David Halberstam Quotes

Pain is part of the sport.

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.

If you think you're in shape, try boxing. You'll discover that you are not. It's the most physically challenging thing I've ever attempted, but I love it and I want to keep up some of the training.

Wrestling school was probably one of the hardest things I've ever done. It just killed me.

There has never been a great athlete who died not knowing what pain is.

My legs tightened up pretty much, and it was a hard last corner for me.

Even in high school, when I had injuries, I tried to play with them. When I shouldn't have worked out, I worked out.

Cycling is so hard, the suffering is so intense, that it’s absolutely cleansing. The pain is so deep and strong that a curtain descends over your brain….Once; someone asked me what pleasure I took in riding for so long. ‘PLEASURE???? I said.’ ‘I don’t understand the question.’ I didn’t do it for the pleasure; I did it for the pain.

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

There's no question that the striving, the stuff that you got out of [sports]. The depending on someone right beside you. Sitting here and calling on yourself when you're tired or getting through something painful, watching your teammates do the same. Everybody feels good when you first walk out there.

I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that weird mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables.

If you're not falling, you're not training hard enough.

Pain is that last quarter of a mile. You feel it, but when you’re through racing, your whole body just feels elated. So the pain is worth it.

ignore the pain, play through it.

With the Special Ops Warrior Foundation's help, we put 266 kids through college last year. And that's what keeps me going. I'll be honest, I don't like running. I don't like biking. I don't like swimming. I do it to raise money. But, now that I'm in this sport, I want to see how far I can push myself. What makes me tick is that pain you feel when you do these ultramarathons. I love knowing that everyone's suffering because I know I can suffer just a little bit more. I can take a lot of pain.

I really am not a weakling. We like to do a lot of takes, so it ends up being pretty physically grueling.

Sometimes you just have to play in pain.

If it felt good, you didn't push hard enough. It's supposed to hurt like hell.

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 pain barrier was not a barrier for her; she could go beyond it.

What makes a great endurance athlete is the ability to absorb potenial embarrassment, and to suffer without complaint. I was discovering that if it was a matter of gritting my teeth, not caring how it looked, and outlasting everybody else, I won. It didn't seem to matter what sport it was-in a straight-ahead, long-distant race, I could beat anybody. If it was a suffer-fest, I was good at it.

My father taught me that one of the most important abilities in life is to be able to take the pain and persevere, and for years this lesson had served me well.

For every finish-line tape a runner breaks -- complete with the cheers of the crowd and the clicking of hundreds of cameras -- there are the hours of hard and often lonely work that rarely gets talked about.

It's an individual sport, but collectively everybody shares the same motto that Ironman stands for: anything is possible.

We must learn to suffer more.