Ultrarunning Quotes

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

Running efficiently demands good technique, and running efficiently for 100 miles demands great technique. But the wonderful paradox of running is that getting started requires no technique. None at all. If you want to become a runner, get onto a trail, into the woods, or on a sidewalk or street and run. Go 50 yards if that's all you can handle. Tomorrow, you can go farther.

For those hours on the Tonto Trail, we didn’t know anything except the land and the sky and our bodies. I was free from everything except what I was doing at that very moment, floating between what was and what would be as surely as I was suspended between river and rim. Finally I remembered what I had found in ultrarunning. I remembered what I had lost.

If it's a nod from society you're looking for, run a marathon. But if it's a life-changing experience of personal strength and perseverance that you want, finish an ultra.

When you feel bad, try to hold on. When you feel good, it's time to push.

A race is a life that is born when you get up in the morning and dies when you cross the finish line.

There's not enough said about winter runing. Running in the winter is like not giving up when the road gets hard. It's about willpower and perseverance and being faithful to your sport.

Ultrarunning can sound like insanity to people who don’t do it. But ultrarunners understand its mad logic: running for days and nights nonstop brings you right up to the edge of breakdown but also to the opportunity for breakthrough.

I had never felt more alive, more happy to be living in the moment. My suffering stood on the horizon, like the mountain, contrasting comfort. It stood starkly against familiarity, above old limitations, and towered over complacency. The mountains added the beauty and depth to the landscape around me. I was pushing into a totally new realm and pushing towards my dream of testing my limits. It did not feel pleasant, not in this hour, but I forced myself to run the last mile.

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.

I'd rather be the last runner who saw a cool thing that everyone else missed, than to be a speedy runner who had a miserable experience.

Once you master breaking down the mental wall of running, there are no limits. When you both see and believe that you can run further, run faster, you can.

In a sprint, if you don't have perfect form, you're doomed. The ultra distance forgives injury, fatigue, bad form, and illness. A bear with determination will defeat a dreamy gazelle every time.

I started running for reasons I had only just begun to understand. As a child, I ran in the woods and around my house for fun. As a teen, I ran to get my body in better shape. Later, I ran to find peace. I ran, and kept running, because I had learned that once you started something you didn’t quit, because in life, much like in an ultramarathon, you have to keep pressing forward. Eventually I ran because I turned into a runner, and my sport brought me physical pleasure and spirited me away from debt and disease, from the niggling worries of everyday existence. I ran because I grew to love other runners. I ran because I loved challenges and because there is no better feeling than arriving at the finish line or completing a difficult training run. And because, as an accomplished runner, I could tell others how rewarding it was to live healthily, to move my body every day, to get through difficulties, to eat with consciousness, that what mattered wasn’t how much money you made or where you lived, it was how you lived. I ran because overcoming the difficulties of an ultramarathon reminded me that I could overcome the difficulties of life, that overcoming difficulties was life.

In ultrarunning, the mountains and willpower equalize the genders. Strawburst

Later, when Dusty thought I had more speed in me, he told me that two women were in the top ten, approaching fast. “They’re gonna chick you, Jurker! Do you want to get chicked?” (Dusty had coined the term when he was in high school. It’s now part of the ultra-running lexicon). I

They’re gonna chick you, Jurker! Do you want to get chicked?” (Dusty had coined the term when he was in high school. It’s now part of the ultra-running lexicon). I

In an ultra marathon, at some point along the way you cross a line where pain becomes your companion. Suffering becomes part of the journey. Sometimes the suffering is minor, and other times it is nearly unbearable...but it always comes.

The moment that someone fully believes, without doubt, that they can do something, their body unlocks another source of strength and endurance that they weren’t tapping into before.

Actually, it's rare for someone to die doing this sport, but it's not at all rare to want to.

Running an ultra is 90 percent mental, and the other 10 percent—that’s mental too!

Running for me is not an activity I work into my life or a pursuit with a set end point. Rather, it is an integral piece of who I am and hope to always be.

In ultrarunning, the mountains and willpower equalize the genders.

Ray Zahab is fond of saying that the challenge of ultrarunning is 90 percent mental, and the other 10 percent is all in our heads. He's got it right: Beyond the marathon, the primary test becomes entirely psychological. If you can run twenty-six miles, then your body can surely carry you even farther (barring calamitous injury), and the only question is whether your mind can go the distance, too.

By unspoken agreement, we all picked an invisible line in the cracked asphalt and toed it.

Running, but more specifically ultrarunning, is both the most brutal and the most beautiful way to test the stuff therapists talk about in their little rooms.

