Christopher McDougall Quotes About Running

Quotes about: Running

Animals Art Heart Injury Inspiration Marathon Motivation

If you don't have answers to your problems after a four-hour run, you ain't getting them.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Meditation, Answers

Christopher McDougall (2010). “Born to Run: The hidden tribe, the ultra-runners, and the greatest race the world has never seen”, p.213, Profile Books
The reason we race isn't so much to beat each other... but to be with each other.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Race, Reason

FaceBook post by Christopher McDougall from Nov 08, 2016
...there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love *running*. The engineering was certainly the same: both depended on loosening your grip on your own desires, putting aside what you wanted and appreciating what you've got, being patient and forgiving and... undemanding...maybe we shouldn't be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Engineering, Capacity To Love
You don't stop running because you get old, you get old because you stop running.

Christopher McDougall

Positive, Basketball, Running

Christopher McDougall (2010). “Born to Run: The hidden tribe, the ultra-runners, and the greatest race the world has never seen”, p.240, Profile Books
We run when we're scared, we run when we're ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Good Times, Scared

FaceBook post by Christopher McDougall from Jan 31, 2011
Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.

Christopher McDougall

Inspirational, Motivational, Running

Christopher McDougall (2010). “Born to Run: The hidden tribe, the ultra-runners, and the greatest race the world has never seen”, p.13, Profile Books
There's something so universal about that sensation, the way running unites our two most primal impulses: fear and pleasure. We run when we're scared, we run when we're ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Two, Way

FaceBook post by Christopher McDougall from Jul 13, 2011
We wouldn't be alive without love we wouldn't have survived without running maybe we shouldn't be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Get Better, Alive

Christopher McDougall (2010). “Born to Run: The hidden tribe, the ultra-runners, and the greatest race the world has never seen”, p.98, Profile Books
Running is the heart of what it means to be human.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Heart, Mean
-The reason we race isn't so much to beat each other but to be with each other. -The Hopis consider running a form of prayer; they offer every step as a sacrifice to a loved one, and in return ask the Great Spirit to match their strength with some of his own.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Prayer, Sacrifice
Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don't look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by," Kerouac wrote. "Trails are like that: you're floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you're struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak... just like life.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Fall, Struggle
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.

Christopher McDougall

Running, People, Greed

Christopher McDougall (2010). “Born to Run: The hidden tribe, the ultra-runners, and the greatest race the world has never seen”, p.99, Profile Books
If you read folklore and mythology, any kind of myths, any kind of tall tales, running is always associated with freedom and vitality and youthfulness and eternal vigor. It's only in our lifetime that running has become associated with fear and pain.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Pain, Motivation
Nearly all runners do their slow runs too fast, and their fast runs too slow." Ken Mierke says. "So they're just training their bodies to burn sugar, which is the last thing a distance runner wants. You've got enough fat stored to run to California, so the more you train your body to burn fat instead of sugar, the longer your limited sugar tank is going to last." -The way to activate your fat-burning furnace is by staying below your aerobic threshold--your hard-breathing point--during your endurance runs.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Distance, California

Christopher McDougall (2010). “Born to Run: The hidden tribe, the ultra-runners, and the greatest race the world has never seen”, p.207, Profile Books
But yeah, Ann [Trason] insisted, running was romantic; and no, of course her friends didn't get it because they'd never broken through. For them, running was a miserable two miles motivated solely by size 6 jeans: get on the scale, get depressed, get your headphones on, and get it over with. But you can't muscle through a five-hour run that way; you have to relax into it, like easing your body into a hot bath, until it no longer resists the shock and begins to enjoy it.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Jeans, Two
I have the idea that running shoes are based on a kind of cult idea - that our feet are flawed and we need shoes to correct those flaws. The shoe companies are in the business of selling shoes. But there's no evidence from running shoe manufacturers that they're right. There's no scientific data that running shoes reduce injury.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Data, Shoes
If you don't think you were born to run you're not only denying history. You're denying who you are.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Thinking, Born To Run

Christopher McDougall (2010). “Born to Run: The hidden tribe, the ultra-runners, and the greatest race the world has never seen”, p.244, Profile Books
There are two goddesses in your heart,” he told them. “The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, give her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you.” Ask nothing from your running, in other words, and you’ll get more than you ever imagined.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Jealous, Heart
But you can't muscle through a five-hour run that way; you have to relax into it like easing your body into a hot bath, until it no longer resists the shock and begins to enjoy it.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Relax, Hot

Christopher McDougall (2010). “Born to Run: The hidden tribe, the ultra-runners, and the greatest race the world has never seen”, p.69, Profile Books
Know why people run marathons? …Because running is rooted in our collective imagination, and our imagination is rooted in running. Language, art, science; space shuttles, Starry Night, intravascular surgery; they all had their roots in our ability to run. Running was the superpower that made us human — which means its a superpower all humans posses.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Art, Mean

Christopher McDougall (2010). “Born to Run: The hidden tribe, the ultra-runners, and the greatest race the world has never seen”, p.239, Profile Books
Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn't live to love anything else. And like everything else we love-everything we sentimentally call our 'passions' and 'desires'-it's really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Distance, Passion

FaceBook post by Christopher McDougall from Jan 17, 2013
Blaming the running injury epidemic on big, bad Nike seems too easy - but that's okay, because it's largely their fault.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Nike, Epidemics

Christopher McDougall (2009). “Born to Run”, p.179, Vintage
Running should be free, man.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Men, Should
That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they'd never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind's first fine art, our original act of inspired creation.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Art, Real

Christopher McDougall (2010). “Born to Run: The hidden tribe, the ultra-runners, and the greatest race the world has never seen”, p.92, Profile Books
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.

Christopher McDougall

Running, Essence, Who We Are

Christopher McDougall (2010). “Born to Run: The hidden tribe, the ultra-runners, and the greatest race the world has never seen”, p.99, Profile Books

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Born: 1962
Occupation: Author
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