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Wellness Wednesday for October 15, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I had a climber friend who was super into endurance running, I was pretty into weightlifting, we were jawing back and forth about which one was harder/more impressive. His argument was that running a marathon was much harder because it took much longer and much more effort, one is destroyed after running a marathon where one is just fine after a 1rm. I argued that a big back squat was more impressive as if you can't squat 300lbs, you just can't squat 300lbs, where if I wanted to run a marathon today I could, it would just take a while, give me enough time and I can travel 26.2 miles on foot today no problem, but if you can't squat 300lbs in the morning you won't squat it in the evening either.*

So this bet formed where I would run a marathon, and then he would attempt a back squat at a weight set as a percentage of the world record equivalent to the percentage of my marathon speed relative to that world record.

He basically thought there was no fucking way I would ever finish a marathon without any training, so he was safe.

Ultimately I did finish the marathon, but he welched and started trying to argue about needing to do the squat as a percentage of the world record at his weight class, which I said was stupid because I didn't get the advantage of running a marathon at the 195lb record. Then that argument kind of ended the thing.

I would say that while I did finish 26.2 miles with no training and just guts, it sucked way worse than I thought it would. So we both kinda had a point.

*My argument ignores the option of breaking the 300lb object into smaller pieces, or needing to run the 26.2 miles per hour at a certain speed to avoid something catching you