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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Notes -
Outside wrote an article about me!
Magnus finished in Eight Hours, though he ran it in the worst conditions imaginable while I ran mine in perfect conditions in a pleasant area, he is also a much more specialized and better climber than I was at the time. I do think it is funny that the video mostly shows him jogging, but if he took 8 hours he was mostly walking, that's only a little over 3 miles an hour.
It's a fun article, but I think for quite obvious reasons the running editor for Outside ignores the most obvious explanation for this practice: Running a marathon is kind of stupid as an activity.
Don't get me wrong here, I think being able to go 26.2 miles in some reasonable period of time is a really cool and valid measure of fitness. And running a marathon in 2.5 hours or less is an amazing achievement in itself, literally faster than I could run half that distance.
But running a marathon in good amateur times is kind of uninteresting.
A lot of sports are like this, interest varies with level. Outside of the playoffs, College basketball is more entertaining than the NBA regular season. MMA amateur slugfest smokers are always pretty fun, but the top-level pro game has gone through periods of boredom like the Lay'N'Pray lightweight title reign of Gray Maynard. Being objectively better does not always make something more interesting or entertaining. Marathon running might be kinda bimodal in terms of interest: it is interesting to watch pros try to break 2hrs, and interesting to watch complete rank amateurs try to gut it out, but it's not that interesting to watch a bunch of junior product engineers try to break 4hrs.
The balance expressed by a pro rock climber who can also run a marathon is much more interesting than the specialization expressed by a 5'6" skeleton ambling to a 2hr45m marathon time.
Personally, I've always wanted to organize an Athenian Race. The really interesting 26.2 mile race wasn't Pheidipides racing back to Athens, it was the Athenian Hoplites who crushed the invading Persians at Marathon and then marched all the way back to Athens prepared to fight the Persians again. So an Athenian race would be a big strength workout, then complete a marathon in less than 8 hours, then get wine drunk to celebrate defeating Persia.
That seems kind of like a series of fencing or MMA bouts, or maybe a rugby game, followed by a 26.2-mile ruck march. With plenty of booze at the finish line.
I think Rugby or American football would be the closest approximation to hoplite warfare, fencing is more agility and MMA is too personal.
But "400m Sprint, 20 back squats at bodyweight, 30 pull ups..." Seems a lot easier to organize.
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