Quotes by Christopher McDougall

“Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone.~Ken Chlouber, Colorado miner and creator of the Leadville Trail 100 mile race”

“That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they'd never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind's first fine art, our original act of inspired creatio...”

“If you don't have answers to your problems after a four-hour run, you ain't getting them.”

“Perhaps all our troubles - all the violence, obesity, illness, depression, and greed we can't overcome - began when we stopped living as Running People. Deny your nature, and it will erupt in some ...”

“Ask nothing from your running, and you'll get more than you ever imagined!”

“Suffering is humbling. It pays to know how to get your butt kicked.”

“You don't have to be fast. But you'd better be fearless.”

“Maybe the wild ones weren't hyperactive; maybe they were misplaced heroes. After all, in another era, the same behavior that is now throttled with Ritalin and disciplinary rap sheets would have bee...”

“We run when we're scared, we run when we're ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time.”

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest ga...”

“Blaming the running injury epidemic on big, bad Nike seems too easy - but that's okay, because it's largely their fault.”

“-The reason we race isn't so much to beat each other but to be with each other. -The Hopis consider running a form of prayer; they offer every step as a sacrifice to a loved one, and in return ask ...”

“...there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love *running*. The engineering was certainly the same: both depended on loosening your grip on your own desire...”

“Nearly all runners do their slow runs too fast, and their fast runs too slow." Ken Mierke says. "So they're just training their bodies to burn sugar, which is the last thing a distance runner wants...”

“We wouldn't be alive without love we wouldn't have survived without running maybe we shouldn't be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.”

“Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and i...”

“Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and dont look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by, Kerouac wrote. Trails are like that: youre ...”

“He was onto something. Something huge. It wasn't just how to run; it was how to live, the essence of who we are as a species and what we're meant to be.”

“Imagine your kid is running into the street and you have to sprint after her in bare feet," Eric told me when I picked up my training with him after my time with Ken. "You'll automatically lock int...”

“Vigil couldn't quite put his finger on it, but his gut kept telling him that there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love running. The engineering was cer...”