Quotes from George Sheehan

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

courage is the bridge between our minds and our bodies.

If you don't have a challenge, find one

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Credo quia absurdum