Quotes from Christopher McDougall

Fascia knows where you are in the world; it's loaded with position sensors that contribute to your sense of balance and feeds those bearings directly to that fear-conditioning corner of your brain, the amygdala. Any movement grooved into the fascia feels soothing, gratifying, efficient; try to unlearn it, as any batting coach or ballet teacher will tell you, and you're in for a struggle. New movements, no matter how necessary or logical, just feel wrong.

you're tougher than you think you are, and you can do more than you think you can.

that's okay; humans are terrific

What causes you to tense up is the unexpected; but as long as you know what you're in for, you can relax and chip away at the job.

Maybe Ron Clarke wasn't being poetic in his description of Zatopek—maybe his expert eye was clinically precise: His love of life shone through every movement. Yes! Love of life! Exactly! That's what got Vigil's heart thumping when he saw Juan and Martimano scramble happy-go-luckily up that dirt hill. He'd found his Natural Born Runner.

Loveable as he is, Lawrence is a hyperkinetic freak, and the world is far too full of marvels and joys for him to ever do anything except lunge and swerve toward whatever catches his eye.

To be a hero, you had to learn how to think, run, fight, and talk—even eat, sleep, and crawl—like a hero.

Your muscles needs oxygen to burn calories and convert them into energy, so the better you are at exchanging gases—sucking in oxygen, blowing out carbon dioxide—the longer you can sustain your top speed.

The ancient Greeks knew this; their entire culture was built on the premise that everyone is tinged with a touch of the godly. To be a hero, you had to learn how to think, run, fight, and talk—even eat, sleep, and crawl—like a hero.

a biologist's biggest occupational hazard, second only to falling in love with your research assistants, was falling in love with your hobbies. You become your own test subject; you start seeing the world as a reflection of your own life, and your own life as a reference point for just about every phenomenon in the world.

Sabes por qué podía hacerlo? Porque nunca nadie le había dicho que no podía. Nunca nadie le había dicho que debía estar muriéndose en algún asilo de ancianos. Uno vive según sus propias expectativas, amigo. Como

Robert Schleip, head of the Fascia Research Project at Germany's Ulm University,

From then on and for the rest of his life, Paddy's motto was Solvitur ambulando: "When in doubt, walk.

The real mutants are the runners who don't get injured. Up to eight out of every ten runners are hurt every year. It doesn't matter if you're heavy or thin, speedy or slow, a marathon champ or a weekend huffer, you're just as likely as the other guy to savage your knees, shins, hamstrings, hips, or heels.

During the time at home, Chris focused on a peculiar story he'd first heard years before. An elderly friend had asked him to trim some of her overgrown trees, and as a thank-you she'd given Chris a book about the strange adventures of Patrick Leigh Fermor, known to everyone as Paddy. Paddy was Chris's kind of adventurer—gallant, literary, madcap, merry. Chris dug around for more and soon learned about Paddy's daffy scheme to kidnap a German general.

Schleip, head of the Fascia Research Project at Germany's

lot of foot and knee injuries that are currently plaguing us are actually caused by people running with shoes that actually make our feet weak, cause us to over-pronate, give us knee problems. Until 1972, when the modern athletic shoe was invented by Nike, people ran in very thin-soled shoes, had strong feet, and had much lower incidence of knee injuries.

Whenever an art form loses its fire, when it gets weakened by intellectual inbreeding and first principles fade into stale tradition, a radical fringe eventually appears to blow it up and rebuild from the rubble.

He started eating pinole for breakfast

dice el Demonio—, uno se hace viejo porque deja de correr".

We've become obsessed with things that affect the way we look, instead of the way we move.

Tu nep?rst?j skriet t?d??, ka k??sti vecs, Dipsijas D?mons vienm?r teica. Tu k??sti vecs t?d??, ka p?rst?j skriet.

Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone. —KEN CHLOUBER, Colorado miner and creator of

the event's star attraction made no sense at all, but Fisher was just getting warmed up. He claimed that one of his runners had been slipped a drugged Coke that caused him to "collapse and become deathly ill,