George A. Sheehan Quotes

I will not last forever. But I am damn well going to know I have been here.

Fitness is just a stage you pass through on the way to becoming a racer.

I have met my hero, and he is me.

Listen to your body. Do not be a blind and deaf tenant.

There are as many reasons for running as there are days in a year ... But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child.

Exercise is done against one's wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse.

Everyone is an athlete. The only difference is that some of us are in training, and some are not.

Every runner is an experiment of one.

To make your life a work of art, you must have the material to work with. The race, any race, is just such an experience.

Fitness has to be fun. If it is not play there will be no fitness. Play, you see, is where the process. Fitness is merely the product.

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 an essential element of education.

The real competition is against the little voice inside you that wants to quit

Out on the roads there is fitness and self-discovery and the persons we were destined to be.

Sweat cleanses from the inside. It comes from places a shower will never reach.

Life is a positive-sum game. Everyone from the gold medallist to the last finisher can rejoice in a personal victory.

If marathoners finish they win.

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 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.

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

Play is where life lives

Exercise: you don't have time not to

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

Because until we write it down, we don't know what is actually at the root of our lives.

The difference between a jogger and a runner is an entry blank.

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.

Once you have decided that winning isn't everything, you become a winner.

There is no substitute for learning to live in our bodies.

The desire to run comes from deep within us - from the unconscious, the instinctive, the intuitive.

Have you ever felt worse after a run?

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

The answer to the big questions in running is the same as the answer to the big questions in life: Do the best with what you've got.

If you want to win anything - a race, yourself, your life - you have to go a little berserk.

Anything that changes your values changes your behavior.

The most important thing I learned [from running] is that there is only one runner in this race, and that is me.

Happiness is different from pleasure. Happiness has something to do with struggling and enduring and accomplishing.

Of all the races, there is no better stage for heroism than a marathon.

Why race? The need to be tested, perhaps; the need to take risks; and the chance to be number one.

Nothing is more certain than the defeat of a man who gives up.

We who run ... are different from those who merely study us. We are out there experiencing what they are trying to put into words.