48 Quotes by Grete Waitz

Sustained motivation is essential to achieving your potential.

My goal has always been to introduce other people to running. They might accomplish something they never thought they could.

Spend at least some of your training time, and other parts of your day, concentrating on what you are doing in training and visualizing your success.

I don't think I would have been such a good runner if I hadn't enjoyed it.

Exercise and sports are greatly affected by what goes into the mind, and the mind is greatly affected by sports and exercise as well. This is true among exercisers at all levels, despite their different goals. A major element in mental training is visualization ... Visualizing a positive outcome can create a pattern of success, as long as you set realistic and specific goals.

Too many people I meet believe that you can sit in a chair and be given motivation. With exercise and fitness, you get it by doing. The mental qualities you need are all linked like a chain. If you give exercise a try and see results, even if it's as simple as feeling good that you get out the door, you'll become motivated to repeat the exercise. Seeing results is inspiring.

For every finish-line tape a runner breaks -- complete with the cheers of the crowd and the clicking of hundreds of cameras -- there are the hours of hard and often lonely work that rarely gets talked about.

You've got to look for tough competition. You've got to want to beat the best.

Everyone wins the marathon. We all have the same feeling at the start-nervous, anxious, excited. It is a broader, richer, and even with twenty-seven thousand people-more intimate experience than I found when racing in track. New York is the marathon that all the biggest stars want to win, but has also been the stage for an array of human stories more vast than any other sporting event.