Marathon Runners Quotes

Most people who do a lot of exercise, particularly in the form of competitive athletics, have unneurotic, extraverted, optimistic personalities to begin with. (Marathon runners are exceptions to this.)

Sandwiched between their “once upon a time” and “happily ever after,” they all had to experience great adversity. Why must all experience sadness and tragedy? Why could we not simply live in bliss and peace, each day filled with wonder, joy, and love? The scriptures tell us there must be opposition in all things, for without it we could not discern the sweet from the bitter. 2 Would the marathon runner feel the triumph of finishing the race had she not felt the pain of the hours of pushing against her limits? Would the pianist feel the joy of mastering an intricate sonata without the painstaking hours of practice?

For every runner who tours the world running marathons, there are thousands who run to hear the leaves and listen to the rain, and look to the day when it is suddenly as easy as a bird in flight.

A novel takes the courage of a marathon runner, and as long as you have to run, you might as well be a winning marathon runner. Serendipity and blind faith faith in yourself won't hurt a thing. All the bastards in the world will snicker and sneer because they haven't the talent to zip up their flies by themselves. To hell with them, particularly the critics. Stand in there, son, no matter how badly you are battered and hurt.

You breathe nonstop, like a marathon runner, but it doesn't help.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you start to think, Man this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand any more is up to the runner himself. This pretty much sums up the most important aspect of marathon running.

Rachel didn’t know what she was having, a choice that Porter respected in other people but could never have handled herself, like being a marathon runner or going camping in the winter.

Remember, it’s the pace that kills, never the distance.

The next generation is like the last runner in a very long relay race. The race to end extreme poverty has been a marathon, with the starter gun fired in 1800. This next generation has the unique opportunity to complete the job: to pick up the baton, cross the line, and raise its hands in triumph. The project must be completed. And we should have a big party when we are done.

Showing up begins long before you stand at the start. Prove yourself an exception in a world where people talk more than act. Intent without follow-through is hollow. Disappoint yourself enough times and empty is how you feel. Make yourself proud. Fill yourself up. Show up.

The perfect Librarian is calm, cool, collected, intelligent, multilingual, a crack shot, a martial artist, an Olympic-level runner (at both the sprint and marathon), a good swimmer, an expert thief, and a genius con artist. They can steal a dozen books from a top-security strongbox in the morning, discuss literature all afternoon, have dinner with the cream of society in the evening, and then stay up until midnight dancing, before stealing some more interesting tomes at three a.m. That's what a perfect Librarian would do. In practice, most Librarians would rather spend their time reading a good book.

I saw many people who begun their marathon races lately, but they eventually came up as top winners. I believe that your "lateness" does not account for your "lastness". It's not too late for you to make a start... Begin it now! No further delays!

a runner can never see the finish line in the middle of a marathon,

Humans can tolerate considerable temporary dehydration providing that we rehydrate in a day or so. In fact, the best marathon runners drink only about 200 milliliters per hour during a race.

The runner need not break four minutes in the mile or four hours in the marathon. It is only necessary that he runs and runs and sometimes suffers. Then one day he will wake up and discover that somewhere along the way he has begun to see order and law and love and Truth that makes men free. It

The hardest part of doing anything new is finding the courage to decide to at least try.

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.

For toxicologists, “the dose makes the poison.” Any substance can be toxic in excess. Water, for instance, is lethal to humans in very high doses, and overhydration killed a runner in the 2002 Boston Marathon. But most people prefer to think of substances as either safe or dangerous, regardless of the dose. And we extend this thinking to exposure, in that we regard any exposure to chemicals, no matter how brief or limited, as harmful.

She eyed his gorgeous body, and raised a brow. “Doing a little flaunting of your own this morning, huh?” “In deference to your delicate sensibilities, I pulled on jeans. Isn’t that enough?” Enough for what, her peace of mind? Ha. Being around Trace, especially with him like this, half-naked, sent her heart racing like a marathon runner’s. “Maybe it would be,” Priss admitted, “if you don’t look so good.” The compliment sent his right eyebrow arching high. “Oh, come on, Trace. You know what you look like.” She visually devoured him again, more blatantly this time, and noticed a rise behind the fly of his jeans. For her? Well-well-well. Flattering.

In business, what's required for short term profit and what's required for long term resilience are very often at a juxtaposition. I used to run track and field and any track runner will tell you that winning a 100 meter race requires a completely different skill set than winning a marathon. And the same skills that may win you the 100 meter race may infact cause you to lose a marathon. And the skills that may win you a marathon may cause you to lose a 100 meter race. It's not really about balance. But it's about management asking the question what race is this business in at this moment and what skills are required to win this exact race right now. And then it's about asking that question over and over and over again all of the time with every business that the company is engaged in.

