Fray Arsenio

“I can't feel my hands or feet or flesh at all, like I'm a ghost who wouldn't know the earth was under him if he didn't see it now and again through the mist. But even thought some people would call this frost-pain suffering if they wrote about it to their mams in a letter, I don't, because I know that in half and hour I'm going to be warm, that by the time I get to the main road and am turning on to the wheatfield footpath by the bus stop I'm going to feel as hot as a potbellied stove and as happy as a dog with a tin tail.”
― Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

“I wonder if I'm the only one in the running business with this system of forgetting that I'm running because I'm too busy thinking.”
― Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

“Because when on a raw and frosty morning I get up at five o'clock and stand shivering my belly off on the stone floor and all the rest still have another hour to snooze before the bells go, I slink downstairs through all the corridors to the big outside door with a permit running-card in my fist, I feel like the first and last man in the world, both at once, if you can believe what I'm trying to say.”
― Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

“I run to a steady jog-trot rhythm, and soon it was so smooth that I forgot I was running, and I was hardly able to know that my legs were lifting and falling and my arms going in and out, and my lungs didn't seem to be working at all, and my heart stopped that wicked thumping I always get at the beginning of a run. Because you see I never race at all; I just run, and somehow I know that if I forget I'm racing and only jog-trot along until I don't know I'm running I always win the race. For when my eyes recognize that I'm getting near the end of my course -by seeing a stile or cottage corner- I put on a spurt, and such a fast big spurt it is because I feel that up till then I haven't been running and that I've used up no energy at all.”
― Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner