Sheehan Running Quotes

There are weak men; men who run and hide when life slaps them in the ass. Then there are men; men who have a backbone yet occasionally, when life slaps them in the ass, will rely on others. And then there are real men; men who don’t cry or complain, who don’t just have a backbone, they are the backbone. Men who make their own decisions and live with the consequences, who accept responsibility for their actions or words. Men who, when life slaps them in the ass, slap back and move on. Men who live hard and die even harder. Men like my father and my uncles. Men I loved with all my heart. Men like Deuce.

The true runner is a very fortunate person. He has found something in him that is just perfect.

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

The distance runner is mysteriously reconciling the separations of body and mind, of pain and pleasure, of the conscious and the unconscious. He is repairing the rent, and healing the wound in his divided self. He has found a way to make the ordinary extraordinary; the commonplace unique; the everyday eternal.

Your mother holds you skin on skin and when you enter this world, feeds you with her own body; skin on skin. Your father runs his fingers over your tear stained cheek, presses his lips to your forehead; skin on skin. You make love, skin on skin with a man you love, a beautiful man. And then, if you’re lucky your own baby will enter this world and you’ll hold her skin on skin, feed her with your body skin on skin. It’s a magical thing.

There are three different types of men in this world: There are weak men- men who run and hide when life slaps them in the ass. Then, there are men- men who have a backbone, yet occasionally, then life slapps them in the ass, will rely on others. And then, there are real men- men who don't cry or complain, who don't just have a backbone, then are the backbone. Men who make their own decisions and live with the consequences and who accept responsiblity for their actions or words. Men who, when life slaps them in the ass, slap back and move on.

Running is just such a monestary-- a retreat, a place to commune with God and yourself, a place for psychological and spiritual renewal.

From the moment you become a spectator, everything is downhill. It is a life that ends before the cheering and the shouting die.

I am an intellectual. This does not mean I am intelligent, but that ideas are more important to me than people.

William James, who believed the decisive thing about us was not intelligence, strength, or wealth. “The real question posed to us is the effort we are willing to make,

courage is the bridge between our minds and our bodies.

If you don’t have a challenge, find one,

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

Thomas Merton, another solitary, understood that. The beginning of freedom, he wrote, is not liberation from the body but liberation from the mind. We are not entangled in our own body, we are entangled in our mind. I

He runs because he has to. Because in being a runner, in moving through pain and fatigue and suffering, in imposing stress upon stress, in eliminating all but the necessities of life, he is fulfilling himself and becoming the person he is.

The trouble with this country,” the late John Berryman once told fellow poet James Dickey, “is that a man can live his entire life without knowing whether or not he is a coward.

Man is meant to be a success.” Each of us, he said, is unique and endowed with potentials unlike those of others. Success comes in finding your authentic self, the person you truly are, and becoming that person, tapping all of that untapped potential.

Courage, then, has nothing to do with a single act of bravery. Courage is how one lives, not one specific incident. Just as mortal sin is a lifestyle, not one startling transgression. Some,

Disease, then, is one of those bad experiences that turns information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom. The bad experiences that make you love yourself and your body and the world. And make you know that you are in a game that has to have a happy ending.

Anyone with a sense of humor can see that life is a joke, not a tragedy.

The first half hour of my run is for my body. The last half hour, for my soul. In the beginning the road is a miracle of solitude and escape. In the end it is a miracle of discovery and joy. Throughout, it brings an understanding of what Blake meant when he said, “Energy is eternal delight.” I

There are three different types of men in this world: There are weak men - men who run and hide when life slaps them in the ass. Then there are men - men who have a backbone, ye occasionally, when life slaps them on the ass, will rely on others.

Running keeps me at a physical peak and sharpens my senses. It makes me touch and see and hear as if for the first time. Through it I get through the first barrier to true emotions, the lack of integration with the body. Into it I escape from the pettiness and triviality of everyday life. And, once inside,stop the daily pendulum perpetually oscillating between distraction and boredom...It is the swing from boredom to anxiety, from depression to worry, that exhausts and defeats us. The sure knowledge that we can be much more than we are frustrates us.

I am a lonely figure when I run the roads. People wonder how far I have come, how far I have to go. They see me alone and friendless on a journey that has no visible beginning or end. I appear isolated and vulnerable, a homeless creature. It is all they can do to keep from stopping the car and asking if they can take me wherever I'm going. I know this because I feel it myself. When I see the runner I have much the same thoughts. No matter how often I run the roads myself, I am struck by how solitary my fellow runner appears. The sight of a runner at dusk or in inclement weather makes me glad to be safe and warm in my car and headed for home. And at those times, I wonder how I can go out there myself, how I can leave the comfort and warmth and that feeling of intimacy and belonging, to do this distracted thing. But when finally I am there, I realise it is not comfort and warmth I am leaving, not intimacy and belonging I am giving up, but the loneliness that pursues me this day and every day. I know that the real loneliness, the real isolation, the real vulnerability, begins long before I put on my running shoes.

Credo quia absurdum,

difficulté d’être.

If you think that life has passed you by, or, even worse, that you are living someone else’s life, you can still prove the experts wrong. T

Guilt is the unlived life.

So it is not age that is threatened by youth, but the other way around. Youth is threatened by age.

And while these pounds were being shed, while the physiological miracles were occurring with the heart and muscle and metabolism, psychological marvels were taking place as well. Just so, the world over, bodies, minds, and souls are constantly being born again, during miles on the road.

The road to redemption might be damn hard, but in the end—if you reached the end—his father was right. It was worth it. Maribelle was worth it. Funny how her birth was the reason he’d started running, but she ended up being the reason he’d stopped. Life was really fucking funny that way.

I once prayed for grace, but it did not find me; I walked the streets to find the grace that was hiding from me, and yet it still could not be found, so I stopped looking for the grace that always seems out to run me falling to my knees grace did find me causing me to repent of my sins so it could save me!

UNTIL I TOOK UP distance running, I found it easy to take it easy. I had no difficulty following the warnings of the experts. “Avoid stress,” cautioned the physicians. I did. “Reduce your tensions,” advised the psychologists. I did. “Rest that restless heart,” counseled the clergy. I did. Doing these things requires no effort when you are lacking what Santayana called America’s ruling passion—a love for business—when you are a lifelong non-joiner whose greatest desire is not to become involved, when almost everyone you meet is less interesting than your own ideas, and when your inner life has more reality than your outer one.

Becoming an ex-alcoholic, however, is not easy. Drink may be futile and ultimately degrading, but only the fortunate drinker discovers this. And it is the even more fortunate one who then comes upon a new and healthy path to the summit of his physical and mental powers. Before the liver goes, the heart enlarges and the brain begins to deteriorate, he must get the message that there is a better way to experience himself and the universe. My

Cox slanted his eyes at him and grinned. “You’re makin’ me miss Kami,” he said with a dramatic sigh. “Shut up,” Mick growled. “You’re a fuckin’ pussy-whipped asshole.” “Oh yeah?” Cox threatened. “How about I take your old lady out for a fuckin’ ride? You good with that, old man?” Mick lunged and Cox went running. “Who’s fuckin’ pussy-whipped now, asshat?” Cox laughed over his shoulder. “That would be you, bitch!” “You did not just call me a bitch!” Mick roared, chasing him. “Bitch! I fuckin’ did! Bitch!

The distance runner who accepts the past in the person he is, and sees the future as a promise rather than a threat, is completely and utterly in the present. He is absorbed in his encounter with the everyday world. He is mysteriously reconciling the separations of body and mind, of pain and pleasure, of the conscious and the unconsciou. He is repairing the rent, and healing the wound in the divided self. He has found a way to make the ordinary extraordinary; the commonplace, unique; the everyday, eternal.

There are three different types of men in this world: There are weak men—men who run and hide when life slaps them in the ass. Then there are men—men who have a backbone, yet occasionally, when life slaps them in the ass, will rely on others. And then there are real men—men who don’t cry or complain, who don’t just have a backbone, they are the backbone. Men who make their own decisions and live with the consequences and who accept responsibility for their actions or words. Men who, when life slaps them in the ass, slap back and move on. Men who live hard and die even harder.

The athlete doesn’t stop smoking and start training. He starts training and finds he has stopped smoking.

The runner is coming to know, or will know if he runs enough...that the universe is the smallest divisible unit.

I myself am my only obstacle to perfection,” wrote Kierkegaard.

Buying food never did make sense to me. When I finally spend some money I prefer to have some permanent evidence of the expenditure. Doing it on something that is immediately consumed leaves me feeling cheated. For much the same reason, I suppose, I have never smoked. Buying something and then setting it on fire is incomprehensible. So

There were a lot of people in the service,” says Dickey, “who cried when they were discharged because they knew they would have to go back to driving taxicabs and working in insurance offices.

Tomorrow can be the first day of the rest of your life. All you have to do is to follow Thoreau. Inhabit your body with delight, with inexpressible satisfaction; both its weariness and its refreshments. And

When I was young, I was afflicted with what my aunt called “convenient deafness.” I still am. I have the ability to tune out what is going on around me. It is normal for me to retreat inside myself and become less and less aware of my surroundings. If I am in a group and not talking, do not suppose I am listening. I am “away.” I am off in another world. Off in my natural habitat, my mind. Being

Writing, someone said, is turning blood into ink.

When Jami waved Leisel and Alex across, she hesitated. Thank God for Alex, because suddenly he pulled her across the street, nearly carrying her since she suddenly couldn’t seem to run without slipping and nearly falling.

Today’s work does not make us the persons we can be. Work is simply the price to be paid. Having earned our daily bread, we can turn to our daily play.

When you race you are under oath. You are testifying as to who you are.

