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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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.
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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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Okay, we're operating on different levels here.
I am not a natural athlete by any means, but I am not overweight and do fine with resistance training and mild aerobic exercises like kettlebell swings. Is there a trick to running they forgot to teach me? Because I feel like an incel who's told to just be himself and talk to girls more.
Genes..they matter a ton, as much for g-loaded tasks as they do for physical fitness, whether it's endurance sports or strength sports. Even in high school, from what I can recall, about half the boys in my class could not run a mile without stopping. It was not because they were obese , but for whatever reason lacked the stamina to do it. Some ran it easily, and it was not like the faster-milers had put in '10,000 hours'. Practice does help, but there is still huge individual variance that cannot be accounted for by practice.
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As with so many things, the first couple things to do are (1) be fast and (2) don't be slow, just like the trick of talking to girls while being handsome!
Seriously though, one of the things I enjoy about the sport is that the individual variability is so high that you really have to just compare yourself to yourself without getting too carried away with what others are doing. When you go all the way up to the top levels, you're looking at Kelvin Kiptum running a marathon at a 2:51/km average pace, which is just otherworldly to me. I can maybe hold that pace for 800 meters. Even local elites are so much faster than me that nothing I can do is going to make me remotely competitive with them. The underlying physiology for that is a combination of muscular power, oxygen utilization, running economy, and neuromuscular coordination. Such is life!
That said, if you want to get faster, the biggest thing to do is just running a lot of miles at an easy pace. While initially counterintuitive, the bulk of endurance adaptation that is plastic is from aerobic fitness, with the relevant adaptations triggering from slow, aerobic activity. For me, that means roughly 100K/week of running when a training cycle is going well and more like 65K/week when recovering and maintaining general fitness. If I could handle it without injury risk, I'd do a lot more, but I have trouble going above that without things getting dicey. I also run track intervals and tempo workouts, but the majority of my improvement is just from a decade of running consistently. When I started, my easy pace was something like ~6:00/km, and it just gradually got faster at the same intensity level, both by subjective feeling and heart rate.
Have you considered a car? /s
God made some shank's ponies faster than the others, Henry Ford ran them off the road.
I have repeatedly been informed by People of Wheels that even a bike is substantially faster than failing to have any form of conveyance other than my own feet.
I am somewhat confident that the average American couldn't keep up with Kiptum even riding a bike, especially not for two hours. On the other hand, breaking an hour in the 40km time trial is a common status hurdle for competitive cyclists, and is not even twice as fast.
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