Grete Waitz Quotes

In terms of fitness and battling through cancer, exercise helps you stay strong physically and mentally.

What spurs a person to get more serious is highly individual, but I have found that no matter what a person’s level of ability, motivation must come from within, or it will not last.

I am about to get involved with the biggest cancer hospital in Norway. They are building a fitness center to work with patients. I will be a consultant.

I tried to keep it secret, but the story got into the newspapers. It was more difficult for my family, who couldn’t understand why the media wouldn’t leave me in peace.

To suddenly be a hero on a world basis was hard for me to understand. God gave me a gift. I got the chance to use it. I didn’t think I deserved what people were saying. My talent is just more visible than theirs.

You go into the disease as one person and come out of it as a different person. It has changed my perspective on everything. Things that used to upset me no longer do.

I’ll never do that again!

For every finish-line tape a runner breaks — complete with the cheers of the crowd and the clicking of hundreds of cameras — there are the hours of hard and often lonely work that rarely gets talked about.

Everyone wins the marathon. We all have the same feeling at the start-nervous, anxious, excited. It is a broader, richer, and even with twenty-seven thousand people-more intimate experience than I found when racing in track. New York is the marathon that all the biggest stars want to win, but has also been the stage for an array of human stories more vast than any other sporting event.

Sustained motivation is essential to achieving your potential.

My goal has always been to introduce other people to running. They might accomplish something they never thought they could.

Even today, in retirement, I find it very distracting if there is conversation during a run. I work out as much for my head as I do for my body. I’m a thinker. A lot of my ideas come to me more easily when I am running. That is why I like to run in the morning.