Inspirational Running Quotes

"I like running because it’s a challenge. If you run hard, there’s the pain – and you’ve got to work your way through the pain. You know, lately it seems all you hear is? Don’t overdo it’ and? Don’t push yourself.’ Well, I think that’s a lot of bull. If you push the human body, it will respond."
-Bob Clarke

"Run hard, be strong, think big!"
-Percy Cerutty

"It is a paradox to say the human body has no ‘limit.’ There must be a limit to the speed at which men can run. I feel this may be around 3:30 for the mile. However, another paradox remains – if an athlete manages to run 3:30, another runner could be found to marginally improve on that time."
-Sir Roger Bannister

"A lot of people run a race to see who’s the fastest. I run to see who has the most guts."
-Steve Prefontaine

"We can’t all be heroes because someone has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by."
-Will Rogers

"Once you’re beat mentally, you might was well not even go to the starting line."
-Todd Williams

"Now if you are going to win any battle you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do. The body will always give up. It is always tired morning, noon, and night. But the body is never tired if the mind is not tired. When you were younger the mind could make you dance all night, and the body was never tired…You’ve always got to make the mind take over and keep going."
-George S. Patton

"The will to win means nothing if you haven’t the will to prepare."
-Juma Ikangaa

"When the meal was over we all had a quiet rest in our rooms and I meditated on the race. This is the time when an athlete feels all alone in the big world. Opponents assume tremendous stature. Any runner who denies having fears, nerves or some kind of disposition is a bad athlete, or a liar."
-Gordon Pirie

"That is the sort of race which one really enjoys – to feel at one’s peak on the day when it is necessary, and to be able to produce the pace at the very finish. It gives a thrill which compensates for months of training and toiling. But it is the sort of race that one wants only about once a season."
-Jack Lovelock

"We run, not because we think it is doing us good, but because we enjoy it and cannot help ourselves… The more restricted our society and work become, the more necessary it will be to find some outlet for this craving for freedom. No one can say, ‘You must not run faster than this, or hump higher than that.’ The human spirit is indomitable."
-Sir Roger Bannister

"We are different, in essence, from other men. If you want to win something, run 100 meters. If you want to experience something, run a marathon."
-Emil Zatopek

"Marathoning is like cutting yourself unexpectedly. You dip into the pain so gradually that the damage is done before you are aware of it. Unfortunately, when the awareness comes, it is excruciating."
-John Farrington

"A lot of people don’t realize that about 98 percent of the running I put in is anything but glamorous: 2 percent joyful participation, 98 percent dedication! It’s a tough formula. Getting out in the forest in the biting cold and the flattening heat, and putting in kilometer after kilometer."
-Rob de Castella

"If someone says, ‘Hey, I ran 100 miles this week. How far did you run?’ ignore him! What the hell difference does it make?…. The magic is in the man, not the 100 miles."
-Bill Bowerman

"I tell our runners to divide the race into thirds. Run the first part with your head, the middle part with your personality, and the last part with your heart."
-Mike Fanelli

"Those who say that I will lose and am finished will have to run over my body to beat me."
-Said Aouita

"I haven’t seen too many American distance men on the international scene willing to take risks. I saw some U.S. women in Barcelona willing to risk, more than men. The Kenyans risk. Steve Prefontaine risked. I risked – I went through the first half of the Tokyo race just a second off my best 5000 time."
-Billy Mills

"My whole feeling in terms of racing is that you have to be very bold. You sometimes have to be aggressive and gamble."
-Bill Rodgers

"A race is a work of art that people can look at and be affected in as many ways as they’re capable of understanding."
-Steve Prefontaine

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In the long run, exertion regulation wins the day for marathon runners

Long-distance running is widely seen as one of the great physical challenges a human can undertake and as the 2008 Summer Olympics commence in Beijing on August 8, many eager sports fans will await with baited breath the last event of the Games – the men's marathon, held on August 24. For these armchair fans, how marathon runners can complete the grueling, 42.195 km event – physically and mentally – may seem like a great mystery.

Now, reporting in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, Jonathan Esteve-Lanao and Alejandro Lucia at the European University of Madrid and colleagues at the VU University-Amsterdam and the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse describe their investigation of the physiological methods employed by well-trained runners in order to regulate the great physical strain and effort that are needed in order to complete and perform well in marathons and other endurance challenges.

In order to measure the exercise intensity undergone by male runners of various abilities, Esteve-Lanao and colleagues evaluated the heart rate response of 211 middle- and long-distance runners during running competitions ranging in length from five to 100 km. These runners were not elite performers but all were serious competitors and some had enjoyed success in regional competitions.

The researchers found that throughout the course of the races, the runners' heart rate increased in a very controlled way, which appeared to be scaled to the distance of the race. When the heart rate response was scaled to the proportional distance completed, the results across races of different lengths were virtually identical. These findings support the notion that athletes actively manage the increasing strain on their body, in anticipation of reaching the finish line, constantly reassessing their levels of fatigue. Peripheral muscle fatigue, for example, would be highly regulated, with the working muscles giving continuous sensory feedback to the central nervous system to ensure that muscle fatigue is confined within a threshold, above which potentially dangerous consequences – especially muscle damage – could occur.

A surprising finding in this study was that the elite runners didn't run proportionally harder than the less-accomplished athletes and the heart rate response was very similar in all the participants despite the wide variations in competition ability and running performance. This suggests that Paula Radcliffe and other elite marathon runners do so well because of their great, underlying physiological capacity rather than because they put in more effort into their competitions.

Esteve-Lanao and colleagues also investigated instances of discontinuity in a runner's performance, most notably that of "hitting the wall." This happens when the athlete's glycogen stores have run so low that the body must burn stored fat for energy, which does not burn so easily, leading to dramatic fatigue and, potentially, life-threatening collapses, such as Dorando Pietri's collapse, 100 years ago, at the London Olympics in 1908. These examples support the idea that physiological catastrophes can and do occur frequently during strenuous endurance competitions because the athletes are either unwilling or unable to slow down their heart rate, despite dangerously high levels of strain.

The scientists conclude that athletes actively control their relative physiological strain during competition proportionally to the length of the race. According to the runner, Sir Roger Bannister, "The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win," but athletes who are not able to regulate their heart rate over the course of a long-distance race may burn out too soon and end up crashing out of the competition.

Citation: Esteve-Lanao J, Lucia A, deKoning JJ, Foster C (2008) How Do Humans Control Physiological Strain during Strenuous Endurance Exercise? PLoS ONE 3(8): e2943. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002943 http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0002943

Source: Public Library of Science