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Showing posts from March, 2016
"But upon leaving [the monastery after a 6-month retreat], Father Nouwen knew there had been only a lull in the battle with himself. He was the same man, with the same problems. So he asked the abbot for advice. "You must put 90 minutes aside every day for prayer," the abbot told him. If Father Nouwen was to take Genesee home with him, he would have to take time for this daily dialogue with himself and his God. Without constant renewal, what he had experienced at the monastery would vanish. Otherwise, for the rest of his life, he would awake in the morning with the same tendencies, the same desires, the same sins that he conquered only the day before. Only a return each day to the monastery would save him. Running...is just such a monastery--a retreat, a place to commune with God and yourself, a place for psychological and spiritual renewal." -George Sheehan
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"It didn't matter, though; a subtle shift had taken place in his character in the past day or two, one of those subsidences which produce new landmarks and alter the emphasis of the old. What now stood revealed was enjoyment: he realized that he was a human being well fitted to enjoy. Astonishing but true: in all his years of running he had never positively enjoyed a race. He had envied the sprinters, the shot-putters, the jumpers, all those whose event demanded less ascetic discipline than his. Between puts he had seen shot-men reading the paper or chatting with their competitors. And he had felt excluded. Now it occurred to him that he had been excluding himself. But he wasn't excluding himself anymore. And in a flash of intuition he realized why: he had renounced ambition, the tyranny of schedule and stop-watch, the profit-and-loss accounting of his training to date. He said to himself: I solemnly give up all side-considerations, all hopes of gain or celebrity, retaini
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"Why were the Greeks the true, original athletes? Because the Greeks were the inventors of the golden mean. They did not neglect the body for the mind. In our age we have neglected the body for the machine. What we have to do is rediscover the body, stop poisoning it with false stimulants, stop filling it with noxious substances, stop treating it only as a means of self-indulgent pleasure. A plant needs water, and a body needs exercise. If you do not exercise a body, it corrupts, and the mind corrupts with it. Look at the politicians and the scholars and the businessmen. Look at the people who rule our world and tell us what to do. What a travesty of logic! These people have no bodies, only heads. And many athletes have no heads, only bodies. A champion is a man who has trained his body and his mind,  who has learned to conquer pain and to use pain for his own purposes. A great athlete is at peace with himself and at peace with the world; he has fulfilled himself."
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"He made a staggering turn into Exeter Street for the last hundred yards, and the sound of his name beat against his eardrums and he knew, finally, why his father had come back to run for nineteen years, why the others, not the clowns but the good competitors, came out on this day each year. Whether he finished first or fifty-first, each heard, for a little while, the sound of his name, a bit of acclaim to treasure secretly, to set him apart from his fellow man and make brighter an existence that otherwise was humdrum and monotonous; not an easy thing for any man to give up, for there is a need of such tribute in all men of heart and spirit, and each must find his little share in whatever way he can."  -George Harmon Coxe
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"The devil is legion, and he's smarter than you. He's clever. He knows exactly what to do and how to do it in order to cause despair as much as possible. But you just continue in your work and you tell him  'That's fine, keep going, I'm gonna kick your ass in the end.'"
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The Fall and Rise of Jason Isbell - CBS Sunday Morning
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