Instead of saying "I can’t do that," I want you to start saying "I can’t do that, yet!

Marathon runners, by default, must have resilient minds.

If I waited to be in the mood to write, I’d barely have a chapbook of material to my name. Who would ever be in the mood to write? Do marathon runners get in the mood to run? Do teachers wake up with the urge to lecture? I don’t know, but I doubt it. My guess is that it’s the very act that is generative. The doing of the thing that makes possible the desire for it.

My body is sore. I’m not very good at the sport called Sleeping. Like a waddling duck is to a marathon runner, so I am to a kitten. I need to practice more, maybe multiple times a day.

The New York City Marathon was like a citywide block party that happened the first Sunday of every November. It was for serious runners who raced to win money, but also for people who did it for fun. The Vanderbeekers loved watching the marathon every year and cheering on the runners. Because Harlem was located near the end of the course, many of the runners were exhausted by the time they ran past the Vanderbeekers and had leg cramps and needed encouragement.

They moved with a minimum of effort and noise, and knew how to sit, walk and run in the most agile and efficient manner. Varied and constant use of their bodies made them as fit as marathon runners. They had physical dexterity that people today are unable to achieve even after years of practising yoga or t’ai chi.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit. — Aristotle

Small steps add up to complete big journeys.

Finish: Even if you run a slower than expected time, you succeed in any marathon when you finish.

Trent Stellingwerff, a Canadian exercise physiologist and coach, who administers carb-fasted training with elite runners, including 2:10 marathoner Reed Coolsaet.

The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer,

There is a tremendous amount of farting in prison.

RACING IS like graduation day. It’s the opportunity to put all your hard work toward giving 100 percent, physically and mentally. Like a lot of runners, I like to train, but I love to race.

Everything that came before had to happen for us to be the person we are now. And the greatest moments of clarity come when we look back and we realise that it was all necessary and all beautiful.

It’s like when runners collapse at the end of a marathon. Their exhaustion makes sense if you’ve seen the race. But with depression, it might not be evident from the outside how much you’ve endured up till the moment of collapse. You might not even realize it yourself. It takes miles of running hard to get to the point where your body completely shuts down. Many of us have been running hard for years, pushing ourselves to our very limit. We’ve kept calm and carried on, and now we just can’t anymore. Really, it’s miraculous that we’ve made it this far considering all we’ve been carrying.

The goal is not to read a book, the goal is to become a reader. The goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner. The goal is not to learn an instrument, the goal is to become a musician.

The marathon is less a physical event than a spiritual encounter. In infinite wisdom, God built into us a 32-km racing limit, a limit imposed by inadequate sources of the marathoner's prime racing fuel - carbohydrates. But we, in our human wisdom, decreed that the standard marathon be raced over 42 km. So it is in that physical no-man's-land, which begins after the 32-km mark, that the irresistible appeal of the marathon lies. It is at that stage, as the limits to human running endurance are approached, that the marathon ceases to be a physical event. It is there that you, the runner, discover the basis for the ancient proverb: "When you have gone so far that you cannot manage one more step, then you have gone just half the distance that you are capable of." It is there that you learn something about yourself and your view of life." Marathon runners have termed it the wall. (Chapter 10)

Pekin ducks would be better runners if they had three legs, like a piano, and they jogged like streaming music. Together we'd compete in marathons like one guy sitting on a bench drinking an energy drink and feeling powerful.

Albert Mummery, that eminent alpinist, described being in the mountains in this way: ‘Above, in the clear air and searching sunlight, we are afoot with the quiet gods, and men can know each other and themselves for what they are.

Imagine that a career is like a marathon—a long, grueling, and ultimately rewarding endeavor. Now imagine a marathon where both men and women arrive at the starting line equally fit and trained. The gun goes off. The men and women run side by side. The male marathoners are routinely cheered on: “Lookin’ strong! On your way!” But the female runners hear a different message. “You know you don’t have to do this!” the crowd shouts. Or “Good start—but you probably won’t want to finish.” The farther the marathoners run, the louder the cries grow for the men: “Keep going! You’ve got this!” But the women hear more and more doubts about their efforts. External voices, and often their own internal voice, repeatedly question their decision to keep running. The voices can even grow hostile. As the women struggle to endure the rigors of the race, spectators shout, “Why are you running when your children need you at home?

