Top 120 Christopher McDougall Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You don’t stop running because you get old, you get old because you stop running.”

— Christopher McDougall

Featured in: Running Quotes

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

— Christopher McDougall

Featured in: Running Quotes

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

— Christopher McDougall

Featured in: Running Quotes

4. “Ask nothing from your running, and you’ll get more than you ever imagined.”

— Christopher McDougall

Featured in: Running Quotes

5. “If you don’t think you were born to run you’re not only denying history. You’re denying who you are.”

— Christopher McDougall

Featured in: Running Quotes

6. “The reason we race isn’t so much to beat each other, but to be with each other.”

— Christopher McDougall

Featured in: Running Quotes

7. “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

8. “You don’t have to be fast. But you’d better be fearless.”

— Christopher McDougall

9. “Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

— Christopher McDougall

10. “We were born to run; we were born because we run.”

— Christopher McDougall

11. “Deny your nature, and it will erupt in some other, uglier way.”

— Christopher McDougall

Featured in: Running Quotes

12. “Solvitur ambulando: “When in doubt, walk.”

— Christopher McDougall

13. “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

14. “Suffering is humbling. It pays to know how to get your butt kicked.”

— Christopher McDougall

15. “We’re constantly told that running will ruin our knees and outrage our hearts, but for nearly all of human existence, it was associated with freedom, vitality, and eternal youth.”

— Christopher McDougall

16. “Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone. – KEN CHLOUBER, Colorado miner and creator of the Leadville Trail 100.”

— Christopher McDougall

17. “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

18. “Humans are built for endurance, not speed. We’re awful sprinters compared to every other animal. We try to run our races as if they were speed races, but they are not. They’re endurance races. Even a marathon, the way it’s run now, it’s not an endurance contest.”

— Christopher McDougall

19. “Everyone is built for running.”

— Christopher McDougall

20. “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

21. “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

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

— Christopher McDougall

23. “Anyone can do running. Running should be easy. It should be fun. It should include everyone. It shouldn’t be a punishment for eating cheesecake, which is what we’ve turned it into.”

— Christopher McDougall

24. “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

25. “Endurance, after all, is the only reason we even exist. We think of ourselves as nature’s deadliest animals, but the truth is, a naked human is the biggest wimp in the wild. We have no fangs, no claws, no strength, and no speed.”

— Christopher McDougall

26. “If you read folklore and mythology, any kind of myths, any kind of tall tales, running is always associated with freedom and vitality and youthfulness and eternal vigor. It’s only in our lifetime that running has become associated with fear and pain.”

— Christopher McDougall

27. “Running is the heart of what it means to be human.”

— Christopher McDougall

28. “We wouldn’t be alive without love we wouldn’t have survived without running maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.”

— Christopher McDougall

29. “The best runner leaves no tracks. – Tao Te Ching.”

— Christopher McDougall

30. “The ‘Tarahumara’ use their legs ‘as designed.’ By running at a young age with minimal footwear, they naturally develop the best biomechanical use of their legs. Cushioned shoes restrict foot movements and allow for over-striding. Short strides are natural.”

— Christopher McDougall

31. “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

32. “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

33. “Were designed for persistence hunting, which is a mix of running and walking. Whats built into that kind of running is a sense of pleasure. You are designed and built and perfect for this activity, and it should be enjoyable and fun.”

— Christopher McDougall

34. “For nearly 2 million years, our ancestors survived and thrived and spread across the planet because they could run other mammals into heat exhaustion.”

— Christopher McDougall

35. “Running should be free, man.”

— Christopher McDougall

36. “There’s a more glaring giveaway that boxing and wrestling are just recreation: girls and old guys aren’t good at them. As a rule of thumb, performance aberration in a basic skill is a good way to evaluate whether it’s natural to a species. When you spot a giant ability gap between ages and genders, you know you’re looking at nurture, not nature.”

— Christopher McDougall

37. “Empathy, the Greeks believed, was a source of strength, not softness; the more you recognized yourself in others and connected with their distress, the more endurance, wisdom, cunning, and determination you could tap into.”

— Christopher McDougall

38. “There are two goddesses in your heart,” he told them. “The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, give her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you.” Ask nothing from your running, in other words, and you’ll get more than you ever imagined.”

— Christopher McDougall

39. “Their real strength was their ears: Theseus and Hercules were lifelong learners and equal-opportunity students, always seeking advice and just as happy to get it from women. That was the mark of a hero and the signature of pankration: total power and knowledge.”

— Christopher McDougall

40. “The ancient Greeks loved that little interlocking contradiction, the idea that you’re only your strongest when you have a weakness for other people. They saw.”

— Christopher McDougall

41. “Blaming the running injury epidemic on big, bad Nike seems too easy – but that’s okay, because it’s largely their fault.”

— Christopher McDougall

42. “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

43. “There is a growing subculture of barefoot runners, people who got rid of their shoes. And what they have found uniformly is you get rid of the shoes, you get rid of the stress, you get rid of the injuries and the ailments.”

— Christopher McDougall

44. “Extreme heroism springs from something that no scientific theory can fully explain; it’s an illogical impulse that flies in the face of biology, psychology, actuarial statistics, and basic common sense.”

— Christopher McDougall

45. “When it comes to mentors, you can’t beat survival.”

— Christopher McDougall

46. “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

47. “True heroism, as the ancients understood, isn’t about strength, or boldness, or even courage. It’s about compassion.”

— Christopher McDougall

48. “We were born to run; we were born because we run. We’re all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known.”

— Christopher McDougall

49. “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. – Gnostic Gospel of St. Thomas.”

— Christopher McDougall

50. “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