Found this in the Navy Times this week....and wanted to share it. I know it isn't one of my normal posters, but it is a good motivational quote. This is from Colby Wentlandt, a 12 year-old ultra-maratoner (yes, that is correct 12 years old)....

One reason I like running is you can't blame anyone else for having it go wrong. It's all you, the blame and the accomplishment.

Instead of a poster today, I am going to post my running quote:

Yes there will be pain. Yes there will be injuries. And yes, there will be days where you want to give up. The point is not to. If you give up, then the past week, month, year will have been in vain. Keep pushing through the tiredness, push through the pain, and push through the injuries to be come the new, better you.

Running Helps You Find your Inner Self

Try to run like Rocky Balboa or Shalane Flanagan, and you'll soon find out who you really are.

By Marc Parent; Image by Nigel Buchanan
Published May 7, 2013



The predominant feature of a self-appointed genius is ignorance. Before you begin something, you know everything about it. Once you start, you realize you know nothing. Back when I knew everything about running—back before I'd ever actually tried it—I drove past a runner one day and pointed him out to my wife. He was hunched over, tilted a little sideways, jabbing his fists low from his hips, and twisting his face rhythmically to his shoulder. I thought he looked terrible. Pick up the stride, Dude, I thought. Bring your head up, close your mouth, and brighten your eyes, for crying out loud. You wouldn't expect anyone seated at a restaurant to let their face go slack and their eyes go loopy unless there was something wrong. Why should it be any different for someone on the road?

"The guy cares about his appearance enough to go running," I told Susan. "You'd think he'd try to look a little better while he's actually doing it."

I, self-appointed genius, began running for the sake of appearance, so my stride was a primary concern. No problem there. I would just try not to run in a stupid-looking way. How hard could it be? A stride wasn't something you were born with, after all—it was something you could pull off a rack and throw on like a suit. If I went slow and breathed like a windbag and my face turned red and sprouted rivers, there was nothing I could do about it. But I could run however I chose. I could heroically trot with my chin lifted and slightly canted toward the sun. I could drop my hips and hunch my shoulders and hunker down like I was up to something important that no one should question. I could smile and lope like a pro basketball player who would explode with finesse at any moment. If my body went crazy, I could wrap it in a nice suit that would somehow counterbalance the ugly truth.

Within moments of my first time out, I thought about Rocky from the movie and tried to run like him—slow and loose with a casual suggestion in the movements that my body might flash with a flurry of punches. No one could ask why I was running like Rocky all of a sudden, because maybe that's just how I did it. Maybe it was a happy coincidence that I happened to run just exactly like Rocky. After a few minutes of jogging with light shadowboxing, my stride devolved into something that wasn't anything at all like Rocky's and much more like an overweight guy in his early 40s who had never run a day in his life.

The first lessons are almost always the best lessons, and it was no different here: Running is a kind of truth serum. It brutally strips away everything you put on and leaves you with only yourself. The runner on the road, hunched over or otherwise, knows something that the passenger in the car doesn't. Down to the core, the runner knows who he is. The runner has to. He's so tired, who he is is all that's left.

The fact that I've been running a few years now and should know better hasn't stopped me from trying new personas at the outset of almost every run. Today for example, I began with small, springy steps and high fists that would have mortified my family. I had just seen a video of this guy who claimed the stride should come off the toes and land on the toes. He looked like a version of that British vacuum guy—smart and modern and like he'd have bathrooms in his house with prototype toilets made by Google, I suppose. Anyway, very trustworthy, and the stride looked great on him, despite the fact that he was wearing something like sandals. He was showing other attractive people in sandals how to do it. They ran in place with their knees flicking up to their bellies and then magically accelerated forward without any perceivable change in what they were doing. Their heads remained still as if they were riding hovercrafts. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to stride like a sandal-footed, level-headed, British vacuum guy, and I did for the first mile or so before the run returned me to my truer self.

Rough visual for the stride of my truer self, by the way: Take a large industrial trash bag full of two-by-fours that have been cut to three-foot lengths and doused with whale blubber, shake the bag furiously, and let the boards have their way.

Once I had an idea at the start of a run that wasn't about strides. Instead of letting my hands flop uselessly at my hips, I closed my thumbs and index fingers into relaxed "okay" signs and swung them high enough that I could catch glimpses of them and tell myself I was okay with every stride. What a powerful message to repeatedly send yourself through the toil of a run! What a subconscious world of good it would do! For a moment I thought I'd discovered something that would have me bounding over mountains. I can't say exactly when it happens but somewhere after a mile of swinging okay signs across your face, it goes from brilliant to breathtakingly dumb.

But the run makes trash of every bauble and artifact, layer upon layer, whether it's something in your form, or something on your body, or something in your mind, until you're empty and bare and raw. The New York Times set up a booth one year at the finish line of the New York City Marathon so that runners could step in to be photographed just moments after they had completed the 26.2-mile distance. Hundreds of people of all ages, sizes, and races stepped in to be shot, and the pictures were posted online. I clicked through most of them. They were some of the most intimate portraits I'd ever seen. What made the shots so stunning—newsworthy, even—was that in every instance, you were looking at people in a way you never see them, and in a way they would rarely let themselves be photographed: without expression or intention or emotion or even thought; without hairstyle, makeup, outfit, or really, grooming of any kind. The runner knows who he is. The farther he runs, the more he knows, the more that shows.

We've all been told at some point in life that the only way to win is to be yourself. But how can you be yourself if you don't know who that is? If you think lying is only something you can do with language, then it's relatively easy to stay truthful. But if you believe motivations, gestures, expressions, postures, and the deep, unconscious rivers that drive those can also lie, you begin to understand the complexity of moving truthfully from one moment to the next.

Because the first time I saw Shalane Flanagan run, I went out later that afternoon thinking I could probably keep up with her if I only rolled my legs out with the same long, whiplike lashes she did. And for the first mile I did just that. Then I got really tired and stopped thinking about her. Then I went farther and stopped thinking altogether and just ran, my mouth hanging open, somewhat hunched over, and probably tilted a little to one side.