Susan Orlean Quotes

Exerting yourself to the limit over and over again, that is the essence of running. Running is painful, but the pain doesn't leave me, I can take care of it. That agrees with my mentality.

Discipline is something we despise for the moment.... We all look for a place to run, an excuse with which to stall. No one enjoys it. Yet those of us who have endured it know that the fruit it produces and the pain from which it ultimately spares us makes it worth the agony.

I always pushed myself. Whenever I felt I needed to stop, I made myself run faster.

There's no magic to running far or climbing Everest. Endurance is mental strength. It's all about heart.

What I've learned from running is that the time to push hard is when you're hurting like crazy and you want to give up. Success is often just around the corner.

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.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you think, ‘Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The ‘hurt’ part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself.

When you're running and you are there, there's a little person that talks to you and that little person says “Oh, I'm tired”, “My lounge's about to pop”, “I'm so hurt”, “I'm so tired”, “There's no way I can possibly continue”. And you wanna quit. Right? That person, if you learn how to defeat that person when you're running you will learn how to not quit when things get hard in your life.

Even still, we run. We have not reached our average of 57.92 years without knowing that you run through it, and it hurts and you run through it some more, and if it hurts worse, you run through it even more, and when you finish, you will have broken through. In the end, when you are done, and stretching, and your heartbeat slows, and your sweat dries, if you've run through the hard part, you will remember no pain.

The marathon can humble you.

At times, you are mentally but not physically prepared; at times, you are physically but not mentally prepared. I would be lying if I said it doesn't affect your performance. But the sooner you get over it, the better. So you discipline yourself. That is why fitness counts.

I always try to remind myself, when it's tough, when your body's sore and you're hurting, I try to sit back and tell myself, 'Would you rather be doing anything else in the world at this moment?'

In my most painful moments on the bike, I am at my most curious and I wonder each and every time how I will respond.

Mental toughness is a state of mind - you could call it 'character in action.'

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 do something that requires willpower - like going for a run after work - you have to conserve your willpower muscle during the day.

Quitting is unthinkable and pain is just weakness leaving the body

The disciple must have great power of endurance. Bear all evil and misery without one thought of unhappiness, resistance, remedy, or retaliation. That is true endurance, and that you must acquire.

Strength comes from waiting.

It hurts, but that’s all it does. The most difficult part of the training is training your mind. You build calluses on your feet to endure the road. You build calluses on your mind to endure the pain. There’s only one way to do that. You have to get out there and run.

Running is always an exercise in humility.

So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

I've never known a man worth his salt who, in the long run, deep down in his heart, didn't appreciate the grind, the discipline

When running up a hill, it is all right to give up as many times as you wish-as long as your feet keep on moving.