Examine the opportunities, the challenges you've given yourself.

It is clearly not the journey for everyone. People succeed in as many ways as there are people. Some can be completely fulfilled with destinations that are much closer to home and more comfortable. But if you long to keep going, then I hope you are able to follow my lead to the places I have gone. To within a whisper of your own personal perfection. To places that are sweeter because you worked so hard to arrive there. To places at the very edge of your dreams.

There's a complete difference between training for a specific event and goal and just training.

The only thing you can never change is your values.

All my life I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but it's impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasn't left an imprint through the generations.

You can't control what the other athlete is going to do; you can't control anything except for your competition and how you execute the race or how you execute the task.

As an athlete, I'd average four hours a day. It doesn't sound like a lot when some people say they're training for 10 hours, but theirs includes lunch, massage and breaks. My four hours was packed with work.