one that matters. In a sense, the way he brought me up laid the groundwork for how I’m able to see the world. Why
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Nina George (The Little Paris Bookshop)
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This coping skill is essentially a protective reaction against threats to the ego. Neuropsychologists have identified the ventral anterior cingulate cortex and the medial orbitofrontal cortex as two areas of the brain that “light up” when a person’s ego has been attacked and he responds not by cowering or playing deaf but instead by rallying in his own defense. This pattern of brain activity is the neurological substrate of bulletin boarding, and bulleting boarding is the salient coping skill of every endurance athlete who achieves greatness despite having the “wrong body” for his or her sport.
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Matt Fitzgerald (How Bad Do You Want It?: Mastering the Psychology of Mind over Muscle)
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Seeds of greatness
My question for you is this: Are you really alive? Are you passionate about your life or are you stuck in a rut, letting the pressures of life weigh you down, or taking for granted what you have? You weren’t created to simply exist, to endure, or to go through the motions; you were created to be really alive.
You have seeds of greatness on the inside. There’s something more for you to accomplish. The day you quit being excited about your future is the day you quit living. When you quit being passionate about your future, you go from living to merely existing.
In the natural there may not be anything for you to be excited about. When you look into the future, all you see is more of the same. You have to be strong and say, “I refuse to drag through this day with no passion. I am grateful that I’m alive. I’m grateful that I can breathe without pain. I’m grateful that I can hear my children playing. I am grateful that I was not hurt in that accident. I’m grateful that I have opportunity. I’m not just alive--I’m really alive.”
This is what Paul told Timothy in the Bible: “Stir up the gift, fan the flame.” When you stir up the passion, your faith will allow God to do amazing things. If you want to remain passionate, you cannot let what once was a miracle become ordinary. When you stared that new job you were so excited. You told all your friends. You knew it was God’s favor. Don’t lose the excitement just because you’ve had it for five years.
When you fell in love after meeting the person of your dreams, you were on cloud nine. You knew this match was the result of God’s goodness. Don’t take it for granted. Remember what God has done.
When your children were born, you cried for joy. Their births were miracles. You were so excited. Now you have teenagers and you’re saying, “God, why did you do this to me?”
Don’t let what was once a miracle become so common that it’s ordinary. Every time you see your children you should say, “Thank you, Lord, for the gift you’ve given me.”
We worked for three years to acquire the former Houston Rockets basketball arena for our church. During that time, it was still for sports and music events. When there wasn’t a ball game or concert, Victoria and I would come up late at night and walk around it. We’d pray and ask God for His favor.
When the city leaders approved our purchase, we celebrated. It was a dream come true. Nearly ten years later, it’s easy to get used to. Holding services in such a huge building could become common, ordinary, and routine because we’ve been doing it so long now. But I have to admit that every time I walk in the building, I can’t help but say, “God, thank you. You have done more than I can ask or think.
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Joel Osteen (You Can You Will: 8 Undeniable Qualities of a Winner)
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Because the only way to become really good at coping with the discomforts and stresses of endurance sports is to experience them.
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Matt Fitzgerald (How Bad Do You Want It?: Mastering the Psychology of Mind over Muscle)
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Building a startup is very much an endurance sport
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Max Levchin
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Sports were supposed to be a reflection of life, a life lesson, a test of endurance and strength, a great preparation for the real world.
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Harlan Coben (Home (Myron Bolitar, #11))
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The most successful endurance athletes over the age of 40 are so similar in personality it’s almost uncanny. What we see in all of these men and women is a limitless passion for sport and for the athletic lifestyle that stems from a positive, life-embracing personality (i.e., a non-neurotic, open, extraverted, conscientious style of coping with life). A
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Matt Fitzgerald (How Bad Do You Want It?: Mastering the Psychology of Mind over Muscle)
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In the American colonies, the first laborers were European indentured servants. When African laborers were forcibly brought to Virginia beginning in 1619, status was defined by wealth and religion, not by physical characteristics such as skin color. But this would change. Over time, physical difference mattered, and with the development of the transatlantic slave trade, landowners began replacing their temporary European laborers with enslaved Africans who were held in permanent bondage. Soon a new social structure emerged based primarily on skin color, with those of English ancestry at the top and African slaves and American Indians at the bottom. By 1776, when “all men are created equal” was written into the Declaration of Independence by a slaveholder named Thomas Jefferson, a democratic nation was born with a major contradiction about race at its core. As our new nation asserted its independence from European tyranny, blacks and American Indians were viewed as less than human and not deserving of the same liberties as whites. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the notion of race continued to shape life in the United States. The rise of “race science” supported the common belief that people who were not white were biologically inferior. The removal of Native Americans from their lands, legalized segregation, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II are legacies of where this thinking led. Today, science tells us that all humans share a common ancestry. And while there are differences among us, we’re also very much alike. Changing demographics in the United States and across the globe are resulting in new patterns of marriage, housing, education, employment, and new thinking about race. Despite these advances, the legacy of race continues to affect us in a variety of ways. Deeply held assumptions about race and enduring stereotypes make us think that gaps in wealth, health, housing, education, employment, or physical ability in sports are natural. And we fail to see the privileges that some have been granted and others denied because of skin color. This creation, called race, has fostered inequality and discrimination for centuries. It has influenced how we relate to each other as human beings. The American Anthropological Association has developed this exhibit to share the complicated story of race, to unravel fiction from fact, and to encourage meaningful discussions about race in schools, in the workplace, within families and communities. Consider how your view of a painting can change as you examine it more closely. We invite you to do the same with race. Examine and re-examine your thoughts and beliefs about race. 1
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Alan H. Goodman (Race: Are We So Different?)
