Top 100 Mcdougall Quotes
#1. I read Christopher McDougall's book 'Born to Run.' If running were a religion, this would be its bible. I actually scribbled my favorite passages on my arm to read during the race.
Jennifer Carpenter
#2. Anatoly Karpov, his by-the-book opponent, was too conservative to pressure Kasparov early in the game, so Kasparov put the pressure on himself with a Queen's Gambit - and won.
Christopher McDougall
#4. What about our human rights,' demanded Carl, who'd gathered a small deputation of kids within minutes. 'There is a WAR ON,' said Crewman Devlin, shortly. I wondered if this meant grown-ups actually listen to you when there wasn't a war on, because somehow I was sceptical.
Sophia McDougall
#5. To the tarahumara, asking direct questions is a show of force, a demand for a possession inside their head.
Christopher McDougall
#6. One of the most dangerous and best-kept secrets of the medical profession is the epidemic of anesthesiologists who are addicted to their own drugs.
Christopher McDougall
#7. Perhaps all our troubles - all the violence, obesity, illness, depression, and greed we can't overcome - began when we stopped living as Running People. Deny your nature, and it will erupt in some other, uglier way.
Christopher McDougall
#8. Humans are built for endurance, not speed. We're awful sprinters compared to every other animal. We try to run our races as if they were speed races, but they are not. They're endurance races. Even a marathon, the way it's run now, it's not an endurance contest.
Christopher McDougall
#9. In 'Tarahumara' land, there was no crime, war or theft. There was no corruption, obesity, drug addiction, greed, wife-beating, child abuse, heart disease, high blood pressure, or carbon emissions. They didn't get diabetes, or depressed, or even old: 50-year-olds outran teenagers.
Christopher McDougall
#10. In terms of nutritional content, a tablespoon of chia is like a smoothie made from salmon, spinach, and human growth hormone.
Christopher McDougall
#13. Do you remember any great poet that ever illustrated the higher fields of humanity that did not dignify the use of wine from Homer on down?
James A. McDougall
#15. High protein diets make you sick in the long and short term. Expect kidney disease, heart disease and more strokes and cancer. Plus the weight loss is temporary because you can't stay sick for long. Look at the creators of these diets - many are fat themselves.
John A. McDougall
#16. Sherlock Holmes gets to be brilliant, solitary, abrasive, Bohemian, whimsical, brave, sad, manipulative, neurotic, vain, untidy, fastidious, artistic, courteous, rude, a polymath genius. Female characters get to be Strong.
Sophia McDougall
#18. Vigil couldn't quite put his finger on it, but his gut kept telling him that there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love running.
Christopher McDougall
#19. If you don't have answers to your problems after a four-hour run, you ain't getting them.
Christopher McDougall
#20. Lesson two,' Caballo called. 'Think Easy, Light, Smooth, and Fast. You start with easy, because if that's all you get's that's not so bad. Then work on light. Make it effortless, like you don't give a shit how high the hill is or how far you've got to go.
Christopher McDougall
#21. We're constantly told that running will ruin our knees and outrage our hearts, but for nearly all of human existence, it was associated with freedom, vitality, and eternal youth.
Christopher McDougall
#24. it's like in life, you have obstacles and you train to overcome them. You search for the best technique. You keep the best, you repeat it, and then you get better.
Christopher McDougall
#27. Films like 'Bond' fund training schemes for film technicians of the future, and working on films themselves provides a great training ground for budding directors and cinematographers. If there's no money there for films to be made, it's like a house of cards, it all comes tumbling down.
Callum McDougall
#28. error. It was Saturday evening, February 25, 2006, and I had twenty-four hours
Christopher McDougall
#29. the only man in modern history to successfully kidnap a commanding general. Paddy
Christopher McDougall
#30. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running or you wouldn't live to love anything else.
Christopher McDougall
#31. We've got a motto here-you're tougher than you think you are, and you can do more than you think you can.
Christopher McDougall
#32. Best of all, Christmas means a spirit of love, a time when the love of God
and the love of our fellow men
should prevail over all hatred and bitterness,
a time when our thoughts
and deeds and the spirit of our lives manifest the presence of God.
