Holy Hangover, Batman

Bruce had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run the three miles in twenty-one or twenty-two minutes. Just under eight minutes a mile. So this morning he said to me “We’re going to do five.” I said, “Bruce, I can’t go five. I’m a helluva lot older than you are, and I can’t do five.” He said, “When we get to three, we’ll shift gears, and it’s only two more and you’ll do it.” I said, “Okay hell, I’ll go for it.” So we get to three, we go into the fourth mile and I’m okay for three or four minutes, and then I really begin to give out. I’m tired, my heart’s pounding, and I can’t go any more and I say to him, “Bruce, if I run any more,” - and we’re still running - “if I run any more I’m liable to have a heart attack and die.” He said, “Then die.” It made me so mad that I went the full five miles. Afterward I went to the shower and then I wanted to talk to him about it. I said, you know, “Why did you do that?” He said, “Because you may as well be dead. Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.

from Bruce Lee: The Art of Expressing the Human Body by John Little (1998), quoted by Chris Arrant who got it from jelatinous and dotherunningman.

I need to internalize this, as I was saying to Amy yesterday, I’m just not that confident. I’m always selling myself short, that I wouldn’t even bother applying to Ivy League programs because I would likely get rejected. This is something that pervades my writing and in turn my life. In general this self-deprecation is really just fear; that I am in fact not good enough, and I shouldn’t even try to move above my station. This is what misery is and I should not accept it.

Source: dotherunningman