Top 30 Quotes by Don Kardong

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.

In those long, lonely miles you put in during the off-season, and in those knife-in-the-gut track repetitions and hill repeats that buckle your knees - at that moment in almost every race when you ask yourself how much you're willing to hurt to catch one more runner - you can draw strength and inspiration from your running mates.

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.

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.