188 Quotes by Christopher McDougall

The reason we race isn't so much to beat each other, he understood, but to be with each other.

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.

You don't have to be fast. But you'd better be fearless.

Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone.~Ken Chlouber, Colorado miner and creator of the Leadville Trail 100 mile race

Whenever an art form loses its fire, when it gets weakened by intellectual inbreeding and first principles fade into stale tradition, a radical fringe eventually appears to blow it up and rebuild from the rubble. Young Gun ultrarunners were like Lost Generation writers in the ’20s, Beat poets in the ’50s, and rock musicians in the ’60s: they were poor and ignored and free from all expectations and inhibitions. They were body artists, playing with the palette of human endurance.

Suffering is humbling. It pays to know how to get your butt kicked.

Because that's the ugly truth about heroism: the tests don't start when you're ready or stop when you're tired. You don't get time-outs, warm-ups, or bathroom breaks. You may have a headache or be wearing the wrong pants or find yourself—the way Norina did—in a skirt and low heels in a school hallway becoming slick with your own blood.

Daredevils aren't the answer; spinal rehab wards are full of daredevils. Fearlessness doesn't really help, either: when your car breaks down, you don't want the mechanic to say, 'I've never done this before, but I'm willing to die trying.' What you want to hear is 'Don't worry. This is right up my alley.' Heroism isn't some mysterious inner virtue, the Greeks believed; it's a collection of skills that every man and woman can master so that in a pinch, they can become a Protector.

We've lulled ourselves into believing that in an emergency, someone else will always come along to rescue us. We've stopped relying on our own wonderfully adaptable bodies; we've forgotten that we can think, climb, leap, run, throw, swim, and fight with more versatility than any other creature on the planet.