George McDougall
#33. You get leafy greens in your body first thing in the morning and you'll lose a lot of weight.
Christopher McDougall
#35. That it took him nearly the entire walk to notice what was happening: his back didn't hurt. Didn't hurt a bit. Heyyy ... Ted thought. Maybe I can
Christopher McDougall
#36. The creation of the United States of America is the central event of the past four hundred years.
Walter A. McDougall
#38. For nearly 2 million years, our ancestors survived and thrived and spread across the planet because they could run other mammals into heat exhaustion.
Christopher McDougall
#39. She hesitated but her stomach won out. After all, an intruder who made her breakfast couldn't be all bad. Maybe that's just how they did it in Echo Falls; breakfast and a robbery.
Jaime McDougall
#41. The 'Tarahumara' use their legs 'as designed.' By running at a young age with minimal footwear, they naturally develop the best biomechanical use of their legs. Cushioned shoes restrict foot movements and allow for over-striding. Short strides are natural.
Christopher McDougall
#42. We're designed for persistence hunting, which is a mix of running and walking. What's built into that kind of running is a sense of pleasure. You are designed and built and perfect for this activity, and it should be enjoyable and fun.
Christopher McDougall
#43. Wilt Chamberlain, all seven feet one inch and 275 pounds of him, had no problem running a 50-mile ultra when he was sixty years old after his knees had survived a lifetime of basketball.
Christopher McDougall
#45. Because that's the ugly truth about heroism: the tests don't start when you're ready or stop when you're tired.
Christopher McDougall
#46. Blaming the running injury epidemic on big, bad Nike seems too easy - but that's okay, because it's largely their fault.
Christopher McDougall
#48. Even Charles Darwin, that human decoder ring of bizarre behavior, found the idea of saving a stranger's life to be a total head-scratcher.
Christopher McDougall
#50. But humans, with our millions of sweat glands, are the best air-cooled engine that evolution has ever put on the market.
Christopher McDougall
#51. He was onto something. Something huge. It wasn't just how to run; it was how to live, the essence of who we are as a species and what we're meant to be.
Christopher McDougall
#55. The art of the hero wasn't about being brave; it was about being so competent that bravery wasn't an issue. You
Christopher McDougall
#56. Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value.
John A. McDougall
#58. Something occurred to me on the way. "Does your dad know you've got his his flask?" I asked Josephine.
"Yes, he's probably worked it out by now," Josephine said.
Sophia McDougall
#59. We have seen the damage already caused to the music industry and we have to continue to make the public and government bodies globally aware of the damage that will happen if DVD piracy is not brought under control.
Callum McDougall
#61. We've created an unnatural form of running. It's not just the shoes, but we run on artificial surfaces - straight ahead, hard and steady - instead of speeding up and slowing down, reacting to the terrain with changes of pace and rhythm.
Christopher McDougall
#62. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain.
Christopher McDougall
#64. The heroes of the past are untouchable, protected forever by the fortress door of time - unless some mysterious stranger magically turns up with a key.
Christopher McDougall
#65. Theodore, you have the mind but not the body," his father said. "And without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You have to make your body.
Christopher McDougall
#66. We don't woo our wives with clubs. We don't leave old folks on ice floes. And maybe the time has come to quit diving into rip tides to save people we don't know. We've outgrown a lot of survival-of-the-fittest strategies, and risking our lives for strangers might be one of them.
Christopher McDougall
#67. There is a growing subculture of barefoot runners, people who got rid of their shoes. And what they have found uniformly is you get rid of the shoes, you get rid of the stress, you get rid of the injuries and the ailments.
Christopher McDougall
#68. I think everyone who goes to see a 'Bond' movie expects to be impressed by the look and the locations chosen. Certainly I was when I grew up watching them, and I don't think that's changed in the last 50 years.
Callum McDougall
#69. But still. It has to end sometime. Wars always do. Everything has to end,' said Josephine, eating another ginger biscuit and getting unexpectedly philosophical. 'Yeah. Things like human civilisation,' I said.
