![]() ![]() This is why you must work towards conditioning your mind to push through the pain and the desire to give up.Īnd one of the best ways to sharpen your mind is by reading powerful words. Whether you are just starting out or a seasoned runner, you know that the most important factor is your mind.Įvery mile you hit your mind will want to give up. *Another quote that we couldn’t find the origins of.Here are over 1000 of the best inspirational and motivational quotes & sayings for runners. "Kid," Pre would say, "I didn't mean it literally." He sees a concerned Pre standing over him, and gasps out that he'd been inspired by his "suicide pace" quote. Imagine an impressionable young cross-country runner, lying panting in the chute after a maniacal start has led to major oxygen debt failure. ![]() ![]() He never came close to doing that, and rolled his eyes at those who did and died trying. To me, and surely to him, "a suicide pace," means ripping away at truly physically unsustainable speed. He very much wanted to be alive and strong at the finish. He wanted to make everyone following suffer, but with the object of getting the most out of his own races. The essence of Pre's front running was the opposite of suicidal. I never heard Pre say those words, and if you can't find them elsewhere, I think there is a reason. UPDATE: Kenny Moore, the author of Bowerman and the Men of Oregon and Best Efforts, and a contemporary of Pre, wrote us the following email: His willingness to go on a suicide mission every time he raced was and is unparalleled-even if he never put it that way. The idea that each race is a war against what's possible that could end disastrously is the key to the Pre mystique. If Prefontaine’s races were “works of art” (we’re confident he said that), and “art is what we need to believe is true”*, then I need to believe that Prefontaine so perfectly described his artistic process. When MileSplit editor Jojo Gretschel first mentioned to me that the quote seemed fake to her, I felt shitty. The word “suicide” does not come out of Prefontaine’s mouth in the Kenny Moore’s Bowerman and the Men of Oregon, the script to the movie Without Limits (co-written by Moore), the script to the movie Prefontaine, or his official biography. The phrase “suicidal pace” appears twice: once in 1930, and once in 1984, when Alberto Salazar said “If anyone goes out at a suicidal pace, I’ll probably sit back” before that year’s Olympic Trials.Įvery edition of the Eugene Register-Guard is scanned into Google’s newspaper archive if you search that, which contains scanned editions of many more newspapers, all thirty-one uses of “suicide pace” are not attributed to Prefontaine. We’ll save you a Hamilton-the phrase “suicide pace” appears once, in 1955, referring to a car. You can access every edition of The Oregonian ever printed for a mere $10. The closest thing to it that I know is from him is the "I plan to put crap in their legs" (or something like that) quoted before the '72 Olympic Games. Not that he couldn't have said it, but I figure if it were genuine, I would have heard it before now. I have never heard that quote before and never ascribed to Pre. I emailed Tom Jordan, the director of the Pre Classic and the author of the biography Pre: The Story of America’s Greatest Running Legend asking him about the quote. Poster of Pre with the quote, available for $25: There’s no evidence that Pre ever said it. There’s only one problem with that last quote. If I were a teenager in 2016, there’s a 100% chance that all of my social media accounts would be covered in Pre quotes, including one of the most iconic ones: “The only good pace is a suicide pace, and today looks like a good day to die.” ( Runners love tweeting that.) Without Limits is one of my favorite movies ever, and I had a poster in various bedrooms from roughly 2005 to 2011 of this great photo of Pre looking back. Every mildly serious American runner has, at some point, encountered it. His death in a May 1975 car crash is one of the great tragedies in the history of American sports, and the bravura performance that was his life created an inspirational cottage industry that’s going strong four decades later. Today would be Steve Prefontaine’s 65th birthday. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |