George A. Sheehan Quotes & Sayings

The study of motivation goes back to the Greeks. Their sports were essential to their education. They saw in sports the integration of body, mind and soul, the creation of beauty, the mastering of athletics, and the challenge of competition. A French sociologist points this out. "Sports," he wrote, was part of the education of the citizen. He was expected to engage in exercise for a whole series of reasons that had to do with the shaping of the citizen; the relation between moral good and physical good; and the growth of a person. — George A. Sheehan

Nothing is more certain than the defeat of a man who gives up. — George A. Sheehan

There are as many reasons for running as there are days in a year ... But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child. — George A. Sheehan

Play is where life lives — George A. Sheehan

The answer to the big questions in running is the same as the answer to the big questions in life: Do the best with what you've got. — George A. Sheehan

The music of a marathon is a powerful strain, one of those tunes of glory. It asks us to forsake pleasures, to discipline the body, to find courage, to renew faith and to become one's own person, utterly and completely. — George A. Sheehan

Life is a positive-sum game. Everyone from the gold medallist to the last finisher can rejoice in a personal victory. — George A. Sheehan

I have met my hero, and he is me. — George A. Sheehan

Anything that changes your values changes your behavior. — George A. Sheehan

Sweat cleanses from the inside. It comes from places a shower will never reach. — George A. Sheehan

Fitness has to be fun. If it is not play there will be no fitness. Play, you see, is where the process. Fitness is merely the product. — George A. Sheehan

Sport is an essential element of education. — George A. Sheehan

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. — George A. Sheehan

If marathoners finish they win. — George A. Sheehan

People begin running for any number of motives, but we stick to it for one basic reason-to find out who we really are. — George A. Sheehan

The difference between a jogger and a runner is an entry blank. — George A. Sheehan

Once you have decided that winning isn't everything, you become a winner. — George A. Sheehan

Do not tell me what to do, tell me what you do. Do not tell me what is good for me, tell me what is good for you. If, at the same time, you reveal the you in me, if you become a mirror to my inner self, then you have made a reader and a friend. — George A. Sheehan

Everyone is an athlete. The only difference is that some of us are in training, and some are not. — George A. Sheehan

Listen to your body. Do not be a blind and deaf tenant. — George A. Sheehan

Out on the roads there is fitness and self-discovery and the persons we were destined to be. — George A. Sheehan

Every runner is an experiment of one. — George A. Sheehan

Sport is singularly able to give us peak experience where we feel completely one with the world and transcend all conflicts as we finally become our own potential. — George A. Sheehan

We who run ... are different from those who merely study us. We are out there experiencing what they are trying to put into words. — George A. Sheehan

The most important thing I learned [from running] is that there is only one runner in this race, and that is me. — George A. Sheehan

Happiness is different from pleasure. Happiness has something to do with struggling and enduring and accomplishing. — George A. Sheehan

I will not last forever. But I am damn well going to know I have been here. — George A. Sheehan

Like everyone else, I want to be challenged. I want to find out whether or not I am a coward. I want to see how much effort I can put out ... what I can endure ... if I measure up. Running allows that. — George A. Sheehan

To make your life a work of art, you must have the material to work with. The race, any race, is just such an experience. — George A. Sheehan

To keep from decaying, to be a winner, the athlete must accept pain - not only accept it, but look for it, live with it, learn not to fear it. — George A. Sheehan

Why race? The need to be tested, perhaps; the need to take risks; and the chance to be number one. — George A. Sheehan

If you want to find the answers to the Big Questions about your soul, you'd best begin with the Little Answers about your body. — George A. Sheehan

I have a bumper sticker that Bowen created that says Regardless of my kids grades, they have an 'A' in my book'. Without play the child that still lives in all of us will always be incomplete. And not only physically, but creatively, intellectually, and spiritually as well. — George A. Sheehan

Exercise is done against one's wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse. — George A. Sheehan

If you want to win anything - a race, yourself, your life - you have to go a little berserk. — George A. Sheehan

The obsession with running is really an obsession with the potential for more and more life. — George A. Sheehan

Have you ever felt worse after a run? — George A. Sheehan

To know you are one with what you are doing, to know that you are a complete athlete, begins with believing you are a runner. — George A. Sheehan

On the roads, I can see truth revealed whole without thought or reason. There I experience the sudden understanding that comes unasked, unbidden. I simply rest, rest within myself, rest within the pure rhythm of my running. And I wait. — George A. Sheehan

Of all the races, there is no better stage for heroism than a marathon. — George A. Sheehan

I run each day to preserve the self I attained the day before and to secure the self yet to be. — George A. Sheehan

There is no substitute for learning to live in our bodies. — George A. Sheehan

Fitness is just a stage you pass through on the way to becoming a racer. — George A. Sheehan

The more I run, the more I want to run, and the more I live a life conditioned and influenced and fashioned by my running. And the more I run, the more certain I am that I am heading for my real goal: to become the person I am. — George A. Sheehan

The real competition is against the little voice inside you that wants to quit — George A. Sheehan

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. — George A. Sheehan

Life is the greatest experiment. Each of us is an experiment of one-observer and subject-making choices, living with them, recording the effects. — George A. Sheehan

The desire to run comes from deep within us - from the unconscious, the instinctive, the intuitive. — George A. Sheehan

Success rests with having the courage and endurance and, above all, the will to become the person you are, however peculiar that may be. Then you will be able to say, I found my hero and he is me. — George A. Sheehan

Because until we write it down, we don't know what is actually at the root of our lives. — George A. Sheehan

The key then is to find your own mountain, otherwise you will be competing with people who are not even in your event, and running up against the 'shoulds' and 'oughts' of that world, and the inevitable frustration and depression and feelings of failure. A person can be complete or incomplete, but one thing is sure, he cannot be someone else. — George A. Sheehan

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. — George A. Sheehan

Exercise: you don't have time not to — George A. Sheehan