Some inspiration...

Hey you all
We all need a bit of inspiration at times... and you have all been a huge source of inspiration, motivation and awe... some of you are so brave and so determined and so dedicated... I just wanted to say thanks...

Here are some quotes that I'd like to share with you - some fun, some inspiring - maybe you haven't seen them all - I love the first one best I think

Thanks all for making me feel welcome, and for maintaining such an excellent place to meet and chat...



"A bicycle ride is a flight from sadness."--James E. Starrs, The Literary Cyclist



"Some people pay a thousand dollars for a tattoo. This scar cost me twenty grand." -- Matt Hoffman

"Cycling is like a church - many attend, but few understand." -- Jim Burlant

"My favorite courses are nasty, technical downhills that frighten my mom." -- Josh Ivey

"I'm fascinated by the sprinters. They suffer so much during the race just to get to the finish, they hang on for dear life in the climbs, but then in the final kilometers they are transformed and do amazing things. It's not their force per se that impresses me, but rather the renaissance they experience. Seeing them suffer throughout the race only to be reborn in the final is something for fascination." -- Miguel Indurain

"I picked my head up during an interval and saw an enormous ostrich zigzagging in the road. I swung wide to get by - and just as I did he started chasing me. These guys can motor. I had to sprint to drop him." -- Tyler Hamilton

"A mountain bike race is a constant hard effort for two to three hours. In road racing the efforts often come in surges. You ride easy for awhile then you have to make an extreme, hard effort. They are two different efforts, two different forms of suffering." -- John Tomac

"It was eleven more than neccessary." -- Jacques Anquetil, after winning a race by tweleve seconds

"The Europeans look down on raising your hands. They don't like the end-zone dance. I think that's unfortunate. That feeling - the finish line, the last couple of meters - is what motivates me." -- Lance Armstrong

"I was a hero, and a second afterwards it was all over. Casartelli was dead so what I had achieved was worth nothing." -- Richard Virenque, on winning the Tour de France stage in which Fabio Casartelli died in a crash

"I won! I won! I don't have to go to school anymore." -- Eddy Merckx, after winning his first bike race

"There was a second supremely sweet moment of victory. As I made my way through the finish area, I passed the Cofidis team. Assorted members of the organization stood around, the men who I felt had left me for dead in a hospital room. "That was for you," I said as I moved past them." - Lance Armstrong after winning the opening time trial and becoming the leader of the 1999 Tour de France

"Pain is a big fat creature riding on your back. The farther you pedal, the heavier he feels. The harder you push, the tighter he squeezes your chest. The steeper the climb, the deeper he digs his jagged, sharp claws into your muscles." - Scott Martin

"What was supposed to be a summer of fun on the bike turned into a year, then two years. It certainly wasn't a calculated plan to have a career as a cyclist." - Derek Bouchard-Hall

"The riders come out, knights for the tournament, neck to thigh in slippery lycra with the sheen of deep space condoms, faired helmets on their heads like the glans from another galaxy and neoprene pixyboots to slide the air around their feet, mounted on gaudily caparisoned donkeys - the carbon fibre monocoque monoblade." - James Waddington, Bad to the Bone

"Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride." - John F. Kennedy

"Bicycling is a big part of the future. It has to be. There's something wrong with a society that drives a car to workout in a gym." - Bill Nye, the Science Guy

"What's wrong with wearing a wet chammy?", Brian, 8 hours into a wet chammy day

"The bicycle is just as good company as most husbands and, when it gets old and shabby, a woman can dispose of it and get a new one without shocking the entire community." -- Ann Strong, Minneapolis Tribune, 1895

"It never gets easier, you just go faster." -- Greg LeMond

"Eat before you are hungry. Drink before you are thirsty. Rest before you are tired. Cover up before you are cold. Peel off before you are hot. Don't drink or smoke on tour. Never ride just to prove yourself." -- Paul de Vivie

"But to say that the race is the metaphor for the life is to miss the point. The race is everything. It obliterates whatever isn't racing. Life is the metaphor for the race." -- Donald Antrim

"You not bike rider, you nobody."--Eddie B.

"Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel...the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood."--Susan B. Anthony

"There is something uncanny in the noiseless rush of the cyclist, as he comes into view, passes by, and disappears."--Popular Science, 1891

"Passing softly through the backcountry creates a fascinating tension. On one hand is the environment, generating powerful swells of energy that course through our psyches. There's something about mountains, deserts, woods, that excites us. Yet, on the other hand, the awesomeness of it all diminishes our importance in the earth's affairs."--Hank Barlow

"You get a feeling on certain trails, when you're reacting like you and your machine are just one thing. It's the feeling of physical exertion and speed and technique all wrapped into one."--Ned Overend

"The best rides are the ones where you bite off much more than you can chew--and live through it."--Doug Bradbury

"When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair or the future of the human race." - H.G. Wells

"Think of bicycles as rideable art that can just about save the world." - Grant Peterson

"She who succeeds in gaining the mastery of the bicycle will gain the mastery of life." --Frances E. Willard, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle

"When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking." - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, January 18, 1896, Scientific American Magazine

"This is not Disneyland, or Hollywood. I'll give you an example: I've read that I flew up the hills and mountains of France. But you don't fly up a hill. You struggle slowly and painfully up a hill, and maybe, if you work very hard, you get to the top ahead of everybody else." - Lance Armstrong



and the most fun quote...?

"He's dancing on the pedals in an immodest way!" -- Phil Liggett, on a victory by Dag-Otto Lauritzen

These are great. I love to collect quotes.

Thanks!

Kik

I'm a HUGE fan of quotes, especially cycling ones. I have a huge collection stored on my computer for those days when I'm just not feeling it. Believe it or not, they really do work! Almost every single quote you listed here is among my collection. And the first one you listed is the one I loved the most, hence the reason it resides in my signature. :)

You're welcome KK

KK & Bluez... maybe you can post some of your faves here too?

Wishing you both ostriches to chase you, when you need a few extra seconds in a race :p

"When I go biking, I repeat a mantra of the day's sensations: bright sun, blue sky, warm breeze, blue jay's call, ice melting and so on. This helps me transcend the traffic, ignore the clamorings of work, leave all the mind theaters behind and focus on nature instead. I still must abide by the rules of the road, of biking, of gravity. But I am mentally far away from civilization. The world is breaking someone else's heart." - Diane Ackerman

"Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling." - James E. Starrs

"It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle." - Ernest Hemingway

"Life is like riding a bicycle. You don't fall off unless you stop pedaling." - Claude Pepper

"To be a cyclist is to be a student of pain....at cycling's core lies pain, hard and bitter as the pit inside a juicy peach. It doesn't matter if you're sprinting for an Olympic medal, a town sign, a trailhead, or the rest stop with the homemade brownies. If you never confront pain, you're missing the essence of the sport. Without pain, there's no adversity. Without adversity, no challenge. Without challenge, no improvement. No improvement, no sense of accomplishment and no deep-down joy. Might as well be playing Tiddly-Winks." - Scott Martin

"Bicycling is a big part of the future. It has to be. There's something wrong with a society that drives a car to workout in a gym." - Bill Nye, the Science Guy