Brendan Leonard > Quotes

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“The mountains are where I remember being with my friends. The timeline of any friendship is a series of scenes or memories, times where you were together over the course of the relationship. I’ve spent plenty of time with my friends drinking coffee and sharing dinner at restaurants; but those scenes always fade in to the background, overshadowed by adventures like this.”
― Brendan Leonard

“The thing I realize, though, the longer and longer I stay sober, is that the bigger injustice would not be a life cut short, or a life inside a prison. It would be living the sadly ordinary life of a career alcoholic, sitting on a barstool and telling the same stories to the same half-friends for years and years, spending all that money on just enough drinks to get into a cozy haze every night.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“Of course, when there’s nothing to do but sleep, you can’t sleep.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“I had graduated from pointless shit like sitting on a barstool for hours at a time to pointless shit like crawling sideways across a meaningless rock face and wishing I could just get a few feet farther. It was exactly what I needed.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“Most of the guys who worked in my department at REI climbed. They talked about it a lot, and I learned that the “rock” in “rock climbing” is silent if you know what you’re talking about.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“You wait at the curb for a bus or a friend with a car, and you light a cigarette, and maybe then you realize that no one told you what to do with the rest of your life.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“I didn’t drink a couple of beers and chill out; I drank as hard as I could as long as I could. I didn’t have a cigarette every now and then; I smoked a pack a day, all of them right down to the butt. I didn’t take up jogging; I ran a marathon. I dive into everything, and the job gets done, even when it’s not a job. When I find a song I like, I play the shit out of it, over and over again, until, after two weeks, I can’t listen to it anymore.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“It’s enjoyable, to come back to the safer, grounded world that you dreamed about escaping, and realizing that even if you burn your burritos, it’s a tiny worry compared to wondering if you’re going to get yourself and your buddy killed on some stupid rock in a canyon in Arizona.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“A lot of time when it’s getting harder, I will just become focused on moving and reminding myself that I’m fine. I guess if I had a mantra it might just be “You’re fine, you’re fine, you’re doing fine, this is fine.”
― Brendan Leonard, I Hate Running and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion

“I hate camping. I wonder if there’s a way to do all this outdoor shit and not have to sleep in a tent. What’s the point of making yourself miserable to enjoy the outdoors? We could have just gotten up really early in the morning and driven here. No one can possibly get a good night’s sleep in these conditions. Maybe”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“But over the long term, after you put yourself through a good amount of discomfort for a few minutes or hours at a time, a couple times a week, something else happens: You build a higher tolerance for pain and challenges in other aspects of your life.”
― Brendan Leonard, I Hate Running and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion

“all of that would be a lot to explain if an alien landed here and ran up next to me on Central Park South and asked what I was doing, and that’s a weird thing to be thinking about, but so is almost bursting into tears after running for three hours and 50 minutes straight for no real reason.”
― Brendan Leonard, Have Fun Out There Or Not: The Semi-Rad Running Essays

“If you want to run and you have a nagging injury or pain, you essentially become an addict who has a problem that is obviously caused by the thing they’re addicted to, and will search tirelessly for a solution, any solution, that will make their problem go away—except quitting the thing they’re addicted to. Or maybe that’s just me.”
― Brendan Leonard, Ultra-Something

“Spending all that time in the proverbial “pain cave” makes the challenges of regular life a little easier because you’ve upped your tolerance for discomfort (and probably lowered your resting heart rate too). It also translates to an ability to run farther.”
― Brendan Leonard, I Hate Running and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion

“When it comes to running, you have to become the person you don’t want to let down. You get a few minutes or an hour a few times a week when you put yourself first, and you don’t flake. You show up for yourself.”
― Brendan Leonard, I Hate Running and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion

“Don’t count on motivation. Count on discipline.”
― Brendan Leonard, I Hate Running and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion

“Yes, I hate it most of the time, but maybe once during every run, I have a few seconds, or a minute or two, where I find myself thinking, “You know, this isn’t so bad.”
― Brendan Leonard, I Hate Running and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion

“Setting a goal, sticking to it, and achieving it, whatever it is, equals success.”
― Brendan Leonard, I Hate Running and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion

“Running can suck. It can be really painful when you first start doing it, but with enough practice, it’s more uncomfortable than painful and you can just run longer before it hurts, or it hurts less because you’re more used to it.”
― Brendan Leonard, I Hate Running and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion

“Everyone in that starting corral, whether they run five-minute miles or fourteen-minute miles, is hoping they won’t have to stop to poop in the middle of the race. In that, we are all equal.”
― Brendan Leonard, I Hate Running and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion

“Everybody should try running. And when I say try it, I mean do it long enough that you get through the part where it sucks and into the fleeting but noticeable part where you actually think it’s fun. Because during every run, for a few seconds or a few minutes, you have a moment where it feels really good. You forget about the discomfort and you find rhythm, maybe some grace, and a feeling of strength and confidence as you move as well as you’ll ever move doing anything.”
― Brendan Leonard, I Hate Running and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion

“That is the end of the fun phase of all addictions: maintenance.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“That was the day I started to try to forget all my memories with a person I loved. The day I started to adjust to a new part of my life, the part when I’m not in love anymore, the part where I’m alone.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

“Spending all that time in the proverbial “pain cave” makes the challenges of regular life a little easier because you’ve upped your tolerance for discomfort (and probably lowered your resting heart rate too). It”
― Brendan Leonard, I Hate Running and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion

“I don’t want anyone to have to fall into a crevasse, see people die on Everest or in Antarctica, or have to amputate their own arm to feel like they’ve had a good time.”
― Brendan Leonard, The Art of Getting Lost: 365 Days of Adventure, Big and Small

“But running is more like a weird friend I keep hanging out with and who is good for me in a really strange way—despite being pretty unlikable most of the time.”
― Brendan Leonard, I Hate Running and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion

“Start small, start now. This is much better than, “start big, start later.” One advantage is that you don’t have to start perfect. You can merely start. —Seth Godin”
― Brendan Leonard, I Hate Running and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion

“It’s called showing up for work. He got up at five a.m., six days a week, and did his job. That’s it. He just showed up.”
― Brendan Leonard, I Hate Running and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion

“Fall seven times and stand up eight. —Japanese proverb”
― Brendan Leonard, I Hate Running and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion