Here's stuff to ponder as you do your long runs. Add your own as a comment or send it on to me, [email protected].

"Great is the victory, but the friendship of all is greater"

Emil Zatopek (pictured)

Greatest long-distance runner of the 1950s

"Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education."

Mark Twain

"Always use lots of vaseline"

"When you feel good - go like hell - there's going to be plenty of days

you'll feel like s**t!"

JAL

"Do most of us want life on the same calm level as a geometrical problem? Certainly we want our pleasures more varied with mountains and valleys of emotional joy, and marathoning furnishes just that."

Clarence DeMar

When I first started running, I was so embarrassed, I'd walk when cars passed me. I'd pretend I was looking at the flowers."

Joan Benoit Samuelson

Great American runner

"I'm not that old! Not as old as you, you old bastard! Maybe you've given up but not me!"

John Kelly, American runner to his neighbour when told he was right to stop running marathons because he wasn't getting younger. Kelly came out of retirement and placed 19th in the Rome Olympics marathon a few months later.

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Or indeed, a woman. Rudyard Kipling

Inspirational sports video on YouTube, under 3 minutes long:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6cOp6EDFlI