As a child I had been taken to see Dr Bradshaw on countless occasions; it was in his surgery that Billy had first discovered Lego. As I was growing up, I also saw Dr Robinson, the marathon runner. Now that I was living back at home, he was again my GP. When Mother bravely told him I was undergoing treatment for MPD/DID as a result of childhood sexual abuse, he buried his head in hands and wept. Child abuse will always re-emerge, no matter how many years go by. We read of cases of people who have come forward after thirty or forty years to say they were abused as children in care homes by wardens, schoolteachers, neighbours, fathers, priests. The Catholic Church in the United States in the last decade has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for 'acts of sodomy and depravity towards children', to quote one information-exchange web-site. Why do these ageing people make the abuse public so late in their lives? To seek attention? No, it's because deep down there is a wound they need to bring out into the clean air before it can heal. Many clinicians miss signs of abuse in children because they, as decent people, do not want to find evidence of what Dr Ross suggests is 'a sick society that has grown sicker, and the abuse of children more bizarre'. (Note: this was written in the UK many years before the revelations of Jimmy Savile's widespread abuse, which included some ritual abuse)

We either don’t run, or if we do then running has become an ‘exercise’, something that either we are told to do, or we tell ourselves to do. Something that is measured in terms of value and benefit, rather than being an expression of feeling.

Exhausted, many of the blind had sat down on the ground, others, weaker still, simply collapsed into a heap, some had fainted, it is possible that the cool night air will restore consciousness, but we can be certain that when it is time to break camp, some of these unfortunates will not get up, they have resisted until now, they are like that marathon runner who dropped dead three metres from the finish line, when all is said and done, what is clear is that all lives end before their time.

Running has often been the tool that I use as a way to explore, to learn, to live. It takes me to a place of balance – physical, mental, emotional. Running or not is irrelevant. It is the finding something that lets us delve deeper into our own story that matters.

Hunter S. Thompson said: ‘Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow!” What a Ride!

I still sometimes feel like I’m not really in the runners club. I’ll see someone wearing a marathon shirt and, even though I have also finished a marathon, a tiny voice inside will say, Yeah, but you only did one. And you walked at times. And it took you longer than Oprah to finish, so let’s not get carried away.

We runners pride ourselves on our perseverance. We see things through despite pain and fatigue. Usually sticking it out is the right choice—those negative feelings are almost always temporary sensations along the road to meeting our goals. Getting past those bad patches makes our accomplishments that much sweeter.

The act of running is simple, one foot in front of the other. The art of becoming a runner is achieved through a new mindset and commitment to change, especially if it’s new to you. It’s tough, challenging, painful, sometimes lonely, regularly uncomfortable and often excruciating…but the rewards are second to none.

The week before the marathon, sleep well. If normally you “get by” with five hours but require seven, make sure you get seven every night. The sleep you get the week leading up to the marathon is more important than the night before. The night before, you probably won’t sleep well due to anxiety, excitement and anticipation.

One way you can practice excellent posture is to use “power poses.” Raising your hands overhead with clenched fists such as a marathon runner might do after winning a race is a great one to try - spread your feet out to shoulder-length distance apart from one another, lift your chin, put a smile on your face, and raise your hands overhead. Now hold this for two full minutes. According to research, this gives you a measurable testosterone boost while decreasing levels of stress hormones in your blood stream.   Once you’re done holding the pose, you will naturally maintain a more confident attitude and better posture for a good twenty or thirty minutes afterwards.

The Existentially Preoccupied Long Distance Runner Sometimes I like to run so hard and for so long with each mile I can feel the pain of my own awareness, my own heightened consciousness of what ails me, the ills of the world, the limitations of our existence, the losses we must endure, the superficial interactions. Sometimes I like to run so hard and for so long that I can feel all of these feelings seep out of the pours of my own skin, the sweat cleansing my very being, my awareness of beauty heightened, the experience of joy possible, each mile, each minute, ridding me of these feelings, washing away the illusions, showing me the truth. Sometimes I like to run so hard and for so long… until finally I feel free… until finally I AM free…

The turmoil of emotion that permeates my every day – the doubts, the fears, the hopes, the apprehensions, the joy – is held in suspension. There is a quiet within my movement. I think. But my thoughts are not my master. For the moment I am simply running. Identity and purpose are irrelevant. To be running is enough. Because if I am running then I am alive. And to be alive is everything.

As Carl Sagan said: ‘We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.’2 Racing and the training it demands force me to ask myself questions. To find the time, the discipline and the motivation to train I have to decide what among the myriad of obligations of daily life is most important to me. It cultivates self-awareness, I start to become more mindful.

As most students of antiquity know, the modern marathon takes its name from the name of a famous battle that the Athenians won over the Persians in 490 B.C. Pheidippides, a Greek soldier and champion runner, volunteered to run the 25 miles from Marathon to Athens to spread the news of the victory. Upon arriving, Pheidippides is reported to have gasped "Rejoice, we conquer!" and then promptly died on the spot.

