Quotes About Endurance

You cannot change your height, the width of your hips, the length of your feet, or any of several other anthropometric variables affecting endurance performance that I have discussed in this chapter. You can't change your genetic potential for leanness, either. But you can reduce your body-fat percentage (and thereby adjust your weight) to the level that is optimal for performance in your chosen endurance sport given your unchangeable genetic constraints.

Anticarb sentiment in the endurance sports community is an ideological spillover from the weight-loss diet culture.

Body weight and body-fat percentage have no meaning in isolation for endurance athletes. These variables have meaning only in relation to performance. Weighing 145 pounds is not better than weighing 155 pounds unless you perform better at the lighter weight. A body-fat percentage of 12 is better than a body-fat percentage of 13 only if you're faster at 12 percent.

Remember, anything you do as an athlete that helps you perform better is likely to make you leaner as well; including enough carbohydrates in your diet is another example of this principle.

How fortunate we were who still had hope I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die

There is a strange lack of dignity in conquest; the dull, uncomplaining endurance of defeat appears more worthy of congratulation.

When the sound of victorious guns burst over London at 11 a.m. on November 11th, 1918, the men and women who looked incredulously into each other's faces did not cry jubilantly: " We've won the war! " They only said: " The War is over.

You see, when everything else is gone, there's always work. I don't think anyone ever realises how much work can mean until the other things are gone.

Patience is not a virtue. It is an achievement.

Hope is the last thing that dies. Maybe because hope is one of those dratted things that is truly, honestly, genuinely immortal.

You can lose your freedom, your health, your honor, everything you love and care about. And yet, if you still have your purpose, you have lost nothing

Always," he says softly. "It is what I intend to do for as long as I breathe.

No one session or week of training will make an athlete's career, but one session or week can break it.

No one workout can make an athlete, but one workout can break an athlete.

To paraphrase Steve Jobs, "I'm always amazed how overnight successes take a helluva long time.

Often the struggler has given up, When he might have captured the victor's cup. And he learned too late when the night came down, How close he was to the golden crown. Success is failure turned inside out, The silver tint of the clouds of doubt. And you never can tell how close you are, It may be near when it seems afar. So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit, It's when things seem worst that you mustn't quit. And that's worth thinking about.

Courage comes and goes. Hold on for the next supply.

James Howard Williams died during an emergency appendectomy. So accustomed to the burning ache of his ulcer, he mistook the new, sharper agony as more of the same. The man who never spoke of his woes stoically bore the pain of a burst appendix until it was too late.

What I learnt from that was that the exhaustion that pain brings arises because we resist it. The thing is to learn to go with the pain, to ride it.

What is to give light must endure burning.

Mortimer had maxed three credit cards stocking the cave with canned goods and medical supplies and tools and everything a man needed to live through the end of the world. There were more than a thousand books along shelves in the driest part of the cave. There used to be several boxes of pornography until Mortimer realized that he'd spent nearly ten days in a row sitting in the cave masturbating. He burned the dirty magazines to keep from doing some terrible whacking injury to himself.

You think your muscles hurt? Try a blade in the belly.

If suffer we must, let's suffer on the heights.

Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.