Quotes About Distance Running

#1. In general, any form of exercise, if pursued continuously, will help train us in perseverance. Long-distance running is particularly good training in perseverance.

Mao Zedong

#2. I have a saying 'train, don't strain.' The Americans have the saying 'no pain, no gain' and that's why they have no distance running champions. They get down to the track with a stopwatch and flog their guts out thinking that it'll make them a champion, but they'll never make a champion that way.

Arthur Lydiard

#3. One of the beautiful things about running is that it is direct and elegant. The formula is simple: put one foot in front of the other. It doesn't take much to figure out that if you want to improve sprint speed, you run faster. If you want to improve distance-running performance, you run farther.

Bernd Heinrich

#4. Distance running demands a brain-body connection that no other creature is capable of.

Christopher McDougall

#5. I enjoyed the discipline and solitariness of long-distance running, which allowed me to escape from the hurly-burly of school life.

Nelson Mandela

#6. It is true that speed kills. In distance running, it kills anyone who does not have it.

Brooks Johnson

#7. There was something terribly sad, yet terribly uplifting, about watching this prophet of the ancient art of distance running turning his back on everything except his dream, and heading back down to "the best place in the world to run." Alone.

Christopher McDougall

#8. The single biggest change in middle-distance running, from the 1500 metres to 10,000 metres, has been the track surface.

Herb Elliott

#9. There are many challenges to long distance running, but one of the greatest is the question of where to put on's house keys.

Gabrielle Zevin

#10. While the truth is putting on its shoes, the lie becomes a champion of a long-distance running.

Ljupka Cvetanova

#11. I guess I am basically most comfortable when I'm alone. As a kid, I was very much a loner. I love long distance running and long distance biking. A director once pointed out that those are all very isolated exercises you do for hours at a time.

Kevin Conroy

#12. Good things come slow, especially in distance running.

Bill Dellinger

#13. Distance running to a professional athlete in my day was five laps around the field. And you stopped each lap to take your pulse.

Lynn Swann

#14. And if any of you want some tips on running, don't be in a hurry, and never let any of the other runners know you are in a hurry even if you are. You can always overtake on long-distance running without letting others smell the hurry in you.

Colin S. Smith

#15. At least for soccer players, it comes down to a blend of two types of fitness - your base endurance, which comes from longer distance running, and your speed, which comes from sprint-based workouts.

Heather O'Reilly

#16. I've always felt that long, slow distance produces long, slow runners.

Sebastian Coe

#17. In the big city, if the man next door happens to be a slum landlord, a Mafia bag man, or a long distance runner, what does it matter, as long as he puts his garbage out on Tuesdays?

Hal Higdon

#18. once you start running and apply the mathematics of change, suddenly this insurmountable distance gets crushed under the curve of motion.

Sam A. Patel

#19. The Marathon distance is very difficult to cover and without the support of all of the fans and people cheering us on and the other runners, we would have a very difficult time to run the full race. So we work together to make a marathon happen.

Tilahun Regassa

#20. Racing a marathon is a true and simple way to test the human spirit. Whether it goes perfectly or poorly you will certainly learn something about yourself and be a better person for having tackled the distance.

Blake Russell

#21. Like the stocks of both Berkshire and Wesco to trade within hailing distance of what we think of as intrinsic value. When it runs up, we try to talk it down. That's not at all common in Corporate America, but that's the way we act.

Charlie Munger

#22. With the case of running, it really is a case of get out, set yourself a distance, run it, and then do it again the next day. It's tremendously simple.

Richard Hammond

#23. Art said he wanted to get more distance. I told him to hit it and run backward.

Ken Venturi

#24. There was no girls' cross-country team at our high school, since cross-country courses were two or three miles long, and, at that distance, a girl's uterus could fall out.

Gretchen Reynolds

#25. Not that running away's going to solve everything. I don't want to rain on your parade or anything, but I wouldn't count on escaping this place if I were you. No matter how far you run. Distance might not solve anything.

Haruki Murakami

#26. During long, slow distance training, you should think of yourself as a thoroughbred disguised as a plow horse. No need to give yourself away by running fast.

Marty Liquori

#27. Success isn't how far you got, but the distance you traveled from where you started.

Steve Prefontaine

#28. Remember, it's the pace that kills, never the distance.

Bill Jones

#29. Dance after dance after dance, until sweat was running down my back as I worked to keep up, keep that smile on my face, to remember to laugh when my hands were within strangling distance from his throat.

Sarah J. Maas

#30. What I need in order to stay creative and centered is a certain amount of distance from the maddening crowd. You cease to be your best self if you're running too fast.

James Redfield

#31. Your core is so important. Get your endurance up. Running and long-distance. Swimming is good as well. Important to have a good core, utilize the proper exercises to strengthen it. It goes out to the rest of your body and makes sure your body is right.

Jozy Altidore

#32. I found I could also be good in cross country. I don't think my running style has anything to do with it. If you have speed and your body feels good, you can do any distance.

Catherine Ndereba

#33. It's all right when you are calling on a girl or talking with friends after dinner to run a conversation like a Sunday-school excursion, with stops to pick flowers; but in the office your sentences should be the shortest distance possible between periods.

George Horace Lorimer

#34. You learn to run like a sprinter, you'll be a great distance runner

Alberto Salazar

#35. To be a champion long-distance runner you have to run on the edge of death.

Toshihiko Seko

#36. Body follows mind. If the mind compares itself to others this could lead to overtraining. Tune out what other runners do and how fast they run. Tune in, instead, to how your body wants to increase speed and distance.

