George A. Sheehan quotes:

We may think there is willpower involved, but more likely... change is due to want power. Wanting the new addiction more than the old one. Wanting the new me in preference to the person I am now.

Success means having the courage, the determination, and the will to become the person you believe you were meant to be.

There are those of us who are always about to live. We are waiting until things change, until there is more time, until we are less tired, until we get a promotion, until we settle down / until, until, until. It always seems as if there is some major event that must occur in our lives before we begin living.

Listen to your body. Do not be a blind and deaf tenant.

The mind's first step to self-awareness must be through the body.

It's very hard in the beginning to understand that the whole idea is not to beat the other runners. Eventually you learn that the competition is against the little voice inside you that wants you to quit.

Sweat cleanses from the inside. It comes from places a shower will never reach.

Exercise is done against one's wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse.

Sport is singularly able to give us peak experience where we feel completely one with the world and transcend all conflicts as we finally become our own potential.

To know you are one with what you are doing, to know that you are a complete athlete, begins with believing you are a runner.

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.

Once you have decided that winning isn't everything, you become a winner.

Anything that changes your values changes your behavior.

Anything that changes your values changes your behaviour.

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

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 difference between a jogger and a runner is an entry blank.

Happiness is different from pleasure. Happiness has something to do with struggling and enduring and accomplishing.

Some think guts is sprinting at the end of a race. But guts is what got you there to begin with. Guts start back in the hills with 6 miles to go and you're thinking of how you can get out of this race without anyone noticing. Guts begin when you still have forty minutes of torture left and you're already hurting more than you ever remember.

If you want to win anything - a race, yourself, your life - you have to go a little berserk.

Because until we write it down, we don't know what is actually at the root of our lives.

There are as many reasons for running as there are days in the year, years in my life. But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child, an artist and a saint. So, too, are you. Find your own play, your own self-renewing compulsion, and you will become the person you are meant to be.

I have met my hero, and he is me.

No matter how old I get, the race remains one of life's most rewarding experiences.

No matter how old I get, the race remains one of life's most rewarding experiences. My times become slower and slower, but the experience of the race is unchanged: each race a drama, each race a challenge, each race stretching me in one way or another, and each race telling me more about myself and others.

Everyone is an athlete. The only difference is that some of us are in training, and some are not.

The more I run, the more I want to run, and the more I live a life conditioned and influenced and fashioned by my running. And the more I run, the more certain I am that I am heading for my real goal: to become the person I am.

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.

Do not tell me what to do, tell me what you do. Do not tell me what is good for me, tell me what is good for you. If, at the same time, you reveal the you in me, if you become a mirror to my inner self, then you have made a reader and a friend.

Every runner is an experiment of one.

Exercise: you don't have time not to

Fitness has to be fun. If it is not play there will be no fitness. Play, you see, is where the process. Fitness is merely the product.

Fitness is just a stage you pass through on the way to becoming a racer.

Have you ever felt worse after a run?

I have a bumper sticker that Bowen created that says Regardless of my kids grades, they have an 'A' in my book'. Without play the child that still lives in all of us will always be incomplete. And not only physically, but creatively, intellectually, and spiritually as well.

I will not last forever. But I am damn well going to know I have been here.

If marathoners finish they win.

If you want to find the answers to the Big Questions about your soul, you'd best begin with the Little Answers about your body.

Life is a positive-sum game. Everyone from the gold medallist to the last finisher can rejoice in a personal victory.

Life is the greatest experiment. Each of us is an experiment of one-observer and subject-making choices, living with them, recording the effects.

Like everyone else, I want to be challenged. I want to find out whether or not I am a coward. I want to see how much effort I can put out . . . what I can endure . . . if I measure up. Running allows that.

Nothing is more certain than the defeat of a man who gives up.

Of all the races, there is no better stage for heroism than a marathon.

On the roads, I can see truth revealed whole without thought or reason. There I experience the sudden understanding that comes unasked, unbidden. I simply rest, rest within myself, rest within the pure rhythm of my running. And I wait.

Out on the roads there is fitness and self-discovery and the persons we were destined to be.

People begin running for any number of motives, but we stick to it for one basic reason-to find out who we really are.

Play is where life lives

Running makes you an athlete in all areas of life...trained in the basics, prepared for whatever comes, ready to fill each hour and deal with the decisive moment.

Sport is an essential element of education.

Sport is where an entire life can be compressed into a few hours, where the emotions of a lifetime can be felt on an acre or two of ground, where a person can suffer and die and rise again on six miles of trails through a New York City park. Sport is a theater where sinner can turn saint and a common man become an uncommon hero, where the past and the future can fuse with the present. Sport is singularly able to give us peak experiences where we feel completely one with the world and transcend all conflicts as we finally become our own potential.

Success rests with having the courage and endurance and, above all, the will to become the person you are, however peculiar that may be. Then you will be able to say, I found my hero and he is me.

The answer to the big questions in running is the same as the answer to the big questions in life: Do the best with what you've got.

The desire to run comes from deep within us - from the unconscious, the instinctive, the intuitive.

The key then is to find your own mountain, otherwise you will be competing with people who are not even in your event, and running up against the 'shoulds' and 'oughts' of that world, and the inevitable frustration and depression and feelings of failure. A person can be complete or incomplete, but one thing is sure, he cannot be someone else.

The most important thing I learned [from running] is that there is only one runner in this race, and that is me.

The music of a marathon is a powerful strain, one of those tunes of glory. It asks us to forsake pleasures, to discipline the body, to find courage, to renew faith and to become one's own person, utterly and completely.

The obsession with running is really an obsession with the potential for more and more life.

The real competition is against the little voice inside you that wants to quit

The study of motivation goes back to the Greeks. Their sports were essential to their education. They saw in sports the integration of body, mind and soul, the creation of beauty, the mastering of athletics, and the challenge of competition. A French sociologist points this out. "Sports," he wrote, was part of the education of the citizen. He was expected to engage in exercise for a whole series of reasons that had to do with the shaping of the citizen; the relation between moral good and physical good; and the growth of a person.

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

There are as many reasons for running as there are days in a year.... But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child.

There is no substitute for learning to live in our bodies.

To keep from decaying, to be a winner, the athlete must accept pain - not only accept it, but look for it, live with it, learn not to fear it.

To make your life a work of art, you must have the material to work with. The race, any race, is just such an experience.

We who run...are different from those who merely study us. We are out there experiencing what they are trying to put into words.

Why race? The need to be tested, perhaps; the need to take risks; and the chance to be number one.

I run each day to preserve the self I attained the day before and to secure the self yet to be.