Competing is exciting and winning is exhilarating, but the true prize will always be the self-knowledge and understanding that you have gained along the way.

World records are only borrowed.

I've always felt that long, slow distance produces long, slow runners.

I believed that we had to answer the question: Why are we doing this? And it wasn’t until we started to articulate, internally as an organisation, that it was about using the Games to inspire young people to participate in sports that we each understood what we had to do.

To anyone who has started out on a long campaign believing that the gold medal was destined for him, the feeling when, all of a sudden, the medal has gone somewhere else is quite indescribable.

I became a great runner because if you're a kid in Leeds and your name is Sebastian you've got to become a great runner.

We need to be confident. We need not to blink.