When the sun comes up, you'd better be running

*Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle–when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.
*

I have seen this quote attributed to Roger Bannister of the sub-4 minute mile.

Is he the author of this quote?

I don’t know, but it’s incorrect. The gazelle only has to outrun the slowest gazelle.

It’s like the two hikers who encounter a bear in their path. One hiker gets a pair of running shoes from his backpack and puts them on. The other hiker says, “Are you crazy? You can’t outrun a bear!” The first hiker says, “I know I can’t outrun a bear. I just need to outrun you.”

The quote is also nonsensical because lions don’t run just because the sun comes up. They sleep a lot, conserve their energy, stalk carefully, and run only when they think they have a good shot at making a kill. In other words, their behavior is the polar opposite of the activity for activity’s sake which the quote seems intended to inspire.

[I know, deconstructing motivational speaker buzz-speak is a waste of time. It’s like worrying about whether you *really can* boil a frog to death by slowly heating up the water. (You can’t.) ]

Any factual answers to this?

You see there’s this search engine, and it’s called Google, and after entering just the first line it only took me less than one minute to find this.

Pretty sure I can.

You just need to put a lid on the pot.

C’mon, people, do I need to tell you how to outsmart a frog?

I tried google first, but must have done something wrong in my search terms.:smack:

Thanks.

When the sun goes down and the moon comes up, I turn into a teenaged goo goo muck.

I cruise through the city and I roam street, looking for something that is nice to eat.

When nobody’s looking at me, I’m a giraffe.

What if the frog is smarter than the average frog?

he gets a lot of pic-a-nic baskets and sings ragtime

If the gazelle waits until morning, the nocturnal hyenas will have made dinner of it.

Gazelles got it rough.

Being a gazelle just sucks.

Problem is, we don’t live on the savannah anymore, and actually running isn’t what keeps us fed or alive. In modern society, the predicament translates to: “When the sun comes up, you’d better make sure you get to work on time, to spend another day performing repetitive, mind-numbing tasks in a small cubicle.”

Fuck that shit. I’d rather be running.