On why I, Anne, run half marathons:
“Small victories have no shelf life. They are little waves that lap up against some part of [the] brain and are gone….. There’s no mysticism about this. Victory is not everything, nor is it the only thing. It’s not slippery or elusive. Victory is ever present, in our minds day in and day out, no matter what the job at hand. We grab it, or we don’t. And man of us, most of the time, simply refuse to reach for it….
The smell of victory is not, as Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore suggested, napalm in the morning. You know what victory smells like? The rubber floor of a gym. It smells like the cover of a 16-pound med ball in dirty hands as a warm breeze blows through eucalyptus branches behind a San Diego strip mall. And victory sounds like that ball being hurled against a cinder-block wall, again, again, and again. Victory looks like fried colors on the edges of your vision on the last rep. Victory tastes like your own filings, like acid in your saliva with a touch of underlying bile held down by sheer will.
This isn’t a Nike commercial…. Physical conditioning is the foundation of any an all successes, no matter where you are or what you do…. Victories, large and small, will not come in a constant stream if your body is unprepared, because by default, the mind is useless if the body is not ready….If you want to know what victory is, taste it a bit more often, you must understand it as [champions] understand it.