Gina Greenlee

#37. The years of us. Our farm and our people. The children, from this distance now almost all completely interchangeable faces and forms, smiling and running and growing so easily into this other thing. So unfettered by time. So shaped by our story, yet somehow so completely untouched by any of it.

Andrew Miller

#38. I'm a long distance runner, and I get my best ideas when I'm out running. It also helps that I can't write it down immediately - if you hold onto an idea, other things will stick on it.

Patrick Ness

#39. It may be that there is an afterlife and I'll look incredibly stupid, but at least I will have had a crammed pre afterlife, a crammed life, so to me the most important thing is as Kipling put it, to fill every unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run.

Stephen Fry

#40. The natural urge when running a distance is to push harder and finish sooner - to race against time. Every second behind a deadline is a little defeat.

Joe Henderson

#41. It's probably the toughest distance race in the world to win. World class runners from 1500m to the marathon contest it and instead of just three runners from each country, like in the Olympics or World Championships, in the senior men's race there are nine.

Paul Tergat

#42. I get stoned, I can't get home, I'm calling long distance on a public saxophone. My head is achin', my back is breakin', feel I got run over by Captain Coconut and his dog named Rover.

Jimi Hendrix

#43. Frustration is the first step towards improvement. I have no incentive to improve if I'm content with what I can do and if I'm completely satisfied with my pace, distance and form as a runner. It's only when I face frustration and use it to fuel my dedication that I feel myself moving forwards.

John Bingham

#44. There is something magical about running; after a certain distance, it transcends the body. Then a bit further, it transcends the mind. A bit further yet, and what you have before you, laid bare, is the soul.

Kristin Armstrong

#45. The girls looked good from a distance, the sun shining through their dresses, their hair. But get up close and listen to their minds running out of their mouths, you felt like digging in under a hill and hiding out with a tommy-gun.

Charles Bukowski

#46. They say the breaks even up in the long run, and the trick is to be a long-distance runner.

Chuck Knox

#47. In a long distance race, everyone gets tired. The winner is the runner who figures out where to put the tired, figures out how to store it away until after the race is over. Sure, he's tired. Everyone is. That's not the point. The point is to run.

Seth Godin

#48. And I thought: I shall remember this all my life. The peril, the running, the howling of the dogs, the smothering. Then the happiness - of action, of leaping. Then the green sweetness of distance. And the trees: their thickness and their compassion, all around.

Mary Oliver

#49. It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.

William Faulkner

#50. What's at the core of your desire to run a marathon? Couple this journey with value beyond miles. The meaning you ascribe to your effort crystalizes your motivation and fuels your commitment to stay the course and go the distance.

Gina Greenlee

#51. Speedwork is terribly overrated! I remember talking to runners after distance races and someone is sure to say they were able to run fast off base work with no speed work at all. The truth is speedwork doesn't work. Lots of miles, and then fast miles gets you there much quicker than speed work.

Gerry Lindgren

#52. Long slow distance makes long slow runners.

Jim Bush

#53. The main thing was not the speed or distance so much as running every day, without taking a break.

Anonymous

#54. Some sessions are stars and some sessions are stones, but in the end they are all rocks and we build upon them.

Chrissie Wellington

#55. I looked over at him, running in the distance. Another faulty, fucked-up brain in a healthy body.

S.J. Watson

#56. They continued to run together for the next thirty minutes. Not a word between them, only the unspoken pulse of the run. Jacob believed runners shared an implicit doctrine: push through the pain to hit a point where it doesn't hurt anymore.

Jacqueline Simon Gunn

#57. If the expansion of the space of the universe is uniform in all directions, an observer located in anyone of the galaxies will see all other galaxies running away from him at velocities proportional to their distances from the observer.

George Gamow

#58. Once we get into the groove, we're kind of like long-distance runners - that adrenalin kicks in for me and I just keep running - and I don't stop!

Keith Urban

#59. And as short as two miles had come to seem to him over the course of his running career, it occurred to him now that two miles was an insurmountable distance to an infant, or a legless man, or a human cadaver for that matter. Einstein was right, he decided. It is all relative.

John L. Parker Jr.

#60. He ran from one side of the cage, and then back again, which was not very far. It was far only if you were a puppy.

Michael Delaware

#61. Time isn't running out. It's not even real," he said, and I knew I had lost him - he was lost, circling in his own mind. "It's just a measure of distance we made up to understand things. Like an inch. Or a mile.

Megan Miranda

#62. During that year by the railroad embankment, at the time of my father's complete disaster, distance meant for us not only some faraway lyrical splendor but also the exceedingly utilitarian idea of running away, the deliverance from fear and hunger.

Danilo Kis

#63. In 1978, the tradition of running from village to village with a message was revived. that first run was from Davis to Los Angeles, a distance of 500 miles.

Dennis Banks

#64. Finland has produced so many brilliant distance runners because back home it costs $2.50 a gallon for gas.

Esa Tikkanen

#65. It was a very strange, disappointing race in that no one wanted to take it out. That's why I took the lead. I wanted some people to run the real distance and that was frustrating. So I took the pace around the second lap, which in some ways is suicidal ... but I wanted the pace to be honest.

Marla Runyan

#66. There's no such thing as a bad carbohydrate.

Don Kardong

#67. Concentrate on small segments of your race at a time. For example, rather than obsessing about the distance that remains, simply complete the next mile in good form ... try another, then another, until the race is done.

Jerry Lynch