Emil Zatopek Quotes

You get very tired, and there was a certain amount of pain and you slow up. Your legs are so tired that you are in fact slowing. If you don't keep running, keep your blood circulating, the muscles stop pumping the blood back and you get dizzy.

About once a year, I do these long-distance relays with some friends of mine, and it takes about 27 or 28 hours to complete it.

It's impossible in heptathlon to have a proper rivalry - you're spending two days together and seven events and dedicate your life to it. It's like a marathon: two days of mental and physical exhaustion.

Anytime you're out there in between those ropes, you always have to worry about fatigue. If you think about it, people get tired just doing cardio. You get tired doing cardio just by yourself. Now imagine running around, picking somebody up, picking you up, trying to pin you, trying to hold you down. It gets very tiring.

The 200 is tragic! It's my favorite race, but it takes so much out of the body - and it's too much time to think.

I ran. I ran until my muscles burned and my veins pumped battery acid. Then I ran some more.

I gave it everything in the last 20 minutes. I knew that I still had the energy, that I was ahead of the mark. I felt euphoric — it was the last 20 minutes of my sporting career.

Why couldn't Pheidippides have died at 20 miles?

I can't believe anyone would voluntarily run 26 miles. Sometimes I sit on the couch cross-legged because I don't feel like walking to the bathroom.

That's what you do all the hard work for, to play in situations that put your body through gruelling times. If you're not up to it, pull out.

By the end of the shoot [of Wrestler], my trainer was pushing me up three flights of stairs to my house and holding my arm like I was an old cripple. I had three MRIs in the first two months of working on the film. I felt like it really was over by the time we started shooting the movie.

I think I bit off more than I could chew. I thought the marathon would be easier. For the level of condition that I have now... that was without a doubt the hardest physical thing I have ever done.

Pain is part of the sport.

I have twenty years of training like a spartan behind me. It has caught up with me. My body is broken down. I've been worn out.

It's like the first man to go to the moon, I will be the first man to run under two hours, this is crucial.

I've had matches go 38 minutes. To be able to move for 38 minutes and have somebody's life in your hands is a difficult thing.

I would say that Breaking2 was my best race because I was running against something no one had done before.

I like, at the end of the night, to be walking back to the locker room limping and sweating, spitting blood out of my mouth. I've been doing this for a long time, and it comes naturally.

I hate sweating, running and getting that red-faced look.

Although he loved performing live, and was great at it - Jeff was as solid on stage, as he was in the studio - performing for two hours at a stretch really took a physical toll. It was very hard on him.

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.

You can actually suffer a little bit more going slowly than when you're going really fast. A faster marathon might even be easier than a slow one, in terms of what it takes out of you mentally.

Being pulled that long and that hard for a 12-hour day gave me migraines. It's what they used to do before there were facelifts for actresses – you know, Joan Crawford's whole career was this. Then the makeup is like Earl Scheib auto body paint sprayed on my face.

I can't even imagine what it's like to run for 5 or 6 hours.

There is something about the ritual of the race - putting on the number, lining up, being timed - that brings out the best in us.