Quotes from George Sheehan

difficulté d'être.

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

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.

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

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

Becoming an ex-alcoholic, however, is not easy. Drink may be futile and ultimately degrading, but only the fortunate drinker discovers this. And it is the even more fortunate one who then comes upon a new and healthy path to the summit of his physical and mental powers. Before the liver goes, the heart enlarges and the brain begins to deteriorate, he must get the message that there is a better way to experience himself and the universe. My

If you think that life has passed you by, or, even worse, that you are living someone else's life, you can still prove the experts wrong. T

Guilt is the unlived life.

Buying food never did make sense to me. When I finally spend some money I prefer to have some permanent evidence of the expenditure. Doing it on something that is immediately consumed leaves me feeling cheated. For much the same reason, I suppose, I have never smoked. Buying something and then setting it on fire is incomprehensible. So

From the outside, this runner's world looks unnatural. The body punished, the appetites denied, the satisfactions delayed, the motivations that drive most men ignored. The truth is that the runner is not made for the things and people and institutions that surround him. To use Aldous Huxley's expression, his small guts and feeble muscles do not permit him to eat or fight his way through the ordinary rough-and-tumble. That

When I was young, I was afflicted with what my aunt called "convenient deafness." I still am. I have the ability to tune out what is going on around me. It is normal for me to retreat inside myself and become less and less aware of my surroundings. If I am in a group and not talking, do not suppose I am listening. I am "away." I am off in another world. Off in my natural habitat, my mind. Being

The artist, especially the poet, has always known this to be wrong. He knows that time shortens and lengthens, without regard to the minute hand.

Tomorrow can be the first day of the rest of your life. All you have to do is to follow Thoreau. Inhabit your body with delight, with inexpressible satisfaction; both its weariness and its refreshments. And

With the publication of Running & Being in 1978, George Sheehan's voice became the voice of a movement, sounding a clarion call to hundreds of thousands of people to abandon their sedentary ways, take to the streets, and run. Today, there are millions of us lacing up our running shoes, training for 5-Ks, 10-Ks, half-marathons, and marathons—each trudging the same path of fitness and self-discovery that he blazed decades before.

At 45, 2 years after the birth of his last child, he started running again.

I myself am my only obstacle to perfection," wrote Kierkegaard.

Aging is a myth, he argued, and he showed it by posting his personal best at 3:01 in his 61st year.

The athlete doesn't stop smoking and start training. He starts training and finds he has stopped smoking.

Sin is the failure to reach your potential," he wrote. "Guilt is the unlived life.

One thing we runners know. There is no substitute for running. No matter what age we are. No matter what time we do it.

Today's work does not make us the persons we can be. Work is simply the price to be paid. Having earned our daily bread, we can turn to our daily play.

At five, I had the intuitive, instinctive faith that my cosmos, my family and the world were good and true and beautiful. That somehow I had always been and always would be. And I knew in a way of a five-year-old that I had worth and dignity and individuality. Later, when I read Nietzsche's statement that these are not given to us by nature but are tasks that we must somehow solve, I knew him to be wrong. We all had them once. We

When you race you are under oath. You are testifying as to who you are.

The runner who is in peak condition is only a razor's edge from catastrophe.