Favorite Ultra Quotes

  • Running is no longer about life and death. It is about finding how large and lovely the nothingness is on the other side of self-preoccupation. Just run. Find nothing.
    --Thomas C. Williams (letters section, Trail Runner Magazine)

    Perhaps the genius of ultrarunning is its supreme lack of utility. It makes no sense in a world of space ships and supercomputers to run vast distances on foot. There is no money in it and no fame, frequently not even the approval of peers. But as poets, apostles and philosophers have insisted from the dawn of time, there is more to life than logic and common sense. The ultra runners know this instinctively. And they know something else that is lost on the sedentary. They understand, perhaps better than anyone, that the doors to the spirit will swing open with physical effort. In running such long and taxing distances they answer a call from the deepest realms of their being -- a call that asks who they are ...
    --David Blaikie

    The only way to define your limits is to go beyond them.
    --Arthur C. Clarke

    Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.
    --Steven Wright

    Speed is sex ... distance is love.
    --David Blaikie

    Inside a ring or out, ain't nothing wrong with going down, it's staying down that's wrong.
    --Muhammad Ali

    They can because they think they can.
    --Virgil

    Do, or do not. There is no try.
    --Yoda

    Pain is temporary. Quitting is forever.
    --Lance Armstrong

    Self-conquest is the greatest of victories.
    --Plato

    Speed is relative. Effort is universal.
    --Jonathan Beverly

    To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
    --Alfred Lord Tennyson

    The most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.
    --Pierre de Coubertin

    People should learn endurance; they should learn to endure the discomforts of heat and cold, hunger and thirst; they should learn to be patient when receiving abuse and scorn; for it is the practice of endurance that quenches the fire of worldly passions which is burning up their bodies.
    --Buddha

    Any idiot can run a marathon. It takes a special kind of idiot to run an ultramarathon.
    --Alan Cabelly

    Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
    --Unknown

    There is no reason to worry how far the run is. You simply have to enjoy it and not question if it is 26 or 27 or 30 miles--you will thank me later for supplying an extra few minutes of enjoyment.
    --C.S. Pandy, Race Director, Himalayan Run/Trek

    There go the crazy people.
    --Unknown spectator at the start of the Rockledge Rumble 50k

    ... in all of life's little emergencies [there is] one question unceasingly humming in the mental background: When am I going to get my miles in?
    --Scott Douglas

    Afoot and light-hearted
    I take to the open road,
    Healthy, free, the world before me,
    The long brown path before me
    leading wherever I choose.
    --Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass [Thanks VJ!]

    It is impossible to walk rapidly and be unhappy.
    --Mother Teresa of Calcutta [Thanks VJ!]

    All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.
    --Friedrich Nietzsche

    Get going. Get up and walk if you have to, but finish the damned race.
    --Ron Hill

    Men, today we die a little.
    --Emil Zatopek at the start of the 1956 Olympic Marathon

    It's at the borders of pain and suffering that the men are separated from the boys.
    --Emil Zatopek