Christopher McDougall Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

If you don't have answers to your problems after a four-hour run, you ain't getting them.

Christopher McDougall
Human urine is both nutrient-rich and an effective tooth whitener

Christopher McDougall
In 'Tarahumara' land, there was no crime, war or theft. There was no corruption, obesity, drug addiction, greed, wife-beating, child abuse, heart disease, high blood pressure, or carbon emissions. They didn't get diabetes, or depressed, or even old: 50-year-olds outran teenagers.

Christopher McDougall
Perhaps all our troubles - all the violence, obesity, illness, depression, and greed we can't overcome - began when we stopped living as Running People. Deny your nature, and it will erupt in some other, uglier way.

Christopher McDougall
We've got a motto here-you're tougher than you think you are, and you can do more than you think you can.

Christopher McDougall
The words of the social critic Eric Hoffer were ringing true: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket."

Christopher McDougall
There was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love *running*. The engineering was certainly the same: both depended on loosening your grip on your own desires, putting aside what you wanted and appreciating what you've got, being patient and forgiving and... undemanding...maybe we shouldn't be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.

Christopher McDougall
He was onto something. Something huge. It wasn't just how to run; it was how to live, the essence of who we are as a species and what we're meant to be.

Christopher McDougall
Faced with the almost inescapable conclusion that it had been selling lemons, Nike shifted into make-lemonade mode. Jeff Pisciotta became head of a top-secret and seemingly impossible project: finding a way to make a buck off a naked foot.

Christopher McDougall
Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone.

Christopher McDougall
If you don't think you were born to run you're not only denying history. You're denying who you are.

Christopher McDougall
There's something so universal about that sensation, the way running unites our two most primal impulses: fear and pleasure. We run when we're scared, we run when we're ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time.

Christopher McDougall
Blaming the running injury epidemic on big, bad Nike seems too easy - but that's okay, because it's largely their fault.

Christopher McDougall
Only recently have we come up with the technology to turn lazing around into a way of life. We've taken our sinewy, durable, hunter-gatherer bodies and plunked them into an artificial world of leisure.

Christopher McDougall
The only way to truly conquer something, as every great philosopher and geneticist will tell you, is to love it.

Christopher McDougall
But you can't muscle through a five-hour run that way; you have to relax into it like easing your body into a hot bath, until it no longer resists the shock and begins to enjoy it.

Christopher McDougall
If you can run six miles on a summer day, then you, my friend, are a lethal weapon in the animal kingdom.

Christopher McDougall
Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain.

Christopher McDougall
That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they'd never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind's first fine art, our original act of inspired creation.

Christopher McDougall
Sometimes,' she said, 'it takes a woman to bring out the best in a man.

Christopher McDougall