He was onto something. Something huge. It wasn't just how to run; it was how to live, the essence of who we are as a species and what we're meant to be.

If you can run six miles on a summer day, then you, my friend, are a lethal weapon in the animal kingdom.

...there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love *running*. The engineering was certainly the same: both depended on loosening your grip on your own desires, putting aside what you wanted and appreciating what you've got, being patient and forgiving and... undemanding...maybe we shouldn't be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.

If you don't have answers to your problems after a four-hour run, you ain't getting them.

There is a growing subculture of barefoot runners, people who got rid of their shoes. And what they have found uniformly is you get rid of the shoes, you get rid of the stress, you get rid of the injuries and the ailments.

The only way to truly conquer something, as every great philosopher and geneticist will tell you, is to love it.

Know why people run marathons? …Because running is rooted in our collective imagination, and our imagination is rooted in running. Language, art, science; space shuttles, Starry Night, intravascular surgery; they all had their roots in our ability to run. Running was the superpower that made us human — which means its a superpower all humans posses.