Athletic Potential Quotes
“No citizen has a right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training… what a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
~Socrates
“The difference between the mile and the marathon is the difference between burning your fingers with a match and being slowly roasted over hot coals”
~Hal Higdon
“THE EDGE, there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”
~Hunter S. Thompson
“Dig deep into that inexhaustible well of grit, guts, and determination.”
~Ken Chlouber
“You’re better than you think you are you can do more than you think you can.”
~Ken Chlouber
“Is this level of athletic competition the ultimate distraction from real life? Or is it a form of prayer?”
~Norah Vincent
“Pushing your body past what you thought it was capable of is easy; the hard part is pushing yourself even further… past what your mind wants to let you. That’s what ultrarunning is all about; introducing you to a self you’ve never known.”
~Rex Pace
“Pain is a wonderful thing and now I was feeling wonderful, really wonderful!!!”
~Unknown trail runner on Mt. Baldy
“Ultras, where the athlete pays and the spectator gets in free.”
~Unkown
I stood in unimaginable trance and agony that cannot be remembered.
~Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“We take these risks not to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping us.”
~Submitted by Scott Crabb
“I decided to go for a little run.”
~Forrest Gump
“Obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off the goal.”
~Luis Escobar
“BTW, I still think the WS trail is one of the most beautiful places that I have vomited.”
~Mary Gorski
“Every man dies, but not every man really lives.”
~William Wallace
“The way to heaven leads right through the depths of hell.”
~Peter Bakwin
“There is no satisfaction without a struggle first.”
~Marty Liquori
“Don’t fear moving slowly forward … fear standing still.”
~Kathleen Harris
“It’s very hard in the beginning to understand that the whole idea is not to beat the other runners. Eventually you learn that the competition is against the little voice inside you that wants you to quit.”
~George Sheehan
“If you run hard, there’s the pain — and you’ve got to work your way through the pain … You know, lately it seems all you hear is ‘Don’t overdo it’ and ‘Don’t push yourself.’ Well, I think that’s a lot of bull. If you push the human body, it will respond.”
~Bob Clarke
“Perhaps the genius of ultrarunning is its supreme lack of utility. It makes no sense in a world of space ships and supercomputers to run vast distances on foot. There is no money in it and no fame, frequently not even the approval of peers. But as poets, apostles and philosophers have insisted from the dawn of time, there is more to life than logic and common sense. The ultra runners know this instinctively. And they know something else that is lost on the sedentary. They understand, perhaps better than anyone, that the doors to the spirit will swing open with physical effort. In running such long and taxing distances they answer a call from the deepest realms of their being — a call that asks who they are …”
~David Blaikie
“The luxurious ache of tired but not weary limbs.”
~Michael Fairless
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
~Theodore Roosevelt
“Come on, you sons of bitches – do you want to live forever”
~Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly
“Just go out there and simutaneously piss in your shorts, fart like a foghorn and drink from your mud-caked bottle. While you’re at it let some liquid dribble down your chin onto your shirt, look up at the starry night and laugh like a raving lunatic. Fook em all. You’re doing what you love to do and no one can stop you.”
~Michael Musca
“When we walk to the edge of all the light we have and take the step into the darkness of the unknown, we must believe that one of two things will happen. There will be something solid for us to stand on, or we will be taught to fly.”
~Patrick Overton
“You’ll be wistful for the “wall” of the marathon, when you hit the “death grip” of the ultra.”
~Bob Glover
“I swear, I’ll never do this again.”
~Unknown
“We’ll tell you when to start and we’ll tell you when to stop. In between, don’t think, just keep running.”
~Ken Chlouber
“A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame and money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.”
~K. Chesterton
“The best long distance runners eat raw meat, run naked and sleep in the snow.”
~Alaska Airlines advertisement honoring Iditarod dogs
“There are times in our lives when we are drawn uncontrollably to some dangerous source of misery.”
~Suzi Thibeault
“When you are 99 miles into a 100-mile running race, your brain is not the same brain you started with”.
~Paul Huddle
“Any idiot can run a marathon. It takes a special kind of idiot to run an ultramarathon.”
~Alan Cabelly
“Last is just the slowest winner.”
~Hunter Boyd
“Rewards are on a level with the effort, and the effort is extreme.”
~an unidentified “Utah runner”
“Despite what seems like the extraordinary nature of these events, in the end, they make you even more human.
~Joel McNamara
“Exercise is for people who can’t handle drugs and alcohol.”
~Lily Tomlin
“Find your limits and exceed them.”
~Lynn Strickland
“Your body will argue that there is no justifiable reason to continue. Your only recourse is to call on your spirit, which fortunately functions independently of logic.”
~Tim Noakes
“Beware of the chair!”
