Cycling is so hard, the suffering is so intense, that it’s absolutely cleansing. The pain is so deep and strong that a curtain descends over your brain….Once; someone asked me what pleasure I took in riding for so long. ‘PLEASURE???? I said.’ ‘I don’t understand the question.’ I didn’t do it for the pleasure; I did it for the pain.
But the fact is that I wouldn't have won even a single Tour de France without the lesson of illness. What it teaches is this: pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.
[The] pain is temporary. It may last a minute, an hour, a day, or a year, but eventually it subsides. And when it does, something else takes its place, and that thing might be called a greater space for happiness ... Each time we overcome pain, I believe that we grow.
Pain is only temporary. Quitting is forever!
Marathons are hard because of the physical pain, the pounding on the muscles, joints, tendons.
Pain is temporary. Eventually it will subside. If I quit, however, the surrender stays with me.
Hey. Pain can last a moment, it can last a day, it can last a week, it can last a long..long time, but it can't last forever and the only thing that can last forever is if you quit.
Cancer taught me a plan for more purposeful living, and that in turn taught me how to train and to win more purposefully. It taught me that pain has a reason, and that sometimes the experience of losing things-whether health or a car or an old sense of self-has its own value in the scheme of life. Pain and loss are great enhancers.
