Quotes from Bill Bowerman

♠ Posted by Paul Naylor at 7:01 AM

Bill Bowerman coached the Oregon Ducks track team for 24 seasons. During this time, he coached legendary runner Steve Prefontaine, and around the same time, he co-founded Nike. Below are some quotes from the movie "Without Limits", about the life of Prefontaine. I think these quotes are very inspiring, I think about them often when I'm out for a training run or competing in a race. Now it is up for debate if he really said these as they are portrayed in the movie, but if he did or did not, they do inspire athletes to push themselves further.

“Citius. Altius. Fortius. It means Faster. Higher. Stronger. It’s been the motto for the Olympics for the last 2500 years. But it doesn’t mean faster, higher and stronger than who you are competing against. Just Faster. Higher. Stronger."
                                                                                                   -Bill Bowerman

“Men of Oregon, I invite you to become students of your events. Running, one might say, is basically an absurd past-time upon which to be exhausting ourselves. But if you can find meaning, in the kind of running you have to do to stay on this team, chances are you will be able to find meaning in another absurd past-time: life.”
                                                                                                   -Bill Bowerman

“All of my life – man and boy – I’ve operated under the assumption that the main idea in running was to win the damn race. Actually, when I became a coach I tried to teach people how to do that. I tried to teach Pre how to do that. I tried like Hell to teach Pre to do that… and Pre taught me – taught me I was wrong. Pre, you see, was troubled by knowing that a mediocre effort could win a race, and a magnificent effort can lose one. 

Winning a race wouldn't necessarily demand that he give it everything he had from start to finish. He never ran any other way. I tried to get him to. God knows I tried. But Pre was stubborn. He insisted on holding himself to a higher standard than victory. A race is a work of art. That’s what he said. That’s what he believed. And he was out to make it one every step of the way. 

 Of course, he wanted to win. Those who saw him compete and those who competed against him were never in any doubt about how much he wanted to win. But how he won mattered to him more. 

 Pre thought I was a hard case. But he finally got it through my head that [the real purpose of running isn’t to win a race. It’s to test the limits of the human heart.] And that he did. Nobody did it more often. Nobody did it better. [And we stopped the clock at 12 minutes and 36 seconds – a world record time – with which Steve Prefontaine would have been well satisfied.]”
                                                                                                 -Bill Bowerman