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.

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

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

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.

Have you ever felt worse after a run?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

There is nothing more certain than the defeat of the man who gives up.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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