Fitness is just a stage you pass through on the way to becoming a racer.

Sweat cleanses from the inside. It comes from places a shower will never reach.

On the roads, I can see truth revealed whole without thought or reason. There I experience the sudden understanding that comes unasked, unbidden. I simply rest, rest within myself, rest within the pure rhythm of my running. And I wait.

Sport is an essential element of education.

There is nothing more certain than the defeat of the man who gives up.

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.

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