Marcelino nodded, before disappearing inside the school-house.

“Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry,” Mark Twain used to

the only way to truly conquer something, as every great philosopher and geneticist will tell you, is to love it. Scott would never again linger

“Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and

“Lesson two,” Caballo called. “Think Easy, Light, Smooth, and Fast. You start with easy, because if that’s all you get, that’s not so bad. Then work on light. Make it effortless, like you don’t give a shit how high the hill is or how far you’ve got to go. When

“Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction.”

Only later would he discover that Zatopek wasn’t talking about the hug at all: in his suitcase, Clarke found Zatopek’s 1952 Olympic 10,000-meters gold medal. For Zatopek to give it to the man who’d replaced his name in the record books was extraordinarily noble; to give it away at precisely the moment in his life when he was losing everything else

“To move into the lead means

Young Gun ultrarunners were like Lost Generation writers in the ’20s, Beat poets in the ’50s, and rock musicians in the ’60s: they were poor and ignored and free from all expectations and inhibitions. They were body artists, playing with the palette of human endurance.