Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Running and Being -- We Must Go On. On, On!

1952 Olympics
Mens 5,000m Final
1. Emil Zatopek 14:06

Mens 10,000m Final
1. Emil Zatopek 29:17

Mens Marathon
1. Emil Zatopek 2:23:04

Before the 1952 Olympics, Zatopek had never run a marathon, yet all his winning times at the 1952 Olympics were Olympic records.

At the start of the 1956 Olympic Marathon, Zatopek was heard to say: "Men, today we die a little."

Other quotes:

"When a person trains once, nothing happens. When a person forces himself to do a thing a hundred or a thousand times, then he certainly has developed in more ways than physical. Is it raining? That doesn't matter. Am I tired? That doesn't matter, either. Then willpower will be no problem."

"If you want to win something, run 100 meters; if you want to experience something, run a marathon."

"After all those dark days of the war, the bombing, the killing, the starvation, the revival of the Olympics [London, 1948] was as if the sun had come out....I went into the Olympic Village and suddenly there were no more frontiers, no more barriers. Just the people meeting together. It was wonderfully warm. Men and women who had just lost five years of life were back again."

When asked about his tortured expression during races,
Emil Zatopek said, "It is not gymnastics or ice skating you know."

"It's at the borders of pain and suffering that the men are separated from the boys."

"Great is the victory, but the friendship is all the greater."

See Zatopek run: http://www.runningpast.com/vintage_media.htm

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