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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Once more into Wednesday Wellness with some commentary on running that I think is mildly interesting and somewhat counterintuitive for those that aren't into endurance sports. Last month, another user successfully knocked out their marathon goal and I mentioned that as my miles were ramping up this fall, I was thinking about a full marathon prior to winter, and someone mentioned that I should have the underlying fitness to complete a marathon. They're correct, but I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding, and it's something I've bumped into with a few people that run a bit, but not really at great length, and not at race efforts, and it's a perception that running a marathon will tend to be at a slower pace than usual running, dropping down to accommodate the longer distances. While I'm not particularly good, I do run a fair bit and like to push my race times as close to optimal as possible, and this is quite far from true for me - my easy days are roughly an 8 minute/mile pace while my marathon pace is faster than 7 minutes/mile and my half marathon pace is ~6:15-6:20/mile. The challenge is not in running 26.2 miles, that's something I can roll out of bed and do at an 8-minute pace without any real trouble, it's in maintaining the faster, full-effort pace for the entire race. As you scale up through elite runners, these effects become more pronounced, with easy efforts remaining fairly slow and marathon efforts getting faster and faster.
So, anyway, despite the fact that I'm feeling pretty well, I won't be running a full marathon in 2023 because I don't feel that I've done the relevant training to put in a legitimate effort at the distance. Instead, I'll settle for a small half marathon to close out the year, try for one more personal best, and see what happens.
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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