Quotes by Christopher McDougall

About Christopher McDougall:

Christopher McDougall is an American author and journalist best known for his 2009 best-selling book Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen. He has also written for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, Men's Journal, and New York, and was a contributing editor for Men's Health.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

You don't have to be fast. But you'd better be fearless.

Christopher McDougall

Perhaps all our troubles - all the violence, obesity, illness, depression, and greed we can't overcome - began when we stopped living as Running People. Deny your nature, and it will erupt in some other, uglier way.

Christopher McDougall

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

Christopher McDougall

Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone.~Ken Chlouber, Colorado miner and creator of the Leadville Trail 100 mile race

Christopher McDougall

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether y...

Christopher McDougall

The reason we race isn't so much to beat each other,... but to be each other.

Christopher McDougall

The reason we race isn't so much to beat each other, he understood, but to be with each other.

Christopher McDougall

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 efforthless, like you don't give a shit how high the hill is or how far you've got to go. When you've practiced th...

Christopher McDougall

Strictly by accident, Scott stumbled upon the most advanced weapon in the ultrarunner's arsenal: instead of cringing from fatigue, you embrace it. You refuse to let it go. You get know it so well, you're not afraid of it anymore[...]You can't hate th...

Christopher McDougall

...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 wha...

Christopher McDougall

If you don't think you were born to run you're not only denying history. You're denying who you are.

Christopher McDougall

There are two goddesses in your heart,” he told them. “The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards...

Christopher McDougall

We run when we're scared, we run when we're ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time.

Christopher McDougall

-The reason we race isn't so much to beat each other but to be with each other. -The Hopis consider running a form of prayer; they offer every step as a sacrifice to a loved one, and in return ask the Great Spirit to match their strength with some of...

Christopher McDougall

Nearly all runners do their slow runs too fast, and their fast runs too slow." Ken Mierke says. "So they're just training their bodies to burn sugar, which is the last thing a distance runner wants. You've got enough fat stored to run to California, ...

Christopher McDougall

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.

Christopher McDougall

Blaming the running injury epidemic on big, bad Nike seems too easy - but that's okay, because it's largely their fault.

Christopher McDougall

We wouldn't be alive without love we wouldn't have survived without running maybe we shouldn't be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.

Christopher McDougall

Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new l...

Christopher McDougall

But yeah, Ann [Trason] insisted, running was romantic; and no, of course her friends didn't get it because they'd never broken through. For them, running was a miserable two miles motivated solely by size 6 jeans: get on the scale, get depressed, get...

Christopher McDougall

Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by,” Kerouac wrote. “Trails are like that: you’re floating along in a Shakespearean Arden p...

Christopher McDougall

Author Bio

  • NameChristopher McDougall
  • DescriptionAmerican journalist and writer
  • Born1962
  • ProfessionJournalist; Writer