Quotes About Endurance

Science has demonstrated that some athletes have a higher tolerance for pain and suffering than others do, and that those who have a higher tolerance are more accepting of these sensations.

Running too hard too often is the single most common and detrimental mistake in the sport.

There are two types of nutrition that have the potential to significantly enhance performance when consumed during running: water and carbohydrate. It is no accident that these are the two main ingredients in almost all sports drinks intended for use during exercise. Most

That it's possible. You just have to fight. It will not be easy. But you can manage. Because life is giving you as much pain as you are capable [of living] with. And on the end of that path, the goal will be reachable. You will have suffered to do [it], but it doesn't matter.

That desperate tug-of-war between the desire to persevere and the overwhelming temptation to quit. And he loved it.

It was a very hard race from the word go with a combination of great runners and a tough course," he wrote. "I had my problems winning. I felt several times like giving into the pain and letting Gary [sic] win but I just couldn't. I just kept driving myself harder and harder, longer and longer.

The six steps that the highest-performing athletes most often take to attain their racing weight are by definition the most effective weight-management methods for endurance athletes because the objective of weight management in endurance sports is better performance

Achieve complete mastery of his mind by pushing back the limits of his capacity to suffer until those limits disappeared.

This pain and suffering. This was my trophy ceremony.

eating enough carbohydrate every day will allow you to train harder, better absorb the stress of your training, and perform better in important workouts than you would without adequate carbohydrate intake.

Your physical capacities are only part of the big picture," he told the gathering. "If your spirit is happy and strong, then you're stable under pressure.

If you want to get a sense of what a very high level of perceived effort feels like in isolation from fatigue, find a steep hill and run up it as fast as you can. (You should probably warm up first.) That feeling of trying as hard as you can that hits you immediately, before fatigue sets in, is the feeling of a very high level of perceived effort.

Interestingly, slushie ingestion not only delayed the point at which the subjects reached a critically high core body temperature, but also allowed a higher tolerable core body temperature before exhaustion was reached. In other words, the slushie let them start colder and get hotter.

Physical fitness determines where the wall that represents your physical limit is placed. Mental fitness determines how close you are able to get to that limit in competition.

mainly by increasing tolerance for perceived effort and by reducing the amount of effort that is perceived at any given intensity of exercise.

I call these lifelines: little mantras that come to me spontaneously in the crisis moments of races -- attempts by The Person I Want to Be to gain my weaker side's acceptance of the pain I am inflicting on myself.

In reality, the scenario I've just described could never happen. Perceived effort is essentially the body's resistance to the mind's will. The fitter an athlete becomes, the less resistance the body puts up. Therefore increased physical capacity is always felt.

runners with very heavy training loads need more carbohydrate than runners with more moderate training loads. The more you train, the more carbs your body uses, and the more carbohydrate your body uses, the more carbs you need to eat to maintain adequate muscle glycogen stores.

Because the only way to become really good at coping with the discomforts and stresses of endurance sports is to experience them.

If I was ever going to win Ironman, I was going to have to beat the man who rinsed his cottage cheese

Body weight is the enemy of running performance. Running is, after all, a continuous fight against gravity. With every stride you take your body must be lifted completely off the ground, because all of the progress you make when running is made while your body is airborne. What's

Afterward, AR50 race director Julie Fingar pulled me aside and explained to me that the whole reason ultrarunners become ultrarunners is that they're too slow to qualify for Boston.

The Seven-Hour Standard is doing seven hours of running per week distributed across either six days with one day of absolute rest or seven days with one day of relative rest.

FASTING WORKOUTS. A fasting workout is a long, moderate-intensity workout undertaken in a fasting state—that is, without a meal beforehand and without carbohydrate consumption on the bike. When you deprive your muscles of carbohydrate in a long workout, they burn a lot more fat. Such workouts also boost general fat-burning capacity. I suggest that you perform one fasting workout per week during a quick start.