There are as many reasons for running as there are days in the year, years in my life. But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child, an artist and a saint. So, too, are you. Find your own play, your own self-renewing compulsion, and you will become the person you are meant to be.

Exercise: you don't have time not to

The obsession with running is really an obsession with the potential for more and more life.

Running is just such a monastery- a retreat, a place to commune with God and yourself, a place for psychological and spiritual renewal.

The more I run, the more I want to run, and the more I live a life conditioned and influenced and fashioned by my running. And the more I run, the more certain I am that I am heading for my real goal: to become the person I am.

The study of motivation goes back to the Greeks. Their sports were essential to their education. They saw in sports the integration of body, mind and soul, the creation of beauty, the mastering of athletics, and the challenge of competition. A French sociologist points this out. "Sports," he wrote, was part of the education of the citizen. He was expected to engage in exercise for a whole series of reasons that had to do with the shaping of the citizen; the relation between moral good and physical good; and the growth of a person.

If you want to win anything - a race, yourself, your life - you have to go a little berserk.