Pride lasts longer than pain

I've been looking through the NY Marathon website and found an article on how to find motivation during a race... I condensed it a little bit:

Finding Motivation

For up to two-thirds of a marathon motivation is the last thing you’ll need. The challenge, instead, will be to keep all that crowd support from pulling you to an effortless-feeling early pace that you won’t be able to maintain later. Even for the lead-pack runners, the first sixteen miles are usually a time to pull back on the reins a bit, try to tune out the screaming masses, and keep some energy in reserve for the late-stage moves that are sure to come.

The last third of the race is a different story. Motivation can come from outside for a while, but the kind that you create yourself is even better. Find the positives in your situation: You’re competing in a major athletic event. You aren’t out of energy; you’re drinking your fluids and using your other thoroughly tested speed-enhancers, like salt tablets and PowerGELs. You’ve got thousands of runners on the course with you, all with the same main goal—to finish well. You’ve put in a great deal of hard work, both in training and in the race so far, to get to this point. Every step, every second, is getting you closer to your goal.

Dr. George Sheehan, a cardiologist, record-setting age-group runner, and seminal writer during the 1970s running boom, could be very long-winded about racing. But he once said something so ideally simple that it’s been inscribed on marathon finishers’ medals: “Pride lasts longer than pain.” If you find yourself about to back off the personal-record pace you’re on, or about to tell the group or companion you’re running with to go on without you, or about to yield to the urge to walk; if the discomfort of the marathon’s final miles threatens to undermine all the confidence that you’ve built, think of how proud you’ll be after the race at having resisted the urge to surrender. Then hold out a bit longer. You might be surprised.

Leave it to the British to understate the difficulty of the end of a marathon. Ron Hill, who once won the Boston Marathon, described a particularly miserable few miles as “a bit of a bad patch.” The phrase is good to keep in mind, because it suggests that the rough section has an end. Marathoners experience remarkable resurrections when they can “feel” the finish line; when the remaining distance becomes a mentally manageable one. As bad as you may be feeling, you can also come out the other side of the bad patch. Believing that this is possible will help you when you can’t yet feel the finish line.

Remember: If a marathon were an easy task, it would never have deserved such an important place in your life. You took this on because it’s difficult but possible. Late in the race, the “difficult” part will be proved true. Remember the value to be found in overcoming worthy obstacles, and then prove the “possible” part true, too.