"Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."
William Faulkner
"Kebede provided an important reminder today, as did Eliud Kipchoge’s quiet (and faster) 2:05:30 victory at the Hamburg Marathon. In this glittering roll-call of the decade’s great marathoners, it was Kebede who had the resilience, the patience, and the smarts, things all marathoners need. He turned a scripted, record-obsessed, overcooked, and overpaced artifice into a sustained, tactical, eyeballs-out-to-the-finish good old-fashioned race."
Runner’s World on Kebede winning London
Just listen to his words. It doesn’t matter what you are trying to succeed at, it’s applicable.
In case you were having doubts about running today
Kings of Long Distance Running
“At first glance the annual Man vs. Horse Marathon, set for June 9 in Wales, seems like a joke sport brought to us by the same brilliant minds behind dwarf tossing and gravy wrestling. It was, after all, the product of a pints-fueled debate in a Welsh pub, and for years its official starter was rock musician Screaming Lord Sutch, founder of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. But the jokiness is misleading: When viewed through science’s clarifying lens, the funny marathon is one of the few sports that isn’t a joke.
Hear me out, sports fans—I’m a basketball nut myself, and so the joke is as much on me as anyone. To see where I’m coming from, you can’t do better than examining basketball’s most physically talented player, Michael Jordan. He was hailed as nearly repealing the law of gravity, and during his prime he made rival players look as if they were moving in slow motion. But Air Jordan wasn’t in the same league as a house cat when it comes to leaping. Consider how casually young cats can jump up onto refrigerators. To match that, a man would have to do a standing jump right over the backboard. And a top-notch Frisbee dog corkscrewing through the air eight feet up to snag a whizzing disc makes Jordan look decidedly human when it comes to the fantastic quickness, agility, strength, and ballistic precision various animals are endowed with.
There’s no denying it—our kind started substituting brains for brawn long ago, and it shows: We can’t begin to compete with animals when it comes to the raw ingredients of athletic prowess. Yet being the absurdly self-enthralled species we are, we crowd into arenas and stadiums to marvel at our pathetic physical abilities as if they were something special. But there is one exception to our general paltriness: We’re the right honorable kings and queens of the planet when it comes to long-distance running.”
Read the Rest here….
"The pain of training is nothing compared to the pain of not reaching your potential."
Josh Cox
"The best part of a run? The birds chirping, the awesome air, and the fact that a lot of people are still sleeping."
Summer Sanders,
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On Persistence and Determination
“Press On — Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; The world is full of educated
derelicts. Persistence and determination alone has unlimited potential.”
Calvin Coolidge
"Do not fear going forward slowly; fear only to stand still."
Chinese Proverb
"Run often and run long, but never outrun your joy of running."
Julie Isphording,
"Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory."
W.B.
"Experience has taught me how important it is to just keep going, focusing on running fast and relaxed. Eventually it passes and the flow returns. It’s part of racing."
Frank Shorter
"Think positive. You are a special person. Reward yourself with self-praise as you achieve each interim goal en route to the marathon"
Hal Higdon
"Somewhere in the world someone is training when you are not. When you race him, he will win."
Tom Fleming
"Learn to run when feeling pain, then push harder"
William Sigei
