Don Kardong

“The Kenyans beat up on the American runners in every road race every weekend of the year, but we're way ahead of them in the number and quality of our Elvis impersonators. We get our X-Men and gorillas.”

“When I was in middle school, and teachers lectured about World War II, the conflict seemed impossibly distant and irrelevant. And it had only happened 15 years earlier.”

“When I started running, a gadget was a wristwatch with a secondhand on it.”

“An overzealous parent is just one example of the kind of Problem Mom or Dad who pops up at track meets, threatening to put a damper on the day.”

“New nemeses keep racing fresh, but I also find challenge in going longer, with only the distance as foe. I run my first 50-mile race, journey across the Grand Canyon and back, circumnavigate Mount St. Helens.”

“I've never owned an actual trail-running shoe myself, but maybe I should. My favorite paths are fraught with peril, much of it skulking at shoelace level. A rock, a root, an errant pine cone. Wham, and you're down, choking in dust and picking pebbles from wounds in your forearms and knees.”

“The body responds to a calorie deficit by slowing down the metabolism and burning muscle tissue. That leads to weakness, sluggishness, slow times. In girls, it can also result in cessation of menstrual periods, which in turn leads to loss of bone density and frequent stress fractures.”

“Fartlek, or speed play, is variable-pace running that emphasizes creativity. During a 30-minute run, choose objects to run to - telephone poles, trees, buildings, other runners, whatever. Make choices that mark off different distances, so your pickups vary in length from 15 to 90 seconds, and modify your pace to match the distance.”

“If an athlete takes a shortcut - literally, for example, by running a street that shortens the marathon route by a quarter mile - he or she doesn't have an insurmountable advantage. But it's an unfair advantage, and in a field of equally matched athletes, it's more than enough to make a difference.”

“The toughest trail I ever ran was the Escarpment in the Catskills of New York State. This was an 18-mile race through Rip Van Winkle country, routed through boulder fields, across angular juttings of granite and along a path with an unrelenting barrage of roots, rocks and mud, all of it hidden under slick leaves and dangling nettles.”