Marshall Ulrich > Quotes

“Keep going, one foot in front of the other, millions of times. Face forward and take the next step. Don’t flinch when the road or gets rough, you fall down, you miss a turn, or the bridge you planned to cross has collapsed. Do what you say you’ll do, and don’t let anything or anyone stop you. Deal with the obstacles as they come. Move on. Keep going, no matter what, one foot in front of the other, millions of times.”
― Marshall Ulrich, Running on Empty

“Yes, there may be suffering—in fact, it’s certain there will be—but it serves to heighten our joy. It makes us grateful to be alive.”
― Marshall Ulrich, Running on Empty

“I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather my sparks should burn out in a blaze than they should be stifled by dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than asleep and permanent as a planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”
― Marshall Ulrich, Running on Empty

“It takes guts to follow your dreams. Courage. Many people, even those who love you, don't understand how compelling that can be, and will try to keep you in the 'safety zone'. But f*ck that. Half the fun is venturing into the unknown, taking on the difficult task that yields new knowledge, doing more and testing your limits.”
― Marshall Ulrich, Running on Empty

“1. Expect a journey and a battle. 2. Focus on the present and set intermediate goals. 3. Don’t dwell on the negative. 4. Transcend the physical. 5. Accept your fate. 6. Have confidence that you will succeed. 7. Know that there will be an end. 8. Suffering is okay. 9. Be kind to yourself. 10. Quitting is not an option.”
― Marshall Ulrich, Running on Empty

“True, every runner wants to quit sometimes. By any definition, becoming a successful athlete requires conquering those psychological barriers, whether you’re sucking air during your first jog or gutting it out in the final four miles of a marathon, axiomatically the toughest. When you push beyond the marathon, new obstacles arise, and the necessary mental toughness comes from raising your pain threshold. All endurance sports are about continuing when it feels as if you have nothing left, when everything aches, when you feel done—but you’re not. You have to get beyond the numbers that, like certain birthdays for some people, just seem intrinsically daunting: fifty miles, one hundred miles, one thousand miles, two thousand miles, and random points in between. At such distances, the sport becomes every bit as much mental as physical.”
― Marshall Ulrich, Running on Empty

“One way I deal with the pain is to embrace it, to realize that it also presents a gift: profound appreciation for whatever small thing comforts me, brings me pleasure, makes me laugh, satisfies my hunger, lightens my mood. Yes, at least I didn’t die. In other words, if something hurts, I focus on what doesn’t. The mind will naturally fixate on any irritation, but you can redirect it, make yourself look away or at least occupy yourself with something else for a while.”
― Marshall Ulrich, Running on Empty

“Actually, it's rare for someone to die doing this sport, but it's not at all rare to want to.”
― Marshall Ulrich, Running on Empty

“Why do the easy, expected thing? It takes guts to follow your dreams. Courage. Half the fun is venturing into the unknown, taking on the difficult task that yields new knowledge.”
― Marshall Ulrich

“Ray Zahab is fond of saying that the challenge of ultrarunning is 90 percent mental, and the other 10 percent is all in our heads. He's got it right: Beyond the marathon, the primary test becomes entirely psychological. If you can run twenty-six miles, then your body can surely carry you even farther (barring calamitous injury), and the only question is whether your mind can go the distance, too.”
― Marshall Ulrich

“I always say the only limitations are in your mind, and if you don’t buy into those limits, you can do a helluva lot more than you imagine.”
― Marshall Ulrich, Running on Empty

“To be honest, my spirits dropped after that, and I got pretty quiet and introspective, but I will say this: the peak of Denali ain’t a bad place to take a moment for private reflection. At the top, you realize how high you are: above twenty thousand feet, you see these extraordinarily huge glaciers going on for miles. Off the side, there’s the Great Gorge of Ruth Glacier, one of the deepest canyons in the world, filled with ice and twice the size of the Grand Canyon. Far off in the distance, you can see greenery, but it’s twenty to thirty miles away. You are a speck on an enormous chunk of white ice, settled into the vast field of our world, nestled into but one corner of our inconceivably huge universe. I like that feeling—we humans are so small, so insignificant, but part of something mind-blowingly enormous. It is a paradoxical expansion and contraction, a contradictory sense of insignificance and greatness, of finiteness and boundlessness, of solitude and connectedness.”
― Marshall Ulrich, Both Feet on the Ground: Reflections from the Outside