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A fit athlete, as Glassman put it, is competent in all general physical skills, meaning that he or she not only has stamina, but is also strong, fast, agile, coordinated, and flexible. With this base, you can add in sport-specific training for anything from running a marathon to fighting in the cage.
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Brian Mackenzie (Power Speed ENDURANCE: A Skill-Based Approach to Endurance Training)
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And if it be deemed a great wickedness to contaminate any thing that is dedicated to God, he surely cannot be endured, who, with impure, or even with unprepared hands, will handle that very thing, which of all things is the most sacred on earth. It is therefore an audacity, closely allied to a sacrilege, rashly to turn Scripture in any way we please, and to indulge our fancies as in sport; which has been done by many in former times
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John Calvin (Institutes of the Christian Religion)
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Energy Drinks for Power Cyclist Cycling is a high intensity sport where huge amounts of calories are burned, muscle tissue broken up and a lot of water lost through sweat. To recover and regenerate energy and muscle tissue, your body undergoes a repair mechanism that depends on what you eat and drink. While eating proper foods keeps you healthy and builds your muscle stamina, taking energy drinks cannot be overemphasized as it increases energy and hydration needed for cycling and recovery. Energy drinks are formulated with ample supply of carbs and electrolytes ideal for maintaining high energy levels as well as replacing fluids lost during the rides.
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Neil Constantine (How to Build Cycling Endurance - Cycling training to make you ride faster and longer)
Travis Macy (The Ultra Mindset: An Endurance Champion's 8 Core Principles for Success in Business, Sports, and Life)
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Women cannot compete with men in physical prowess. And why in the name of all that is sane should we? Why not rather have our ambition go into sport for health, endurance, and the mere love of it?
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Michael Sokolove (Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women's Sports)
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When you look at other sports it’s just ludicrous, really. A soccer player’s touched; he collapses like he’s been shot. Tennis: A player cramps, there’s a break, he gets a massage. But the embarrassment, the humiliation LeMond had to endure. But I tell you one thing: He went up in my estimation for that. There was always a sense that LeMond was … classy but soft. Yeah, classy but soft. He was looked on as being a curiosity, as not being serious. Being in a French team, I tried to fit in by pretending I was French, following the French rules—no ice cream but a ton of cheese. He refused that, refused to compromise. But what a bike rider. What a fucking bike rider.
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Richard Moore (Slaying the Badger: Greg LeMond, Bernard Hinault, and the Greatest Tour de France)
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At the heart of the English character lay a fund of kindliness. Though in the mass rough and often cruel, and passionately addicted to barbarous sports like bull-baiting and cock-fighting, they led the world in humanitarian endeavour. It was an Englishman who in the 'seventies and 'eighties, at extreme risk and personal inconvenience, travelled 50,000 miles visiting the putrid, typhus-ridden jails of Europe; and it was Englishmen who at the close of the century first instituted organised opposition to cruelty to children and animals. But nothing so well illustrates the slow but persistent national impulse to mitigate inhumanity as the popular condemnation of the slave trade. This movement ran directly counter to the immediate material interests of the country; it none the less steadily gained strength from its inception by a handful of Quakers in the 'sixties until at the end of the century it was espoused by the Prime Minister himself and the overwhelming majority of thinking Englishmen.
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Arthur Bryant (The Years of Endurance, 1793-1802)
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While it pays to be light and lean in all endurance sports, there is thankfully no single, ideal body type for any specific endurance sport. The variety you see in the physiques of world-class cyclists, runners, and other endurance athletes can be surprising.
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Matt Fitzgerald (Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance, 2nd Edition (The Racing Weight Series))
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Life is an enduring race.
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Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
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In the book Run Like a Girl, Mina Samuels writes: We run like girls when we run for ourselves and inside ourselves. We run like girls when we tune out the negativity that might come our
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Vanessa Runs (Daughters of Distance: Stories of Women in Endurance Sports)