It is necessary to make this point in answer to the `iatrogenic' theory that the unveiling of repressed memories in MPD sufferers, paranoids and schizophrenics can be created in analysis; a fabrication of the doctor—patient relationship. According to Dr Ross, this theory, a sort of psychiatric ping-pong 'has never been stated in print in a complete and clearly argued way'. My case endorses Dr Ross's assertions. My memories were coming back to me in fragments and flashbacks long before I began therapy. Indications of that abuse, ritual or otherwise, can be found in my medical records and in notebooks and poems dating back before Adele Armstrong and Jo Lewin entered my life. There have been a number of cases in recent years where the police have charged groups of people with subjecting children to so-called satanic or ritual abuse in paedophile rings. Few cases result in a conviction. But that is not proof that the abuse didn't take place, and the police must have been very certain of the evidence to have brought the cases to court in the first place. The abuse happens. I know it happens. Girls in psychiatric units don't always talk to the shrinks, but they need to talk and they talk to each other. As a child I had been taken to see Dr Bradshaw on countless occasions; it was in his surgery that Billy had first discovered Lego. As I was growing up, I also saw Dr Robinson, the marathon runner. Now that I was living back at home, he was again my GP. When Mother bravely told him I was undergoing treatment for MPD/DID as a result of childhood sexual abuse, he buried his head in hands and wept. (Alice refers to her constant infections as a child, which were never recognised as caused by sexual abuse)

NATO Special Forces put a lot of emphasis on endurance in selection and training. They have guys running fifty miles carrying everything including the kitchen sink. They keep them awake and hiking over appalling terrain for a week at a time. Therefore NATO elite troops tended to be small whippy guys, built like marathon runners. But this Bulgarian was huge. He was at least as big as me. Maybe even bigger. Maybe six-six, maybe two-fifty. He had a shaved head. He had a big square face that would be somewhere between brutally plain and reasonably good-looking depending on the light. At that point the fluorescent tube on the ceiling of his cell wasn’t doing him any favors. He looked tired. He had piercing eyes set deep and close together in hooded sockets. He was a few years older than me, somewhere in his early thirties. He had huge hands. He was wearing brand-new woodland BDUs, no name, no rank, no unit.

IF YOU’RE like me, you appreciate how running improves your life. You like how you feel while you’re running and after a run. You like being healthier and more in control of your destiny. You like the camaraderie and the time alone. You like being outside enjoying nature. You like pushing yourself and the satisfaction that comes from working toward a goal. You like how clear-cut it is, how you get out of it what you put into it. You like that you get to do it on your terms, as casually or seriously as you want. You simply like telling yourself, “I’m a runner.

ONE OF the biggest differences between the training of world-class runners and that of recreational runners is how slowly we elites sometimes run. Let me explain. Let’s say it’s the day after a hard workout. A typical recovery run for me is 10 miles in 65 minutes. A 10-miler at an average of 6:30 per mile might sound fast, but consider it in perspective. That’s almost 2 minutes per mile slower than I can run for a half-marathon and more than 90 seconds per mile slower than my marathon race pace. For someone who runs a 3:30 marathon, which is about 8 minutes per mile, that would be like averaging a 9:30 pace on a recovery day.

Marathon In 490 B.C., a Greek messenger named Pheidippides ran twenty-six miles, from Marathon to Athens, to bring the senate news of a battle. He died from exhaustion, but his memory lives on thanks to the “marathon,” a twenty-six-mile footrace named in his honor. I thought it would be neat to bring Pheidippides to a modern-day marathon and talk to him about his awesome legacy.   ME: So, Pheidippides: What was it like to run the first “marathon”? PHEIDIPPIDES: It was the worst experience of my life. ME: How did it come about? PHEIDIPPIDES: My general gave the order. I begged him, “Please, don’t make me do this.” But he hardened his heart and told me, “You must.” And so I ran the distance, and it caused my death. ME: How did you feel when you finally reached your destination? PHEIDIPPIDES: I was already on the brink of death when I entered the senate hall. I could actually feel my life slipping away. So I recited my simple message, and then, with my final breath, I prayed to the gods that no human being, be he Greek or Persian, would ever again have to experience so horrible an ordeal. ME: Hey, here come the runners! Wooooh! PHEIDIPPIDES: Who are these people? Where are they going? ME: From one end of New York to the other. It’s a twenty-six-mile distance. Sound familiar? PHEIDIPPIDES: What message do they carry…and to whom? ME: Oh, they’re not messengers. PHEIDIPPIDES: But then…who has forced them to do this? ME: No one. It’s like, you know, a way of testing yourself. PHEIDIPPIDES: But surely, a general or king has said to them, “You must do this. Do this or you will be killed.” ME: No, they just signed up. Hey, look at that old guy with the beard! Pretty inspiring, huh? Still shuffling around after all these years. PHEIDIPPIDES: We must rescue that man. We must save his life. ME: Oh, he knows what he’s doing. He probably runs this thing every year. PHEIDIPPIDES: Is he…under a curse? ME: No.

