George A. Sheehan
George A. Sheehan
George A. Sheehanwas a physician, senior athlete and author best known for his writings about the sport of running. His book, "Running & Being: The Total Experience," became a New York Times best seller. He was a track star in college, and later became a cardiologist like his father. He served as a doctor in the United States Navy in the South Pacific during World War II on the destroyer USS Daly. He married Mary Jane Fleming and they raised...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth5 November 1918
CountryUnited States of America
Do not tell me what to do, tell me what you do. Do not tell me what is good for me, tell me what is good for you. If, at the same time, you reveal the you in me, if you become a mirror to my inner self, then you have made a reader and a friend.
Fitness has to be fun. If it is not play there will be no fitness. Play, you see, is where the process. Fitness is merely the product.
I run each day to preserve the self I attained the day before and to secure the self yet to be.
Like everyone else, I want to be challenged. I want to find out whether or not I am a coward. I want to see how much effort I can put out . . . what I can endure . . . if I measure up. Running allows that.
There are as many reasons for running as there are days in a year.... But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child.
Why race? The need to be tested, perhaps; the need to take risks; and the chance to be number one.
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.
Fitness is just a stage you pass through on the way to becoming a racer.
We who run...are different from those who merely study us. We are out there experiencing what they are trying to put into words.
If you want to win anything - a race, yourself, your life - you have to go a little berserk.
Running is just such a monastery- a retreat, a place to commune with God and yourself, a place for psychological and spiritual renewal.
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.
Anything that changes your values changes your behaviour.
And while these pounds were being shed, while the physiological miracles were occurring with the heart and muscle and metabolism, psychological marvels were taking place as well. Just so, the world over, bodies, minds, and souls are constantly being born again, during miles on the road.