Sophia McDougall
#71. He seemed to be a pure racing animal, which explained two of his other peculiar habits: at the start of every race, he'd let out a bloodcurdling shriek, and after he won, he'd roll in the
Christopher McDougall
#72. I'm supposed to spread my fingers as wide as they were with the rubber band, mash my palms hard into the floor, and pull myself down. When I do, I surprise even myself when my elbows straighten with barely any effort.
Christopher McDougall
#73. But you can't muscle through a five-hour run that way; you have to relax into it like easing your body into a hot bath, until it no longer resists the shock and begins to enjoy it.
Christopher McDougall
#74. The death toll had gotten so bad, Mexico would eventually rank second only to Iraq in the number of killed or kidnapped reporters.
Christopher McDougall
#76. If you don't think you were born to run you're not only denying history. You're denying who you are.
Christopher McDougall
#77. more than 90 percent of the female runners come home with a buckle, while 50 percent of the men come up with an excuse. Not even Ken Chlouber can explain the sky-high female finishing rate, but he can damn well exploit it: "All my pacers are women," Chlouber says. "They get the job done.
Christopher McDougall
#79. Endurance, after all, is the only reason we even exist. We think of ourselves as nature's deadliest animals, but the truth is, a naked human is the biggest wimp in the wild. We have no fangs, no claws, no strength, and no speed.
Christopher McDougall
#80. Vegetables, grains, and legumes contain all the amino acids necessary to build muscle from scratch. Like
Christopher McDougall
#81. Just because men and women of our era don't live up to the myths doesn't mean no one ever has, or ever will again.
Christopher McDougall
#82. pretty girl the German had danced with in a Cretan tavern during the Occupation was actually Xan in disguise.
Christopher McDougall
#83. The fact that someone had decided I'd be safer on Mars, where you could still only SORT OF breathe the air and SORT OF not get sunburned to death, was a sign that the war with the aliens was not going fantastically well.
Sophia McDougall
#84. If you can run six miles on a summer day, then you, my friend, are a lethal weapon in the animal kingdom.
Christopher McDougall
#85. The truth is that there can be no proper training that does not educate the whole system of the man.
Christopher McDougall
#88. Extreme heroism springs from something that no scientific theory can fully explain; it's an illogical impulse that flies in the face of biology, psychology, actuarial statistics, and basic common sense.
Christopher McDougall
#89. The words of the social critic Eric Hoffer were ringing true: Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket.
Christopher McDougall
#90. Shoes block pain, not impact! Pain teaches us to run comfortably! From the moment you start going barefoot, you will change the way you run.
Christopher McDougall
#91. If you read folklore and mythology, any kind of myths, any kind of tall tales, running is always associated with freedom and vitality and youthfulness and eternal vigor. It's only in our lifetime that running has become associated with fear and pain.
Christopher McDougall
#92. I received the best advice for running I ever heard: 'You're not going to win, so just relax. If it feels like work, you're running too hard.'
Christopher McDougall
#93. There's this kind of war on running - people keep telling you you'll get hurt, get injured, that you need orthotics, that you need go to a special running store before you try it. There's this totally misconceived notion that it's hard to do, and it's not.
Christopher McDougall
#94. There's something so universal about that sensation, the way running unites our two most primal impulses: fear and pleasure. We run when we're scared, we run when we're ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time.
Christopher McDougall
#96. The reason we race isn't so much to beat each other, ... but to be with each other.
Christopher McDougall
#97. America's civilization perturbs the trajectories of all other civilizations just by existing.
Walter A. McDougall
#98. And if I really wanted to understand the Raramuri, I should have been there when this ninety-five-year-old man came hiking twenty-five miles over the mountain. Know why he could do it? Because no one ever told him he couldn't.
Christopher McDougall
#99. We are the biggest sissies in the jungle. Every other animal is stronger than we are - they have fangs, they have claws, they have nimbleness, they have speed. We think Usain Bolt is fast - Usain Bolt can get his ass kicked by a squirrel.
Christopher McDougall
#100. Anyone can do running. Running should be easy. It should be fun. It should include everyone. It shouldn't be a punishment for eating cheesecake, which is what we've turned it into.
Christopher McDougall
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