Unexpected comfort: Marathons and PhD's

In a way this finding is silly, because I've been saying for a long time that getting your PhD is an emotional endurance race. And yet I never looked to advice on running marathons for advice on working towards a PhD. They do beautifully substitute for one another. I finished "The Nonrunner's Marathon Guide for Women: Get Off Your Butt and On with Your Training" by Dawn Dais last night and almost cried at the final passage because it was so comforting to me, not as someone running a marathon but as someone struggling to finish my PhD some time this century.

Unfortunately I forgot to bring the book with me, so I grabbed some random marathon quotes and replaced running words with PhD words:

To describe the agony of graduate school to someone who's never been in graduate school it is like trying to explain color to someone who was born blind.

Graduate school is a terrible experience: monotonous, heavy, and exhausting. You can actually suffer a little bit more going slowly than when you're going really fast.

A faster PhD might even be easier than a slow one, in terms of what it takes out of you mentally.

Get going. Get up and walk if you have to, but finish the damned PhD.

"Good things come slow - especially in graduate study."