The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history. There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging.5 Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker. Foragers mastered not only the surrounding world of animals, plants and objects, but also the internal world of their own bodies and senses. They listened to the slightest movement in the grass to learn whether a snake might be lurking there. They carefully observed the foliage of trees in order to discover fruits, beehives and bird nests. They moved with a minimum of effort and noise, and knew how to sit, walk and run in the most agile and efficient manner. Varied and constant use of their bodies made them as fit as marathon runners. They had physical dexterity that people today are unable to achieve even after years of practising yoga or t’ai chi.

We all have one. It is that run. Its physical location may change as we move house, region, country, continent. But it is the run that is always with us. It is the run that we can trust ourselves to. It is the run that is waiting to enfold us back again after injury, absence or discouragement. It is where we go in the cool of the early morning, in the heat of the day, in the fading light of a setting sun. It is a place we go to in all seasons, observing and feeling the changes, until the rhythm of the earth becomes our own, a comforting reminder of the impermanence of all things. It is where we go to seek solace, to seek challenge. It is where we go when we need to push, to hold back. It is where we go when we need to find a fragile peace.

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.

The Neanderthals had it tougher; their long spears and canyon ambushes were useless against the fleet prairie creatures, and the big game they preferred was retreating deeper into the dwindling forests. Well, why didn’t they just adopt the hunting strategy of the Running Men? They were smart and certainly strong enough, but that was the problem; they were too strong. Once temperatures climb above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, a few extra pounds of body weight make a huge difference—so much so that to maintain heat balance, a 160-pound runner would lose nearly three minutes per mile in a marathon against a one hundred-pound runner. In a two-hour pursuit of a deer, the Running Men would leave the Neanderthal competition more than ten miles behind. Smothered in muscle, the Neanderthals followed the mastodons into the dying forest, and oblivion. The new world was made for runners, and running just wasn’t their thing. Privately,

RUNNING THE RACE The marathon is one of the most strenuous athletic events in sport. The Boston Marathon attracts the best runners in the world. The winner is automatically placed among the great athletes of our time. In the spring of 1980, Rosie Ruiz was the first woman to cross the finish line. She had the laurel wreath placed on her head in a blaze of lights and cheering. She was completely unknown in the world of running. An incredible feat! Her first race a victory in the prestigious Boston Marathon! Then someone noticed her legs—loose flesh, cellulite. Questions were asked. No one had seen her along the 26.2-mile course. The truth came out: she had jumped into the race during the last mile. There was immediate and widespread interest in Rosie. Why would she do that when it was certain that she would be found out? Athletic performance cannot be faked. But she never admitted her fraud. She repeatedly said that she would run another marathon to validate her ability. Somehow she never did. People interviewed her, searching for a clue to her personality. One interviewer concluded that she really believed that she had run the complete Boston Marathon and won. She was analyzed as a sociopath. She lied convincingly and naturally with no sense of conscience, no sense of reality in terms of right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable behavior. She appeared bright, normal and intelligent. But there was no moral sense to give coherence to her social actions. In reading about Rosie I thought of all the people I know who want to get in on the finish but who cleverly arrange not to run the race. They appear in church on Sunday wreathed in smiles, entering into the celebration, but there is no personal life that leads up to it or out from it. Occasionally they engage in spectacular acts of love and compassion in public. We are impressed, but surprised, for they were never known to do that before.

Imagine that a career is like a marathon—a long, grueling, and ultimately rewarding endeavor. Now imagine a marathon where both men and women arrive at the starting line equally fit and trained. The gun goes off. The men and women run side by side. The male marathoners are routinely cheered on: “Lookin’ strong! On your way!” But the female runners hear a different message. “You know you don’t have to do this!” the crowd shouts. Or “Good start—but you probably won’t want to finish.” The farther the marathoners run, the louder the cries grow for the men: “Keep going! You’ve got this!” But the women hear more and more doubts about their efforts. External voices, and often their own internal voice, repeatedly question their decision to keep running. The voices can even grow hostile. As the women struggle to endure the rigors of the race, spectators shout, “Why are you running when your children need you at home?” Back in 1997, Debi Hemmeter was a rising

