Don Kardong Quotes

The only way I'll ever run a marathon is if I'm involved in the administration.

I run year-round and then ramp up my training for a race a few months before.

Prior to the 1976 Olympics, I was a 5,000m runner.

If you are a really good marathoner, you have to run New York.

Whenever I'm being invited to the New York City Marathon like today, I need to think twice because I know it's a very tough race.

Running is my bedrock activity.

I might have to do the London Marathon. I like crowds, so that is why I like the big marathons.

I do a lot of marathons as training runs. If I'm somewhere and there's a marathon, I'll sign up and just go run it.

I trained for the marathon. I run along the East River, and I used to run all the way down Manhattan, up the West Side and back home.

I couldn't be more excited to return to the ING New York City Marathon.

I've been running a full marathon every year for more than 20 years, and my record is getting worse. Getting older, getting worse. It's natural.

In running, the only equipment that really matters - at least the mentality was in those days - were the pair of shoes that you wore.

I want to do marathons; I want to do an Ironman.

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.

You entered a marathon with hills? You idiot.

I have several close friends who have run marathons, a word that is actually derived from two Swahili words: mara, which means 'to die a horrible death', and thon, which means 'for a stupid T-shirt.' Look it up.

I've trained with some top players at Chelsea, but sometimes training is not enough.

By running the N.Y.C. Marathon in 2008, I became a runner and I think that's what works the best for me and keeps my body the way I like it to be.

Everything you do off the pitch always shows so you have to work on yourself physically as well, it's not just working on your touch.

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

Doing the long endurance stuff seems to have given me the strength to sustain the speed. I think my body is just a lot stronger (thanks to the marathon)... By increasing the long runs, I found that does not take anything away from the speed but increases the strength on the track.

Everyone wins the marathon. We all have the same feeling at the start-nervous, anxious, excited. It is a broader, richer, and even with twenty-seven thousand people-more intimate experience than I found when racing in track. New York is the marathon that all the biggest stars want to win, but has also been the stage for an array of human stories more vast than any other sporting event.

Poetry, music, forests, oceans, solitude-they were what developed enormous spiritual strength. I came to realize that spirit, as much or more than physical conditioning, had to be stored up before a race.

You learn to run like a sprinter, you'll be a great distance runner

I also feel it usually takes four or five races to hit your best marathon for your body to be accustomed to the training AND the race itself.