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Most runners these days look like telephone operators in the 1950s: their ears are stuffed with other people’s conversations.
I have a friend who wears headphones on long solo runs because, he says, “I can’t spend that much time alone in my head.” I disagree. He can, and he should. Spending that much time inside one’s head, along with the voices and the bats hanging from the various dendrites and neurons, is one of the best things about running, or at least one of the most therapeutic. Your brain is like a duvet cover: every once in a while, it needs to be aired out.
Our sport seems mindless only to people who never run long enough for any thought to form other than “When can I stop running?” But the only way to succeed as a long-distance runner is to do it mindfully, to be aware of the body and the world it is moving through.
Health has a thousand ways of expressing itself, and the least important way is how much fat you can pinch between your fingers.
The problem with being immobile is you can’t move.
Relationships may have something in common with running, in that you can practice and study and think and train and suffer and regroup, and learn from your mistakes and improve, and learn to avoid what pains you can and live with the ones you can’t, but in the end, all of that doesn’t matter. The only thing that really matters is whom you choose to do it with, and whom you do it for.