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With the introduction of radio, we now had a superfast. convenient, and wireless way of communicating over long distances. Historically, the lack of a fast and reliable communication system was one of the great obstacles to the march of history. (In 490 BCE, after the Battle of Marathon between the Greeks and the Persians, a poor runner was ordered to spread the news of the Greek victory as fast as he could. Bravely, he ran 26 miles to Athens after previously running 147 miles to Sparta, and then, according to legend, dropped dead of sheer exhaustion. His heroism, in the age before telecommunication, is now celebrated in the modern marathon.) Today, we take for granted that we can send messages and information effortlessly across the globe, utilizing the fact that energy can be transformed in many ways. For example, when speaking on a cell phone, the energy of the sound of your voice converts to mechanical energy in a vibrating diaphragm. The diaphragm is attached to a magnet that relies on the interchangeability of electricity and magnetism to create an electrical impulse, the kind that can be transported and read by a computer. This electrical impulse is then translated into electromagnetic waves that are picked up by a nearby microwave tower. There, the message is amplified and sent across the globe. But Maxwell's equations not only gave us nearly instantaneous communication via radio, cell phone, and fiber-optic cables, they also opened up the entire electromagnetic spectrum, of which visible light and radio were just two members. In the 166os, Newton had shown that white light, when sent through a prism, can be broken up into the colors of the rainbow. In 1800, William Herschel had asked himself a simple question: What lies beyond the colors of the rainbow, which extend from red to violet? He took a prism, which created a rainbow in his lab, and placed a thermometer below the color red, where there was no color at all. Much to his surprise, the temperature of this blank area began to rise. In other words, there was a "color" below red that was invisible to the naked eye but contained energy. It was called infrared light. Today, we realize that there is an entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, most of which is invisible, and each has a distinct wavelength. The wavelength of radio and TV, for example, is longer than that of visible light. The wavelength of the colors of the rainbow, in turn, is longer than that of ultraviolet and X-rays. This also meant that the reality we see all around us is only the tiniest sliver of the complete EM spectrum, the smallest approximation of a much larger universe

Panting like a marathon runner at mile twenty, overheated bloodhound, steam engine crawling up the Continental Divide.

American History from Rutgers University and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil. He lives in Columbia County, NY, with his wife and two children, who have perfected the art of reimagining every remote control as an iPhone and every Etch-a-Sketch as an iPad. An avid distance runner, Noah has completed four marathons. He actively

Every Saturday, heat or cold, rain or shine, Milly would see Avery running up their road, her long blond ponytail swishing in time with her legs, just as the sun was making gemstones out of the fields and the hills and the bales of hay scattered across the landscape. Twiss would still be snoring away upstairs. Years of sleep remedies had failed to subdue her; she still slept like a wild animal and woke like one, too. On warm mornings, Milly would take her cup of tea out to the porch to watch Avery run by. Though she'd never been a runner herself- she didn't like the sensation of breathlessness, or the hard thunk of her heart- she'd loved to watch Twiss run. And Avery was an even better runner than Twiss had been, and certainly more graceful. She'd run first on the Spring Green high school team and then on the university team and now was training to run the marathon in the Olympic trials. In an interview, when a reporter from the 'Gazette' asked her why she ran, Avery said, "Why does anybody do anything?" which had made Milly like Avery even more. Each Saturday morning, after she passed the driveway, Avery would pick up speed in order to crest the upcoming hills. Sometimes she ran with a yellow music player and matching headphones, but most of the time, she ran without them. "Something comes in and something goes out," Avery had added in the interview, as if she'd been playing at being coy but couldn't really play when it came to running. "I'd keep running forever if my legs would let me." "Tell me about the routes you run in Spring Green," the reporter had said. "My favorite is my Saturday route," Avery said. "There's this little purple meadow I pass on my way up into the hills. When I was little, my grandpa used to say it was enchanted. He said if you walked through it, you'd never be the same person again." "Where did he hear the story?" the reporter asked. "I guess he used to know the people who lived in that house," Avery said. "The bird sisters?" the reporter said. "All I know is, when I pass that meadow, suddenly I can run faster," Avery said. "Are you superstitious?" "I visualize the meadow during all of my races, if that's what you mean." "Have you ever walked through it?" "I believe in it too much," Avery said. "Can you be more specific?" the reporter asked. "No," Avery said.

The real mutants are the runners who don’t get injured. Up to eight out of every ten runners are hurt every year. It doesn’t matter if you’re heavy or thin, speedy or slow, a marathon champ or a weekend huffer, you’re just as likely as the other guy to savage your knees, shins, hamstrings, hips, or heels.

