Best Quotes from Why We Run by Robin Harvie with Page Numbers

The road bears witness to all travelers who go on foot that each of us has a breaking point at which we have to recognize that we are no longer in complete control.

Home is the centrifugal epicenter of safety and belonging where each run begins and ends.

The heightened awareness of this instinct arises only when we step, deliberately or not, beyond those boundaries of routine.

Running should not be hemmed in by schedules and routines. Its beauty derives from the fact that it cannot be governed by the magnetic fields of others. We run for ourselves.

So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbour or friend, nor any company left me but my own.

Through a total renunciation of the world, those hours of solitude amount to the only time when we become our own masters, with nothing to distract or hinder us.

Understanding the primary motivations that explain why we run would have to wait until I stopped shaking my head at my own stupidity and until the soles of my feet no longer burned with tenderness.

To become true long-distance runners, we must accept that we are completely on our own. Only after we have unshackled ourselves from that place of safety can we say that out there, in whatever state we end up, is where we belong.

As I recounted the last hours to them, they listened out of politeness. We were in the place of my childhood, not some foreign land. The adventures that took place here were the creations of an adolescent mind.

FALLING INTO THE SENTIMENTAL trap of self-congratulation, I later worked out that I had run 35 miles on that summer’s day in Denmark. It was the first time I had experienced the freedom Andy McMenemy later described as blowing out the taint of the everyday, in abandonment and solitude.

Running outdoors is being in a sort of magical kingdom under whose spell I feel happiest. What matters more than anything else is seeking out the challenge…throwing all my effort and daring into conquering it.

There is no such thing as a 'good death,' except in the theological sense, only a life lived out bravely and authentically to the end.

In running I have found, without at first knowing it, a taste of the freedom that Scott, Cherry, and Mallory had sought.

Bannister vowed to continue his rounds at St. Mary's Hospital, and he still traveled up to Oxford once a week...it is this spirit of Bannister's that we have inherited.

The greatest gift these men gave us was a profound ability to communicate the experiences of human nature at the limits of its endurance.

Running was a primeval action...uncomplicated that it should be celebrated for its purity. It provided a chance to be in concert with nature.

...running in part a story about experiencing the expansive nature of human sentience, the felt-fact of aliveness.

The history of the human race is a continual struggle from darkness toward light.

The idea that for runners life is much more intensely lived on the edge of our own extinction...is harder to grasp.

To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield. "They...had articulated what is humanly possible."

The river teaches patience, endurance, and vigilance.

For Thoreau, by looking into any water 'the beholder measures the depths of his own nature.'

'Running! If there’s any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can’t think what it might be,' wrote Joyce Carol Oates.

We need to rid ourselves of all the symbolism and metaphor in order to become pure kinetic energy.

In preparation for each marathon I had run, I had only ever increased the weekly mileage, letting the exercise take care of my excess weight.

Sometimes I could feel that I was just running, my step light as it bounced over the loose stones and frozen mud.

When you spend so much time contemplating your lot, you learn to defend yourself against the mental corrosion that will follow.

What can come if we are lucky, when we spend time on our feet, is clarity of thought, as we work through the issues that have set us down on the road in the first place.

My every act was contributing to a single narrative that would conclude with the Spartathlon.

'All human life is muddled by error,' and my family’s story is no different.

Many runners happily spend their entire lives running no faster and no farther than they did the week before. It takes a special meditative quality to be able to do this, a quality that attracts deep respect.

There comes a moment when we want to put ourselves to the test, and that means competition.

Spending hours alone, perfecting his technique, Zátopek got a profound and addictive pleasure from the fatigue resulting from running up to 20 miles a day.

His aim was to train until his body was broken, sometimes leaving him vomiting by the side of the track, a proposition that would have appalled the English school of runners.

For long-distance athletes, there is before Zátopek and after Zátopek.

Running was a way of unchaining oneself from the political system.

By the time the body returns to sea level, the lungs billow out with the extra capacity.

Running was a way of preparing the younger generation for a working life of higher productive labor for the benefit of the wider society.

Regardless of our talent, to have arrived at the start line of a marathon requires strict discipline, a necessary self-regard and focus that excludes all else.

Pain seems to be a pre-condition to this kind of sport… it is precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive.

"If you love something it is easy."

"We are always running toward the horizon."

"Why do we do this? Because we have to. There is a deep, visceral need to. It really matters."

"When you have experienced that euphoria, everything else disappears into insignificance."

"For Rory, running was a way of life, a means of becoming a better person, not through pain or competition, but through seeing the world anew and appreciating what he had already achieved."

"Anyone who has waited at the finishing line of any race will have seen the tears of those who finish, emotionally overwhelmed by the experience."

"For the runner, the ability to confront and overcome resistance is where their heart beats stronger."

"Becoming an ultra distance runner was not simply pushing back the limits of my physical capacity. There was a profound psychological leap that I needed to make."

"Running through landscapes, ignoring signposts and one-way systems, seems positively subversive."

"Running was about adventure, exploration, subversion—all the things the gym could never deliver."

"Solvitur ambulando—anything can be worked out by walking, including emotional tangles."

"Motion has a meditative quality, an ability to slow down the rhythm of our lives."

"Through a return to nature we can live more authentically, feel less of a need to impose ourselves on it forcefully."

"Life is the greatest, happiest and often toughest adventure of all and I have fallen in love with it all over again."

"Running teaches us patience and with that comes compassion—the knowledge of how to become properly grounded."

"Pain and suffering are often the catalysts for life's most profound lessons."

"We are at home in our games because it is the only place we know what we are supposed to do."

"Running was not about racing or competition. It was about an education on the grace of living."

"The idea of home had evaporated for her…Her purchase on the world around her became so brittle."

"Change occurs very slowly…In retreating to the safety of the clear, unpolluted water, Turner's river can become ours too."

Every detail had found its place in the notebook I had kept through the year: speeds, distances covered, weight lost and gained.

Deep within me I knew that I had no earthly business thinking that I could take on the 152 miles...

The road to Sparta had started with a simple question: Why do we run?

I was the last to cross the start line and gave one final wave to Laurence.

This is the exhilaration of feeling, of the physical and emotional response to disintegration...

To run was to know how to cope with that silence.

There was no one to stop me from quitting, and in part I was carrying on simply to see when the last step would come.

For the first time in my life I was living at the absolute extremity of my being, experiencing a frisson of danger in this discomfort zone.

No amount of preparation could tell me what 36 hours on my feet would feel like.

Sometimes, running these distances offers a richness of experience that contributes to our understanding of not only ourselves but of the landscape and our own personal history.