George A. Sheehan Quotes

Everyone is an athlete. The only difference is that some of us are in training, and some are not.

To make your life a work of art, you must have the material to work with. The race, any race, is just such an experience.

Running makes you an athlete in all areas of life ... trained in the basics, prepared for whatever comes, ready to fill each hour and deal with the decisive moment.

We who run ... are different from those who merely study us. We are out there experiencing what they are trying to put into words.

Some think guts is sprinting at the end of a race. But guts is what got you there to begin with. Guts start back in the hills with 6 miles to go and you're thinking of how you can get out of this race without anyone noticing. Guts begin when you still have forty minutes of torture left and you're already hurting more than you ever remember.

If you want to find the answers to the Big Questions about your soul, you'd best begin with the Little Answers about your body.

Exercise is done against one's wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse.

I have a bumper sticker that Bowen created that says Regardless of my kids grades, they have an 'A' in my book'. Without play the child that still lives in all of us will always be incomplete. And not only physically, but creatively, intellectually, and spiritually as well.

Fitness has to be fun. If it is not play there will be no fitness. Play, you see, is where the process. Fitness is merely the product.

No matter how old I get, the race remains one of life's most rewarding experiences. My times become slower and slower, but the experience of the race is unchanged: each race a drama, each race a challenge, each race stretching me in one way or another, and each race telling me more about myself and others.

Once you have decided that winning isn't everything, you become a winner.

There are as many reasons for running as there are days in a year ... But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child.

Play is where life lives

The desire to run comes from deep within us - from the unconscious, the instinctive, the intuitive.

If marathoners finish they win.

The answer to the big questions in running is the same as the answer to the big questions in life: Do the best with what you've got.

Why race? The need to be tested, perhaps; the need to take risks; and the chance to be number one.

Happiness is different from pleasure. Happiness has something to do with struggling and enduring and accomplishing.

The study of motivation goes back to the Greeks. Their sports were essential to their education. They saw in sports the integration of body, mind and soul, the creation of beauty, the mastering of athletics, and the challenge of competition. A French sociologist points this out. "Sports," he wrote, was part of the education of the citizen. He was expected to engage in exercise for a whole series of reasons that had to do with the shaping of the citizen; the relation between moral good and physical good; and the growth of a person.

Nothing is more certain than the defeat of a man who gives up.

Anything that changes your values changes your behavior.

I will not last forever. But I am damn well going to know I have been here.

To keep from decaying, to be a winner, the athlete must accept pain - not only accept it, but look for it, live with it, learn not to fear it.

Sport is singularly able to give us peak experience where we feel completely one with the world and transcend all conflicts as we finally become our own potential.

The obsession with running is really an obsession with the potential for more and more life.

Do not tell me what to do, tell me what you do. Do not tell me what is good for me, tell me what is good for you. If, at the same time, you reveal the you in me, if you become a mirror to my inner self, then you have made a reader and a friend.

The difference between a jogger and a runner is an entry blank.

Out on the roads there is fitness and self-discovery and the persons we were destined to be.

Success rests with having the courage and endurance and, above all, the will to become the person you are, however peculiar that may be. Then you will be able to say, I found my hero and he is me.

Exercise: you don't have time not to

I run each day to preserve the self I attained the day before and to secure the self yet to be.

The real competition is against the little voice inside you that wants to quit

The most important thing I learned [from running] is that there is only one runner in this race, and that is me.

Life is a positive-sum game. Everyone from the gold medallist to the last finisher can rejoice in a personal victory.

The music of a marathon is a powerful strain, one of those tunes of glory. It asks us to forsake pleasures, to discipline the body, to find courage, to renew faith and to become one's own person, utterly and completely.

Like everyone else, I want to be challenged. I want to find out whether or not I am a coward. I want to see how much effort I can put out ... what I can endure ... if I measure up. Running allows that.

Because until we write it down, we don't know what is actually at the root of our lives.

To know you are one with what you are doing, to know that you are a complete athlete, begins with believing you are a runner.