But there exist other, different, methods of infolding-obliquity, compression, and the Seven Types of Ambiguity-a modest estimate of Empson's. The later Joyce, for instance, makes one realize why the German word for writing poetry is 'dichten'- to condense (certainly more poetical than 'composing', i.e. 'putting together'; but perhaps less poetical than the Hungarian kolteni-to hatch). Freud actually believed that to condense or compress several meanings or allusions into a word or phrase was the essence of poetry. It is certainly an essential ingredient with Joyce; almost every word in the great monologues in Finnegans Wake is overcharged with allusions and implications. To revert to an earlier metaphor, economy demands that the stepping stones of the narrative should be spaced wide enough apart to require a significant effort from the reader; Joyce makes him feel like a runner in a marathon race with hurdles every other step and aggravated by a mile-long row of hieroglyphs which he must decipher. Joyce would perhaps be the perfect writer-of the perfect reader existed.

The world’s greatest footrace,” Runner’s World’s Amby Burfoot called it in 2007. “The Boston Marathon, the Super Bowl, and the Fourth of July all rolled into one, on acid,” says one of the 176 Americans running in the 2010 event. (Apparently that quote has legs; other variations of it making the rounds involve Disney World, the Tour de France, and steroids.) To Yasso it is “the one race that still haunts my dreams.” It was 1982 when someone in the Boston Marathon—he can’t remember who—told him that Comrades tested the human spirit in ways that no other race in the world did.

But I never did much running again until I signed up to do an ultra-marathon when I was on Blue Peter in 2008. 78 miles in 24 hours. At the time I wasn’t really running at all. I had never done a marathon, but I think that was good, because I didn’t realise how hard it would be to do three.

There’s never been a case of a runner dying of dehydration on a marathon course, but since 1993, at least five marathoners have died from hyponatremia they developed during a race.

When you run the marathon, you run against the distance, not against the other runners and not against the time.

For every runner who hits the wall because of his or her failure to consume enough carbohydrate during the race, there are several who hit the wall because of their failure to consume enough carbs in their everyday training diet. To

Any athlete who experienced race-level effort completely out of context would instantly regain full respect for its awfulness. If a runner were to suddenly experience the same level of effort she felt during the last mile of her hardest marathon while climbing a flight of steps at home, for example, she would probably fall to the floor and call for help, believing she was dying.

As I prepare for my marathon qualifier, I continue to run on Wednesdays with the regular group. We continue to navigate a path near Shorter’s house. His name still comes up frequently, as it has since I arrived in town. We’ll be running along the foothills or perhaps finishing up a workout back atop Mapleton Hill. Someone will say they saw Shorter at the liquor store and he was as warm and friendly as can be. Someone else will say he saw Shorter somewhere else, perhaps at McGuckin Hardware, and Frank couldn’t have been more of a jerk. Before I met with him, I’d come to see him the way many in Boulder see him: mysterious and difficult, a seemingly selfish man on a mockable crusade to win a gold medal to match the gold medal he already has. I’d grown certain that he was a miserable soul locked away in his house, the lonely long-distance runner stewing in demons of his own design.

When we chase a positive outcome, on the other hand, the closer we get, the more motivated we are, and the harder we work. To see this phenomenon in action, go stand at the finish line of a marathon. You’ll see runners who have been limping for the past seven miles suddenly find their stride again when they see the finish line.

cheap grace” as “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”1

I called a team meeting (of one) and we decided I would run with the head torch around my neck and have my drop bag (jacket and painkillers) taken to the foot of the mountain. I couldn’t help but thinking that I was steadily becoming a knowledgeable ultra-marathon runner…

Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are. The goal is not to read a book, the goal is to become a reader. The goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner. The goal is not to learn an instrument, the goal is to become a musician.

Disaster-preparation planning is more like training for a marathon than training for a high-jump competition or sprinting event. Marathon runners do not practice by running the full course of twenty-sex miles; rather, they get into shape by running shorter distances and building up their endurance with cross-training. If they have prepared successfully, then they are in optimal condition to run the marathon over its predetermined course and length, assuming a range of weather conditions, predicted or not. This is normal marathon preparation. But imagine preparing for a mystery marathon on undisclosed terrain, of an unspecified length, which could begin at any time.

