188 Quotes by Christopher McDougall

Because that’s the ugly truth about heroism: the tests don’t start when you’re ready or stop when you’re tired.

A team of Harvard scientists had once verified exactly that point by sticking a rectal thermometer in a cheetah and getting it to run on a treadmill. Once its temperature hit 105 degrees, the cheetah shut down and refused to run.

Blaming the running injury epidemic on big, bad Nike seems too easy – but that’s okay, because it’s largely their fault.

If it feels like work, you’re working too hard.

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.

We say the rarajipari is the game of life, ′ Angel said. ‘You never know how hard it will be. You never know when it will end. You can’t control it. You can only adjust.

As a rule of thumb, performance aberration in a basic skill is a good way to evaluate whether it’s natural to a species. When you spot a giant ability gap between ages and genders, you know you’re looking at nurture, not nature. Male.

Heroes aren’t perfect; with a god as one parent and a mortal as the other, they’re perpetually teetering between two destinies. What tips them toward greatness is a sidekick, a human connection who helps turn the spigot on the power of compassion. Empathy, the Greeks believed, was a source of strength, not softness; the more you recognized yourself in others and connected with their distress, the more endurance, wisdom, cunning, and determination you could tap into.

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.