Once A Runner Nuggets

I've been reading "Once A Runner". I'm not finished with it yet, but I found a few nice nuggets.

Training was a rite of purification; from it came speed, strength. Racing was a rite of death; from it came knowledge.

Cassidy very early on understood that a true runner ran even when he didn't feel like it, and raced when he was supposed to, without excuses and with nothing held back. He ran to win, would die in the process if necessary, and was unimpressed by those who disavowed such a base motivation. You are not allowed to renounce that which you never possessed, he thought.