Grete Waitz Quotes

...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.

I got into hula hooping at age six - I hula hooped all day, every day. That was something I was comfortable with, but I never tried walking or singing while hula hooping! It's actually pretty difficult and tiring. But I like challenging myself. It's hard, but it's really fun.

I started running, and I hated it. Of course, everyone hates running for the first mile. If you're running two miles or twenty miles, it always hurts. Now I live it. I look forward to it. It's really good. It clears my head.

Running is always an exercise in humility.

Running has taken me in, and continues to comfort, heal and challenge me in all kinds of magical ways. I am not a 'good runner' because I am me. I am a good 'me' because I am a runner.

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.

I didn't start jogging or running until I was 37 years old. It was something that really helped me change my life.

I've got a song called 'Salt Skin' because when you run in the heat it evaporates and you've got salt crystals on your face. I love that, because it means you've worked really hard.

If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to experience a different life, run a marathon.

Because running fast is more fun than running slow.

I'm not out there sweating for three hours every day just to find out what it feels like to sweat.

I've always worked out, but running pushed bits of me harder than anything else I had ever done.

The gratification you feel from making tangible progress while running is just about unparalleled, so I understand why people love it. But it's also hard, grueling work. Those feel-good benefits have to be earned four to five times a week.

You know that every bead of sweat falling off your head, every weight you've pumped - the history of that is all in your eyes.

Right now I feel like playing as long as I can, As long as my body will allow me to play I'm going to continue to play.

Like writing, running is so much about mind over matter. There are times when you have to override the discomfort and keep pushing. That capacity to endure and then prevail is just amazing.

It was closer to manual labor than shooting a film. I always think of something Michael Caton-Jones told me: 'Pain is temporary. Film is forever.'

If I only ran when nothing hurt, I would never run.

Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life

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

I like the physical challenge. It's fun for me.

The distance runner is mysteriously reconciling the separations of body and mind, of pain and pleasure, of the conscious and the unconscious. He is repairing the rent, and healing the wound in his divided self. He has found a way to make the ordinary extraordinary; the commonplace unique; the everyday eternal.

Running is the greatest metaphor for life, because you get out of it what you put into it.

My goal has always been to introduce other people to running. They might accomplish something they never thought they could.

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