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If marathoners finish they win.

George A. Sheehan

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George A. Sheehan
Age: 74 †
Born: 1918
Born: November 5
Died: 1993
Died: November 1
Cardiologist
Military Officer
Physician
Finish
Winning
Running

More quotes by George A. Sheehan

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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
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I will not last forever. But I am damn well going to know I have been here.
George A. Sheehan
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There are as many reasons for running as there are days in the year, years in my life. But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child, an artist and a saint. So, too, are you. Find your own play, your own self-renewing compulsion, and you will become the person you are meant to be.
George A. Sheehan
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Exercise: you don't have time not to
George A. Sheehan
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The desire to run comes from deep within us — from the unconscious, the intuitive, the instinctive. And that desire becomes a passion when the runner learns to race. Then, the race becomes all — the lovemaking of the runner.
George A. Sheehan
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Play is where life lives
George A. Sheehan
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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
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We may think there is willpower involved, but more likely... change is due to want power. Wanting the new addiction more than the old one. Wanting the new me in preference to the person I am now.
George A. Sheehan
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It's very hard in the beginning to understand that the whole idea is not to beat the other runners. Eventually you learn that the competition is against the little voice inside you that wants you to quit.
George A. Sheehan
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Once you have decided that winning isn't everything, you become a winner.
George A. Sheehan
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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
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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
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Why race? The need to be tested, perhaps the need to take risks and the chance to be number one.
George A. Sheehan
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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
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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
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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
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No matter how old I get, the race remains one of life's most rewarding experiences.
George A. Sheehan
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Every runner is an experiment of one.
George A. Sheehan
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The distance runner is mysteriously reconciling the separations of body and mind, of pain and pleasure, of the conscious and the unconscious. He is repairing the rent, and healing the wound in his divided self. He has found a way to make the ordinary extraordinary the commonplace unique the everyday eternal.
George A. Sheehan
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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