In un mondo saturo di informazioni, la scelta di essere vaghi è come una tre- gua. Una corsa senza compravendita, senza sponsor, senza cellulare. Anche al di là del malinteso della distanza, Barkley non ha quasi niente a che fare con altre 100 miglia come Hardrock, Western States, UTMB o la Diagonale des Fous. La Barkley è un oltre-trail, un'isoletta inclassificabile riservata a quaranta corridori. Non ci sono vincitori, solo dei rari non-vinti. Ma soprattutto, a Frozen Head non si trova niente che non si abbia già, nessun trofeo da portarsi a casa. «La maggior parte delle corse sono organizzate in modo da essere sicuri di poterle finire. La Barkley non consiste soltanto nell'esplorare i limiti, ma nel confrontare i partecipanti. Mostra la fine e il limite di ognuno».

was eating lighter and hadn’t been laid up once by injury, I was able to run more; because I was running more, I was sleeping great, feeling relaxed, and watching my resting heart rate drop. My personality had even changed: The grouchiness and temper I’d considered part of my Irish-Italian DNA had ebbed so much that my wife remarked, “Hey if this comes from ultrarunning, I’ll tie your shoes for you.” I knew aerobic exercise was a powerful antidepressant, but I hadn’t realized it could be so profoundly mood stabilizing and—I hate to use the word—meditative. If you don’t have answers to your problems after a four-hour run, you ain’t getting them.

Just like the mountain sometimes does not let you pass, the heat would not allow me to run in those canyons as I wished.

I looked at my medal and it had "20 miles, 50K, 50 miles, 100K" printed across the bottom. It didn't matter which of the races you did: everyone who crossed the finish line got the same medal. I loved that. I'm sure someone had struggled just as hard as I had to finish the 20-miler. Why did I deserve anything better? Running is the most democratic of sports, and ultrarunning ever the more so. p61

Panic struck when we reached the car and I tried to open the door. It was locked. He'd locked the keys in the car! Then I realized that Dad simply hadn't unlocked it yet. He pressed the button on the remote, and the car unlocked. But in that instant of absentminded panic it occurred to me that for the past fourteen plus hours I'd been gone from reality, I'd been totally lost in the spell of ultrarunning, I'd been so totally immersed in the experience that nothing else seemed material- not the car remote, not the bills that needed paying, not the politicians in the White House, not the emails that needed sending; all of those things had melted away and vaporized. It was a cleansing of the soul, a physical and emotional reincarnation. After fourteen hours of running I was now someone new. p61.

Most ultramarathons are a sufferfest. I have concluded that it does not matter who you are or how much training you have completed, everyone suffers at some point during an ultra. What differentiates ultrarunners is how they handle themselves in the low moments.

It was only sifting through depths that deep that I was able to uncover my soul. Maybe it was not really about this race; it was about finding those few thoughts that transcended the darkness, the ones that would only be conjured up within my head during times of need. Maybe it was finding a spiritual level of flow while running, floating down the trail like I’ve never experienced before, finding myself running within ultra.

I started easy, so I reminded myself of the wisdom I had often heard repeated by experienced ultrarunners: it’s not about who goes the fastest, it’s about who doesn’t slow down the most.

Pablo Picasso famously said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” There is truth in that thought. Considering my own experience, I tailored it a little: every child is a runner. The problem is how to remain a runner once we grow up.

Resting when you are tired at mountain races is unwise until you reach lower altitudes, I have learned.

200 milers are different, you can come back from the dead.

Ultrarunning seemed to be an alternative universe where none of planet Earth’s rules applied: women were stronger than men; old men were stronger than youngsters; Stone Age guys in sandals were stronger than everybody. And the mileage! The sheer stress on their legs was off the charts.

They’re gonna chick you, Jurker! Do you want to get chicked?” (Dusty had coined the term when he was in high school. It’s now part of the ultra-running lexicon).

One legendary animal that seems ambiguous, hovering as it does in between the real that you can touch and the humanly unattainable, is the pronghorn antelope of the American plains. It has been clocked running at 61 miles per hour—almost twice as fast as a racehorse—and not just in a short sprint. It can reputedly cover 7 miles in 10 minutes. The Hopi tribe believed the antelope to be a spirit messenger and a powerful medicine. In a recent issue of the international journal Nature, the pronghorn was declared the world’s premier ultrarunning animal, the best distance runner that muscle and bone and blood could produce.

It can be hard, out there during a tough race or long run gone wrong, to remember that we choose these mental and physical tests. We are fortunate to experience these events.

There is no finish like the one you questioned.

Every time your foot hits the ground when running it's the force equivalent to around 250% of your body weight. That's a lot of force going through your legs and body!

That’s what a coach does for you: they help expand your vision of what’s possible, not by telling you what you’re capable of but rather by guiding you to discover it within yourself.