Quote

There's never going to be a decathlon that you're going to have 10 events that your satisfied with. You're always, always going to be dissatisfied in something, and that always draws you back to try to retry that the next time you do a decathlon. It's like you go for the perfect 10.

If I really felt like I was the world's greatest athlete, I'd get 10 great events. But I know that's pretty much not possible. That's the toughness of the decathlon.

For me, I want 10 perfect events.

As a decathlete, you take pride in saying, 'The elements, I'm not going to let them affect me. It's just the 11th event. Another thing you have to fight through.'

For decathletes, our event goes all throughout the day so you're trying to go up and down and up and down emotionally and physically and you know mentally you're just on a roller coaster.

Being a decathlete is like having ten girlfriends. You have to love them all, and you can't afford losing one.

The decathlon includes ten separate events and they all matter. You can't work on just one of them.

I'm like a decathlete who does all of the events he's used to, but is being forced by certain circumstances to focus on three events, and being forced to focus on events that he wasn't that interested in, and also weren't his strongest events.

All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because we're liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.

During the decathlon, I always think only of the next event and my personal record.