Top 120 Christopher McDougall Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We’ve created an unnatural form of running. It’s not just the shoes, but we run on artificial surfaces – straight ahead, hard and steady – instead of speeding up and slowing down, reacting to the terrain with changes of pace and rhythm.”

— Christopher McDougall

52. “One of the most dangerous and best-kept secrets of the medical profession is the epidemic of anesthesiologists who are addicted to their own drugs.”

— Christopher McDougall

53. “We are the biggest sissies in the jungle. Every other animal is stronger than we are – they have fangs, they have claws, they have nimbleness, they have speed. We think Usain Bolt is fast – Usain Bolt can get his ass kicked by a squirrel.”

— Christopher McDougall

54. “Even Charles Darwin, that human decoder ring of bizarre behavior, found the idea of saving a stranger’s life to be a total head-scratcher.”

— Christopher McDougall

55. “The art of the hero wasn’t about being brave; it was about being so competent that bravery wasn’t an issue.”

— Christopher McDougall

56. “Wilt Chamberlain, all seven feet one inch and 275 pounds of him, had no problem running a 50-mile ultra when he was sixty years old after his knees had survived a lifetime of basketball.”

— Christopher McDougall

57. “To live with ghosts requires solitude.”

— Christopher McDougall

58. “If you can run six miles on a summer day then you, my friend, are a lethal weapon in the animal kingdom. We can dump heat on the run, but animals can’t pant while they gallop.”

— Christopher McDougall

59. “Practice abundance by giving back,” and “Improve personal relationships,” and “Show integrity to your value system.” Vigil’s dietary advice was just as bare of sports or science. His nutrition strategy for an Olympic marathon hopeful was this: “Eat as though you were a poor person.”

— Christopher McDougall

60. “Know why people run marathons? he told Dr. Bramble. Because running is rooted in our collective imagination, and our imagination is rooted in running. Language, art, science; space shuttles, Starry Night, intravascular surgery; they all had their roots in our ability to run. Running was the superpower that made us human – which means it’s a superpower all humans possess.”

— Christopher McDougall

61. “Patience and kindness don’t show up on demand; they’re disciplines that require constant practice, and there is no better boot camp for learning those skills than hitching your survival to your ability to discern – and respect – the needs of another creature.”

— Christopher McDougall

62. “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.”

— Christopher McDougall

63. “Just move your legs. Because if you don’t think you were born to run, you’re not only denying history. You’re denying who you are.”

— Christopher McDougall

64. “Nothing works out according to plan, but it always works out.”

— Christopher McDougall

65. “Urique. As a mining village whose best days.”

— Christopher McDougall

66. “Vigil couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but his gut kept telling him that there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love running.”

— Christopher McDougall

67. “In terms of nutritional content, a tablespoon of chia is like a smoothie made from salmon, spinach, and human growth hormone.”

— Christopher McDougall

68. “You know what kind of nerves are in your feet? The same ones that network into your genitals. Your feet are like a minnow bucket full of sensory neurons, all of them wriggling around in search of sensation. Stimulate those nerves just a little, and the impulse will rocket through your entire nervous system; that’s why tickling your feet can overload the switchboard and cause your whole body to spasm.”

— Christopher McDougall

69. “You don’t start with today and aim toward your goal. You start with the goal, and aim back toward today. Do it like that, and you’ll always find a way.”

— Christopher McDougall

70. “Now, Ah Hing, I’m going to teach you how to fight like a woman. – GRANDMASTER IP MAN, Bruce Lee’s teacher.”

— Christopher McDougall

71. “Know why he could do it? Because no one ever told him he couldn’t. No one ever told him he oughta be off dying somewhere in an old age home. You live up to your own expectations, man.”

— Christopher McDougall

72. “The Tarahumara would party like this all night, then rouse themselves the next morning to face off in a running race that could last not two miles, not two hours, but two full days. According to the Mexican historian Francisco Almada, a Tarahumara champion once ran 435 miles, the equivalent of setting out for a jog in New York City and not stopping till you were closing in on Detroit.”

— Christopher McDougall

73. “An outlaw outlook calls on every citizen to create, not conform; to decide what is right and wrong and act on it, not just baa along with the rest of the herd.”

— Christopher McDougall

74. “A team of Harvard scientists had once verified exactly that point by sticking a rectal thermometer in a cheetah and getting it to run on a treadmill. Once its temperature hit 105 degrees, the cheetah shut down and refused to run.”

— Christopher McDougall

75. “Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry,” Mark Twain used to say.”

— Christopher McDougall

76. “If it feels like work, you’re working too hard.”

— Christopher McDougall

77. “One pacer got a little freaked out after she saw her runner stare into space for a while and then tell the empty air, “I know you’re not real.”

— Christopher McDougall

78. “Just because men and women of our era don’t live up to the myths doesn’t mean no one ever has, or ever will again.”

— Christopher McDougall

79. “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. Male.”

— Christopher McDougall

80. “You are fit if you can adapt to the demands of your environment with ease and imagination,” Myers.”

— Christopher McDougall

81. “If he could do it, Churchill was certain, so could his fellow misfits.”

— Christopher McDougall

82. “Watching Ann bolt at the start of a race was like watching a mild-mannered reporter yank off his glasses and sling on a crimson cape.”

— Christopher McDougall

83. “The way to activate your fat-burning furnace is by staying below your aerobic threshold – your hard-breathing point – during your endurance runs.”

— Christopher McDougall

84. “E atat de simplu. Trebuie doar sa-ti misti picioarele. Pentru ca, daca nu intelegi ca te-ai nascut pentru a alerga, nu-ti negi doar istoria, iti negi propria fiinta.”

— Christopher McDougall

85. “Strictly by accident, Scott stumbled upon the most advanced weapon in the ultrarunner’s arsenal: instead of cringing from fatigue, you embrace it. You refuse to let it go. You get to know it so well, you’re not afraid of it anymore.”

— Christopher McDougall

86. “Running seemed to be the fitness version of drunk driving: you could get away with it for a while, you might even have some fun, but catastrophe was waiting right around the corner.”

— Christopher McDougall

87. “Darwin’s great gift to science was simplifying all life to pure mathematics: your one and only goal on earth is multiplication. Everything you do, every instinct you have, is an evolutionary urge to make babies and leave behind as many copies of yourself as possible. From that perspective, heroism makes no sense. Why risk the grave for someone else if there’s no guarantee of a biological payoff? Dying for your own kids: smart. Dying for a rival’s? Genetic suicide.”

— Christopher McDougall

88. “Dr. Neil Roach, of George Washington University, lead author of a 2013 study that tackles the mystery of why, out of all other primates on the planet, we’re the only ones who can kill prey with a lethal throw.”

— Christopher McDougall

89. “The death toll had gotten so bad, Mexico would eventually rank second only to Iraq in the number of killed or kidnapped reporters.”

— Christopher McDougall

90. “Heroes aren’t perfect; with a god as one parent and a mortal as the other, they’re perpetually teetering between two destinies. What tips them toward greatness is a sidekick, a human connection who helps turn the spigot on the power of compassion. 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

91. “Because that’s the ugly truth about heroism: the tests don’t start when you’re ready or stop when you’re tired.”

— Christopher McDougall

92. “That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they’d never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They.”

— Christopher McDougall

93. “Running isn’t about making people buy stuff. Running should be free, man.”

— Christopher McDougall

94. “The truth is that there can be no proper training that does not educate the whole system of the man.”

— Christopher McDougall

95. “He seemed to be a pure racing animal, which explained two of his other peculiar habits: at the start of every race, he’d let out a bloodcurdling shriek, and after he won, he’d roll in the.”

— Christopher McDougall

96. “Over time, a subtle cancer spread: where you have more experts, you create more bystanders. Professionals did all the fighting and fixing we used to handle ourselves; they even took over our fun, playing our sports while we sat back and watched.”

— Christopher McDougall

97. “All you have to do is keep the animal in sight, and within ten minutes, you’re reeling him in.”

— Christopher McDougall

98. “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 got, being patient and forgiving and undemanding.”

— Christopher McDougall

99. “Distance running demands a brain-body connection that no other creature is capable of.”

— Christopher McDougall

100. “Whenever an art form loses its fire, when it gets weakened by intellectual inbreeding and first principles fade into stale tradition, a radical fringe eventually appears to blow it up and rebuild from the rubble. Young Gun ultrarunners were like Lost Generation writers in the ’20s, Beat poets in the ’50s, and rock musicians in the ’60s: they were poor and ignored and free from all expectations and inhibitions. They were body artists, playing with the palette of human endurance.”

— Christopher McDougall