Getting away and asking ourselves who we want to become, who we want our families to become, and then backtracking and choosing one little step that is doable, to implement. One little step at a time. If you want to be a woman who loves Jesus and trusts him, then you need to spend time with him. Open his Word and read, one verse at a time. One prayer at a time. If you want to be a mom who is present with her kids, then you may need to put your phone in the cabinet for an hour from 3 to 4 p.m. each day. If you want to have intentional time together as a family, you might spend snack time each afternoon reading a story with your kids. If you want to be a family who uplifts one another and cheers one another on, you might go around the dinner table one night a week and each of you say one thing you love about a certain family member. If you want to be a runner, you don’t sign up for a marathon tomorrow, but you do need to put some running shoes on and get outside and start running. Doesn’t have to be every day. Doesn’t have to be five miles at a time. It could be ten minutes twice a week, but that makes you a runner. You don’t have to aim for perfection, or 100 percent even. We’re not looking for A+’s. We’re simply learning to be the people we want to be—living in the 80 percent rule. Rhythms over goals. Intentionality over reacting. Being present over distraction. Grace over legalism.

initially cause discomfort and even terror, can ultimately become very enjoyable. This gradual adjustment signals that a new chemical balance has been established within the body, so that marathon runners, say, get a sense of well-being and exhilaration from pushing their bodies to the limit.

More bad news for aerobic activity: Whether it’s running, cycling, or a step class, the main reason it gets easier the more you do it, is not because of improved cardiovascular conditioning, but because of improved economy of motion. For the most part, it doesn’t get easier because of muscular endurance, but because your body is becoming more efficient at that particular movement. You require less strength and oxygen than you did before, because your body’s nervous system is adapting. Wasted movements are eliminated, necessary movements are refined, and muscles that don’t need to be tensed are relaxed and eventually atrophied. This is why marathon runners will huff and puff if they cycle for the first time in years.

Crossing the river under the cover of night was something new to me; never before had I arrived at this juncture without sufficient daylight to make safe passage. Lowering myself down the darkened riverside embankment and cautiously wading into the water, it was unnervingly cold and bracing. The American River was mostly fed by snowmelt from the higher elevations, and the the uninitiated, crossing it could be catastrophic. To those unlucky few, the Western States journey ended at this point when their muscles seized up upon exposure to the whirling, cold-water torrent. Thankfully, some of us found the occasion just the opposite, renewing. I submerged fully in the chilly liquid, then jumped up and shook vigorously like a wet dog. "Brrr!" It felt so good I did it again. Once sufficiently doused and thoroughly chilled, I began the crossing. A line was strung across the waterway for safety, and I held tight as I stepped farther into the depths, the waterline rising over my waist. I thought about other races and how Western States compared. To a runner at, say, the Boston Marathon the idea of forging a river midrace would seem preposterous, unimaginable. But here I was, 78 miles into a 100-mile footrace grasping a flimsy rope for dear life trying to avoid being swept downstream. If marathoning is boxing, ultramarathoning is a bare-knuckes bar brawl. p221

In a car you’re always in a compartment … You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a [motor] cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.’3

What is important is finding a way that lets us keep exploring, experiencing, searching, sharing, living – whatever it is that lets us be fully present in the moment with an innocent trust that the world is before us and full of infinite possibility.

To finish a marathon in less than 4 hours, you should ideally be a runner for a couple of years, have completed a half marathon, or be extremely determined and competitive.

Many runners in the 12-16 minute pace range have reported running 60+ minutes faster in the marathon or 30+ minutes faster in the half marathon when they switched to R/W/R.

You think you can be a successful runner from a good family?” It was not really a question. He had talked of his upbringing in Ethiopia: about the poverty that surrounded him, and about the violence meted out to him in his home. Haile’s counterintuitive analysis was that all world-beating runners spring from twisted roots. He believed that a deficit of opportunities, and an early taste of pain, had not stifled his talent but fertilized it.

A house built on a strong foundation can weather many storms!

While regular physical activity improves immune function and lowers respiratory infection risk, sustained and intense exertion may have the opposite effect. As you go from inactive to active, infection risk declines, but at a certain point, overtraining and excessive stress can increase the risk of infection by impairing immune function.57 In the weeks following marathons or ultramarathons, runners report a two- to sixfold increase in upper-respiratory-tract infections.

To become a better runner, you need to: 1) adapt a proper diet, 2) lower body fat, 3) avoid smoking and heavy drinking, 4) obtain adequate sleep, and 5) exercise regularly. Do that, and you also can add years to your life.

Runners who attend a yoga class the day after a marathon are often amazed at the speed of their recovery; they are able to go up and down the stairs without pain and stiffness in short order.

If you listen to what others say, you may not try at all. If you listen to your body, you may quit too soon. What your mind believes, your body believes. Your mind is the key.

No doubt a brain and some shoes are essential for marathon success, although if it comes down to a choice, pick the shoes. More people finish marathons with no brains than with no shoes.” – Don Kardong

You do not need to seek freedom in a different land, for it exists with your own body, heart, mind and soul. B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life