This quote was in a pile I sorted out today and I wanted to share it. Lots of learning points on dedication, hard work and pushing past your own self-imposed limits.

‘Bruce had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run 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’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, “ok, hell, I’ll do it”.

So we get to three, we go into the fourth mile and I’m ok for three or four minutes and then I really begin to give out. I’m tired, my heart is pounding, I can’t go on any more and I say to him, “Bruce, if I run anymore I’m liable to have a heart attack and 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 “why did you do that?” He said “Because you might as well be dead. Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physically or anything else, it’ll spread over into 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.”‘

(It comes from Bruce’s great friend and co-writer John Little and can be found in ‘The Art of Expressing the Human Body’.)