Becoming an ex-alcoholic, however, is not easy. Drink may be futile and ultimately degrading, but only the fortunate drinker discovers this. And it is the even more fortunate one who then comes upon a new and healthy path to the summit of his physical and mental powers. Before the liver goes, the heart enlarges and the brain begins to deteriorate, he must get the message that there is a better way to experience himself and the universe. My.

He runs because he has to. Because in being a runner, in moving through pain and fatigue and suffering, in imposing stress upon stress, in eliminating all but the necessities of life, he is fulfilling himself and becoming the person he is.

Anyone with a sense of humor can see that life is a joke, not a tragedy.

From the moment you become a spectator, everything is downhill. It is a life that ends before the cheering and the shouting die.

The trouble with this country,” the late John Berryman once told fellow poet James Dickey, “is that a man can live his entire life without knowing whether or not he is a coward.

I am an intellectual. This does not mean I am intelligent, but that ideas are more important to me than people.

The runner need not break four minutes in the mile or four hours in the marathon. It is only necessary that he runs and runs and sometimes suffers. Then one day he will wake up and discover that somewhere along the way he has begun to see order and law and love and Truth that makes men free. It.

Thomas Merton, another solitary, understood that. The beginning of freedom, he wrote, is not liberation from the body but liberation from the mind. We are not entangled in our own body, we are entangled in our mind. I.

Man is meant to be a success.” Each of us, he said, is unique and endowed with potentials unlike those of others. Success comes in finding your authentic self, the person you truly are, and becoming that person, tapping all of that untapped potential.

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.