Quotes from Don Kardong

Grizzly bears eat people without the benefit of music.

The body responds to a calorie deficit by slowing down the metabolism and burning muscle tissue. That leads to weakness, sluggishness, slow times. In girls, it can also result in cessation of menstrual periods, which in turn leads to loss of bone density and frequent stress fractures.

The Kenyans beat up on the American runners in every road race every weekend of the year, but we're way ahead of them in the number and quality of our Elvis impersonators. We get our X-Men and gorillas.

Avoid any diet that discourages the use of hot fudge.

Without ice cream, there would be darkness and chaos.

Avoid any diet that dicourages the use of hot fudge.

Prior to the 1976 Olympics, I was a 5,000m runner.

Running at night used to frighten me. Part of it was simply safety, the question of whether level ground would truly appear under each tentative footstep, and whether the temporary but complete blindness suffered while running toward headlights was, in fact, concealing death.

Without ice cream there would be darkness and chaos.

No doubt a brain and some shoes are essential for marathon success, although if it comes down to a choice, pick the shoes. More people finish marathons with no brains than with no shoes.

Coaches know that a parent publicly scolding his kid after a race will not help the athlete perform better.

New nemeses keep racing fresh, but I also find challenge in going longer, with only the distance as foe. I run my first 50-mile race, journey across the Grand Canyon and back, circumnavigate Mount St. Helens.

There's always somebody doing something more extreme than you are. It used to be that if you ran the marathon, that was the end of it.

When I started running, a gadget was a wristwatch with a secondhand on it.

Cold is not without its risks to runners, of course, especially ones who don't head south when winter visits their neighborhood. Even pooh-pooh-ers of frozen lungs and lovers of dark jogs over permafrost have been known to be careful about certain hazards.

I know runners who have suffered a tick bite and ended up with Lyme disease. I'll take an angry moose any day.

Cheer for your teammates, regardless of whether they're fast or slow, veteran or neophyte, varsity or JV. Or rally the spirits of someone who's had a bad performance. Also, encourage stragglers during tough workouts; jog back to 'pick up' a runner who's behind during a long run.

Even for runners who never make the transition to more sophisticated workouts, easing into speedwork will lead to more enjoyable running.

When I was in middle school, and teachers lectured about World War II, the conflict seemed impossibly distant and irrelevant. And it had only happened 15 years earlier.

My introduction to dissociation had been at Kenneth Cooper's clinic in January of 1975. Cooper had assembled a gaggle of top American distance runners and a half dozen top researchers, the intent being to figure out what the difference was - physiologically, biomechanically, psychologically - between elite and subelite runners.

I've never owned an actual trail-running shoe myself, but maybe I should. My favorite paths are fraught with peril, much of it skulking at shoelace level. A rock, a root, an errant pine cone. Wham, and you're down, choking in dust and picking pebbles from wounds in your forearms and knees.

In those long, lonely miles you put in during the off-season, and in those knife-in-the-gut track repetitions and hill repeats that buckle your knees - at that moment in almost every race when you ask yourself how much you're willing to hurt to catch one more runner - you can draw strength and inspiration from your running mates.

An overzealous parent is just one example of the kind of Problem Mom or Dad who pops up at track meets, threatening to put a damper on the day.

Support the athlete, encourage the team, help the coach. That's what good track parents do.