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 marathoners finish they win.

Because until we write it down, we don't know what is actually at the root of our lives.

The answer to the big questions in running is the same as the answer to the big questions in life: Do the best with what you've got.

Out on the roads there is fitness and self-discovery and the persons we were destined to be.

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

The distance runner is mysteriously reconciling the separations of body and mind, of pain and pleasure, of the conscious and the unconscious. He is repairing the rent, and healing the wound in his divided self. He has found a way to make the ordinary extraordinary; the commonplace unique; the everyday eternal.