The music of the marathon is a powerful martial strain, one of those tunes of glory. It asks us to forsake pleasures, to discipline the body, to find courage, to renew faith and to become one's own person, utterly and completely.

Running has given me the courage to start, the determination to keep trying, and the childlike spirit to have fun along the way. Run often and run long, but never outrun your joy of running.

Your toughness is made up of equal parts persistence and experience. You don't so much outrun your opponents as outlast and outsmart them, and the toughest opponent of all is the one inside your head.

Every run is a work of art, a drawing on each day's canvas. Some runs are shouts and some runs are whispers. Some runs are eulogies and others celebrations. When you're angry, a run can be a sharp slap in the face. When happy, a run is your song. And when your running progresses enough to become the chrysalis through which your life is viewed, motivation is almost beside the point. Rather, it's running that motivates you for everything else the day holds.

Of course it was painful, and there were times when, emotionally, I just wanted to chuck it all. But pain seems to be a precondition for this kind of sport. If pain weren't involved, who in the world would ever go to the trouble of taking part in sports like the triathlon or the marathon, which demand such an investment of time and energy? It's precisely because of the pain, precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive--or at least a partial sense of it. Your quality of experience is based not on standards such as time or ranking, but on finally awakening to an awareness of the fluidity within action itself.

The marathon offers far more than a physical challenge... More than any other athletic event it favors the thinkers, the planners. The ability to develop and execute a training plan, to monitor and adjust to changing conditions, to set an appropriate pace, and to concentrate for hours on one task, all contribute more to marathon success than leg speed. We find satisfaction in a sport where natural ability won't cover up for ignorance or irrationality.

We all have bad days and bad workouts, when running gets ugly, when split times seem slow, when you wonder why you started. It will pass.

Every time I fail, I assume I will be a stronger person for it. I keep on running figuratively and literally, despite a limp that gets more noticeable with each passing season, because for me there has always been a place to go and a terrible urgency to get there.

It's not uncommon to go to bed thinking, 'Darn, I should have run today.' It's not common to go to bed thinking, 'I shouldn't have run today.'

Even if there were two of me, I still couldn't do all that has to be done. No matter what, though, I keep up my running. Running every day is a kind of lifeline for me, so I'm not going to lay off or quit just because I'm busy. If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I'd never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished.

It's not the races you enter that count. It's your runs in training and sticking with it. It's how you adjust to injury and how you recover that makes you a good runner.

As runners, we all go through many transitions—transitions that closely mimic the larger changes we experience in a lifetime. First, we try to run faster. Then we try to run harder. Then we learn to accept ourselves and our limitations, and at last, we can appreciate the true joy and meaning of running.

Stadiums are for spectators. We runners have nature and that is much better.

We runners don't need a lot. It is not what we have but what we enjoy that constitutes our abundance.

Your mind can make you train, your body can create power, but only your heart can make you a champion.

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.

You're a runner when you prefer marathon movies over movie marathons.

When I'm racing, there is no place to hide from a lack of determination, no way to rationalize that I'm doing my absolute best unless I really am. My faults are right there to feel. It's all a result of how hard I've worked, or how hard I haven't. Racing produces one significant outcome: it forces you to be honest with yourself.

It's at the borders of pain and suffering that the men are separated from the boys.

Can you celebrate where you are in your training? In the course of many miles (aka, life) we can become lazy or cynical about mile markers. We become numb to small victories. Maybe we brush them aside, our eyes and hearts fixated on the bigger goal. Or maybe we are afraid to celebrate, thinking that we don't deserve it until we reach the prize, or we will jinx ourselves by counting our chickens before they hatch. This thinking is not only misguided, it steals our joy! If we reach the big victory our joy will not be diminished by having celebrated steps taken in the right direction along the way. And if we don't reach the goal, we may be disappointed, but we will have fully embraced the journey—and perhaps that is the real prize all along.