~Unknown
“No matter how well you know the course, no matter how well you may have done in a given race in the past, you never know for certain what lies ahead on the day you stand at the starting line waiting to test yourself once again. If you did know, it would not be a test; and there would be no reason for being there.”
~Dan Baglione
“If I can’t go faster I’ll go longer.”
~Doug Barber
“The longest hill must end in a valley.”
~Henry C. Beeching
“Speed is sex … distance is love.”
~David Blaikie
“The road to excess leads to the place of wisdom, for we can never know what is enough until we have experienced too much.”
~William Blake
“In ultrarunning, the pain is inevitable, but the suffering is optional.”
~Al Bogenhuber
“A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or else what’s a heaven for?”
~Robert Browning
“Go fast enough to get there, but slow enough to see.”
~Jimmy Buffett
“I like those people. They are calmer and cooler, I think. Personality-wise, they are rich. An ultra runner is not somebody who is normally going to wish you bad. On the contrary if you are down an ultra runner will help you.”
~Michel Careau
“Vincit qui patitur: he conquers, who endures”
~Percy Cerutty
“If it hurts, make it hurt more”
~Percy Cerutty
“I think the novelty has worn off.”
~Jack Chapman
“The only way to define your limits is by going beyond them.”
~Arthur Clarke
“If you think you won’t finish, you won’t.”
~Dick Collins
“Champions are born with the right stuff, but still must suffer the stresses of training to achieve full potential.”
~David Costill
“Speed and strength are of diminishing importance at greater and greater distances.”
~David Costill
“The most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”
~Pierre de Courbertin
“The only way to be who you want to be is by being what you haven’t yet been.”
~Sally Edwards
“Great spirits often encounter violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
~Albert Einstein
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.”
~T.S. Eliot
“Do the thing and have the power”
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience”
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The people that I have met are not foolish; they are aware of how tired and cold and hungry and frightened and hurting and discouraged and disoriented and how possibly injured they will become. They know they will face great physical, mental, emotional, and possibly spiritual challenges as they make their way to the finish. This is what they are racing against. This is their challenge. This is what I admire.”
~Carolyn Erdman
“If at first you don’t succeed, you can always become an ultramarathoner.”
~Bruce Fordyce
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.”
~Robert Frost
“Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it.”
~Goethe
“A man’s got to know his limitations.”
~Dirty Harry
“Drink, drink, drink! Pee, pee, pee!”
~Ed Hart
“The gulf between what we feel we are doing and what others perceive us to be doing will remain the most ultra of all distances, one that no amount of miles or words can finally bridge.”
~Hart
“It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”
~Dolores Ibarruri
“Because I can.”
~Tom Johnson
“Security is mostly a superstition; it does not exist in nature. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”
~Helen Keller
“If you can’t fly, then run.
If you can’t run, then walk.
If you can’t walk, then crawl.
But whatever you do, keep moving.”
~Martin Luther King, Jr.
“The endurance athlete is the ultimate realist.”
~Marty Liquori
“Fatigue makes cowards of us all”
~Vince Lombardi
“Fear is a part of everything you do … You have to take great risks to get big rewards.”
~Greg Louganis
“No matter what hurts at the beginning, by the end of the race something else will hurt worse.”
~Bob O’Connor
“Pain is good. Extreme Pain is Extremely Good …”
~Navy Seals
“That which does not destroy me makes me stronger”
~Nietzsche
“Whoever fights monsters should see that in the process he does not become a monster. When you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
~Nietzsche
“The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection.”
~Thomas Paine
“Each time you run you will receive lessons. You have enrolled in the school of ultrarunning. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid. What you think makes no difference; the lessons will be presented until they are learned.”
~Keith Pippin
“Self-conquest is the greatest of victories.”
~Plato
“You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
~Eleanor Roosevelt
“Too much is better than not enough.”
~Kyle Rothweiler
“I had as many doubts as anyone else. Standing on the starting line, we’re all cowards.”
~Alberto Salazar
“The will to do, the soul to dare.”
~Sir Walter Scott
“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.”
~George Sheehan
“It’s the quitting that really is hard.”
~Gene Thibeault
“You move from doing things to show other people you could, to where you do things to look into yourself, into your soul, and see who you are and what youre all about.”
~Scott Weber
“There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.”
~Elie Wiesel
“Anything worth doing is worth doing to the extreme.”
~Bruce Wise
“Your biggest challenge isn’t someone else. It’s the ache in your lungs and the burning in your legs, and the voice inside you that yells ‘CAN’T”, but you don’t listen. You just push harder. And then you hear the voice whisper ‘can’. And you discover that the person you thought you were is no match for the one you really are.”
~Unknown
“Adversity introduces a man to himself.”
~Unknown
“I can’t reveal the mystery to either saint or sinner; I can’t state at length what I’ve said curtly; I achieve an altered state that I can’t explain; I have a secret that I cannot share.”
~Omar Khayyám