“God, for example, appealed to me as a beardless man wearing a quilted silk cap; holiness was something burning, forbidding, something connected with fire while a day had the form of an oblong box.”

“But it is nice to know that you have other races lined up, because sometimes you can get so focused on your next marathon that it can become kind of unhealthy in some ways. So it's nice to have something else to slap you in the face and say, all right, there is life after the Olympics.”