George A. Sheehan Quotes - Page 2

Like everyone else, I want to be challenged. I want to find out whether or not I am a coward. I want to see how much effort I can put out . . . what I can endure . . . if I measure up. Running allows that.

There is nothing more certain than the defeat of the man who gives up.

Life is the greatest experiment. Each of us is an experiment of one-observer and subject-making choices, living with them, recording the effects.

To know you are one with what you are doing, to know that you are a complete athlete, begins with believing you are a runner.

Sport is singularly able to give us peak experience where we feel completely one with the world and transcend all conflicts as we finally become our own potential.

Play is where life lives

For every runner who tours the world running marathons, there are thousands who run to hear leaves and listen to rain and look to the day when it all is suddenly as easy as a bird in flight.

I have found my hero and he is me.

Some think guts is sprinting at the end of a race. But guts is what got you there to begin with. Guts start back in the hills with 6 miles to go and you're thinking of how you can get out of this race without anyone noticing. Guts begin when you still have forty minutes of torture left and you're already hurting more than you ever remember.

I run each day to preserve the self I attained the day before and to secure the self yet to be.

The obsession with running is really an obsession with the potential for more and more life.

If you want to find the answers to the Big Questions about your soul, you'd best begin with the Little Answers about your body.

To keep from decaying, to be a winner, the athlete must accept pain - not only accept it, but look for it, live with it, learn not to fear it.

The mind's first step to self-awareness must be through the body.

The distance runner is mysteriously reconciling the separations of body and mind, of pain and pleasure, of the conscious and the unconscious. He is repairing the rent, and healing the wound in his divided self. He has found a way to make the ordinary extraordinary; the commonplace unique; the everyday eternal.

People begin running for any number of motives, but we stick to it for one basic reason-to find out who we really are.