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

There are as many reasons for running as there are days in a year.... But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child.

If you want to find the answers to the Big Questions about your soul, you'd best begin with the Little Answers about your body.

To make your life a work of art, you must have the material to work with. The race, any race, is just such an experience.

If marathoners finish they win.

The key then is to find your own mountain, otherwise you will be competing with people who are not even in your event, and running up against the 'shoulds' and 'oughts' of that world, and the inevitable frustration and depression and feelings of failure. A person can be complete or incomplete, but one thing is sure, he cannot be someone else.

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.