Best Quotes from Why We Run by Robin Harvie with Page Numbers

I am a runner. This is what I do.

The moment that it happened, my faith in my own abilities would return and I would laugh off the blood and the tears.

To retrace my steps to this place was a way of savoring the memory of an era long past.

Each of us has a breaking point at which we have to recognize that we are no longer in complete control.

Homesickness nowadays is associated with children away from their parents for the first time.

The instinct to return cannot be vocalized immediately.

Every Saturday my brother and I raced into town to watch holidaymakers departing.

The pleasure of empowerment that comes with the accomplishment of a challenge is always profound and rewarding.

To become true long-distance runners, we must accept that we are completely on our own.

In those hours when we are cut off from telephone calls and the nagging reminders of our daily responsibilities, we enjoy an illusion of complete self-sufficiency in which we want for nothing.

"There is a road west out of Cheltenham that narrows and rises quickly to a rocky footpath as it follows the gradient up Sandy Hill."

"Before I looked to the future, to the place where my journey as a runner was going to take me, I would first have to solve the riddle of first cause and uncover the reasons why I had become a runner at all."

"Running outdoors is being in a sort of magical kingdom under whose spell I feel happiest."

"What matters more than anything else is seeking out the challenge of the distance and the terrain, throwing all my effort and daring into conquering it."

"In those hours spent alone, my legs heaving, sweat dripping from my forehead, my lungs feeling as though they are being torn apart, nothing else matters."

"There is no need to invent further justification. There is just the thrill of mapping out my own topology through the landscape, coming to know a little more about my own ability."

"We run to bring depth to our everyday lives, not the other way around."

"The pursuit of fear...comes with an acute sensitivity to death since one false step could end in disaster."

"In running, I have found, without at first knowing it, a taste of the freedom that Scott, Cherry, and Mallory had sought."

"To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield."

"The river teaches patience, endurance, and vigilance."

"To be able to run for 36 hours without stopping... I needed to learn how to wash out all metaphor, all meaning and all imagination, and just run."

"Running! If there’s any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can’t think what it might be."

"What can come if we are lucky, when we spend time on our feet, is clarity of thought, as we work through the issues that have set us down on the road in the first place."

"Without imagination there would be no metaphor."

"We must unharness ourselves from the baggage that we drag around with us, free ourselves from imagination, and learn, as we did as children, what it is to run with our feet alone."

"The way in which it flowed... free and untainted, was how I would need to learn to run to survive the Spartathlon."

"Once this has been accepted, most wounds can heal."

"Just as our personalities change and mature with time, so too is the Thames not a single river, since its personality alters in the course of its journey."

"Every family has secrets, and if you decide to run just to see how far you can go, then you will inevitably have to come to terms with the history that brought you there."

"I can. This year I am going to run a marathon."

"The possibility of failure on the one hand and immortality on the other has dominated the physical and mental ambitions of every athlete."

"Pain seems to be a pre-condition to this kind of sport . . . it is precisely because of the pain, precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive—or at least a partial sense of it."

"For those who trained, manly virtue, or arête, was intrinsically bound up with prowess."

"What unites the athletes of ancient Greece, Zátopek, and the first-time marathoner is that they have produced a runner from within themselves through sacrifice and pain, love and care."

"The marathon provides mortals with the nearest thing to Olympic glory that we can hope for, by bringing us face-to-face with all that defines the athletic experience."

"The spirit of the modern Olympic Games was, then, based less on the memories of the glories of Athens than on the attitude toward physical education in nineteenth-century Britain, in which winning was a mildly embarrassing conclusion to proceedings and what really mattered was fair play."

"Once I was a child, I could not walk. But then I learned to walk. Then I became a boy. And I learned to run."

"You will have to hand your body over to your coach just as you would to a doctor. You will have to obey every instruction."

"In a young man, beauty consists in having a body that can endure all sorts of exertion in running . . . and one that is delightful to gaze upon . . . for men in their prime, beauty belongs to those prepared for the toils of active service: such types are good-looking and awe-inspiring at the same time."

"If you love something it is easy."

"When you have experienced that euphoria... everything else disappears into insignificance."

"We are always running toward the horizon."

"Whatever happens, no one can take those away from you."

"I learned to celebrate the achievement."

"If you do not cry at such times, then you are not human."

"Self-discovery comes when a man measures himself against an obstacle."

"Motion is life, stagnation is death."

"To think of a thing is different from to perceive it, as 'to walk' is from 'to feel the ground under you.'"

"The world that I wanted to inhabit was one that poured away on either side of me: a universe of no attachments, of disappearing plains."

"When it hurts, we return to the banks of certain rivers."

"Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness."

"Life is the greatest, happiest and often toughest adventure of all and I have fallen in love with it all over again."

"Pain and suffering are often the catalysts for life’s most profound lessons."

"To experience nature in its totality means going to find it ourselves."

"Beyond the extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction."

"It’s about discovery. It’s about finding one’s path. It’s about using experience in life to shape something completely different. That’s the art of living."

"Running was not about racing or competition. It was about an education on the grace of living."

"With the solitude of those hours came a better empathetic understanding of what Sara Maitland calls in A Book of Silence the 'interior dimension of silence—stillness of the heart and the mind.'"

"The transformation is in the act of running itself, which turns running from a mode of travel—to a mode of being."

"The word 'impossible' still reverberated around my skull, and at times I wondered what I had gotten myself into by shackling myself to this ridiculous idea."

"As the last explorers in a mapped-out world, we were pioneers pushing back the boundaries so that those left behind could enjoy a sense of exploration in their own imaginations."

"It was for this that I had spent those hours wrapped in plastic garbage bags and wool hats in the middle of the summer, sweat gushing off me."

"The essence of running is a metaphor for life, and to run the Spartathlon was a way for us to become better people."

"In my mind, the last year had been constructed out of straight lines and grids of regular shapes imposed regimentally on my daily routine. And now, in the morning haze, that was all about to be broken apart."

"What we were anticipating, as we prepared to take our bodies to the limits of their capability, was what Arthur Koestler described in The Act of Creation as 'an upward surge from the unknown, fertile, underground layers of the mind.'"

"To survive its rigors requires an interior peacefulness in which, as James wrote, we feel 'the keynote of the universe sounding in our ears, and everlasting possession spread before our eyes.'"

"The truly creative act often starts where language ends."

"Time passed more slowly now, gently doing its work."

"Once again I have rubbed shoulders with a truth without fully comprehending it... and then with renunciation I knew peace."