No

The dash is pure body; the marathon is pure mind. The mile is body, mind and spirit. “The mile remains the classic distance,” wrote Paul Gallico, “because it calls for brains and rare judgment as well as speed, condition and courage.” And its searching third quarter requires the leap of faith that what you are doing is worth the effort.

At 45, 2 years after the birth of his last child, he started running again.

Only a sense of humor can help each of us face those great unanswerable questions: Why was I born? Why am I here? Why must I die? What must I do to make my life a triumph? —

The runner who is in peak condition is only a razor’s edge from catastrophe.

With the publication of Running & Being in 1978, George Sheehan’s voice became the voice of a movement, sounding a clarion call to hundreds of thousands of people to abandon their sedentary ways, take to the streets, and run. Today, there are millions of us lacing up our running shoes, training for 5-Ks, 10-Ks, half-marathons, and marathons—each trudging the same path of fitness and self-discovery that he blazed decades before.

Aging is a myth, he argued, and he showed it by posting his personal best at 3:01 in his 61st year.

What the jogger’s face shows is not boredom but contemplation, which Thomas Aquinas described as man’s highest activity save one—contemplation plus putting the fruits of that contemplation into action.

The 5-year-old sees that Paradise correctly, not in technology but in the fairy story, in the great myths that control and guide our lives. And myth is meaning divined rather than defined, implicit rather than explicit.

There are Calleys in every army. What makes them dangerous is a set of circumstances in which their homicidal aberrations can run amok. The laws of war say that it is the responsibility of the highest leadership to do all in its power to prevent such circumstances from occurring.

The real loneliness begins with my failures as son, husband, father, physician, lover, friend.

One thing we runners know. There is no substitute for running. No matter what age we are. No matter what time we do it.

So there we were before breakfast in the hotel garden beneath palm trees, all wearing our matching conference T-shirts. The sound of waves crashing into the hotel beach was drowned out by a boom box playing loud electro workout music to pump us up: exuberant, high-octane tunes with pulsating rhythms that keep building to new crescendos. After dividing into teams, we spent the next forty-five minutes racing from one exercise to the next—planks, squats, sit-ups, sprints, and burpees (a combined squat, push-up, and vertical jump)—constantly high-fiving each other and shouting encouragements. At the end, everyone was exhausted, and we all congratulated each other for our efforts, agreeing vociferously how much fun it was. I enjoyed myself, but was it fun? I did the exercises as best I could, but what I actually enjoyed was the camaraderie, the beautiful setting, the high-fiving, and even the music. Afterward, I also enjoyed the feeling of having exercised intensely. But frankly, the planks, squats, sit-ups, sprints, and burpees were hard. The routine brought to mind the running guru George Sheehan’s observation that “exercise is done against one’s wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse.

George Sheehan, the running guru, describes four roles: being a good animal (physical), a good craftsman (mental), a good friend (social), and a saint (spiritual).

Sin is the failure to reach your potential,” he wrote. “Guilt is the unlived life.

The narrow way for each of us is unique. You do not have to run my narrow path, and I do not have to run your narrow way. The glory is that each of us can finish the narrow way "marked out for us" because the course laid out for us by our sovereign, omniscient God is perfect for us as we walk, run or even crawl according to the written word of God we will hear "Well Done!

I got nothing to lose for it has all been given to Christ making me ready for the fight of my life, ready to fight running into the darkness to show another the way to the cross of Christ. Ready to fight for all that is right with my last breath

The artist, especially the poet, has always known this to be wrong. He knows that time shortens and lengthens, without regard to the minute hand.

From the outside, this runner’s world looks unnatural. The body punished, the appetites denied, the satisfactions delayed, the motivations that drive most men ignored. The truth is that the runner is not made for the things and people and institutions that surround him. To use Aldous Huxley’s expression, his small guts and feeble muscles do not permit him to eat or fight his way through the ordinary rough-and-tumble. That

Are you running from difficulties? Or are you running towards them knowing God is the Master Engineer who allows difficulties to come to make you into the image of Christ, for that is the calling for each of us!

At five, I had the intuitive, instinctive faith that my cosmos, my family and the world were good and true and beautiful. That somehow I had always been and always would be. And I knew in a way of a five-year-old that I had worth and dignity and individuality. Later, when I read Nietzsche’s statement that these are not given to us by nature but are tasks that we must somehow solve, I knew him to be wrong. We all had them once. We

If you would write the truth, you must first become the truth.

Charlie Carpenter rang Lily Sheehan's bell, and when she opened the door he gave her a blue rose. This stands for dying, for death. My daddy met the man who grew them, and when the man tried to run away my daddy shot him in the back.

Behind the enthusiasm, behind the inspiration, behind the passion, there must be the will. We can choose. We can decide. We can will to do it our own way. When we do, nothing can prevail against us.

There comes a time when you never think it’s going to get easier because you put so much effort into someone else’s happiness; being alone meant no happiness. We rely on others to make us happy and in the long run, it ends up a long time coming.