Why you shouldn’t follow a Pro athlete
On YouTube or training wise (Until you are a Pro athlete, in which case why are you reading my blog?)
There might be some lamenting of my now not running for 2 weeks. I apologize for being a little bitch. But atleast I am better than my colleague who offered to be available between 19h to 22h30 and then made a million excuses, finally concluding his sob story with “I can still be available at 20h30”. Yeah, we get it you deem yourself to be a blessing in disguise and thank you for gracing us with your presence.
Actually, it has been not too bad(the running, my colleague sucks). I do get a pang of nostalgia which results in a 9 minute blog, every now and then. But frankly, I am ok. The fact that I do not have any expectations from swimming, or any competitive desire in it helps a lot. The smell of chlorine is tolerable and hey, for once people don’t know me. So I can suck without being judged. I can swim slowly, getting about stuff at my own pace and not training with a bunch of alphas, only some of who will go pro. Talking of Pros, what is wrong with them and YouTube? Why does every single neo-Pro need to have a YouTube channel? And each of them has the same fucking bullshit. They have inspired the likes of non-pro clowns like Ben Parkes and Nick Bare. Goddamn dude. If I want to see comedy, I go to www.louisck.com
I once happened to fall upon this path of YouTube channels too. I do not know what the fuck was that for. Maybe I wanted to get some good footage of where I live or maybe it was to make money from running. I do not deny the importance of having some sort of motivation you gain from others(extrinsic motivation) but really, I filter out people who follow me on Strava, I am off social media until I need to drop the link for a blog and I don’t sit around reading comments and checking stats on my blog either. I am most intrinsically motivated. So the reasons for having started a YouTube channel really confuse me, what did I even gain from it other than the unnecessary overhead of carrying a GoPro everywhere?
While we are on the subject of pros, I also spent a week training like Mo Farah. At least in duration and relative intensity.
It was 17 miles a day for 4 days that week and by the end I was so fucked up, I didn’t run the 23 mile long run. Oh and I almost died that Friday:
Here’s the thing, Mo Farah won 4 Olympic Gold medals and trained under Alberto Salazar. So I am not sure he was even clean. Ok, jokes aside, he was (still is?) a full-time athlete and got enough sleep and didn’t have questions like this hurled at him everyday:
Plus, he was talented. The dude had a lot of potential which he harnessed while working with that horrible man Salazar, I am sure Mo Farah had a lot of TUEs. Ok, you know what? Mo Farah is a bad example especially as I am too sensitive about anti-doping.
Eliud Kipchoge, who I believe is clean, gets full recovery via his sleep, he has a restful day between his training blocks and like I said before, there is TALENT. He won the 5000 meters world championships beating Hicham El-Guerrouj and Kenenisa Bekele, when he was 18. I ran my first half marathon at 22 and it took me 2 hours and 23 minutes. Whatever I achieved in life was on account of discipline and hardwork, ok maybe a little bit of predilection towards athletics from a young age too, but if you had a scale of 0–10 in terms of talent, I would rate mine a solid 3/10. I am not utterly hopeless but I am not a prodigy either.
My best case scenario with running is to run maybe a Sub 2:20 marathon. It will take me years of not having an injury to have the correct training build and then finding the perfect race to do it. And chances are, I might never get to that point given how my body has responded in the last 2 years. Or maybe it will, Richard McDowell gives me hope. But Richard wasn’t this injured in his 30s. And ok, running that 2:20 might have meaning to me because then I would have found the best version of a runner which I could be but that doesn’t mean anything at all and it definitely doesn’t mean I am talented. Meb Keflezighi once jogged to a 2:20 marathon. Talented people run 2:20 on a bad day.
Elation and despair are the 2 faces of the same coin. If you want to win big, you need to risk the big low. I have spent most of my last 4 years risking to win big. I worked 10–12 hour days without overtime pay or compensation. I worked without holidays, showed up to work at 6 AM and at 10 PM. I worked without a backup, without appreciation and while doing all of that, I felt so demoralized with my reality that to prove that I matter, I ran hard. I ran 8000 + kilometers each year, I ran many fast miles and I pounded the pavement each day telling myself that by pushing myself to the brink I am getting the best version of myself. We live in a society which celebrates this sort of badass behaviour, work hard until you die and fuck sustainability. The profit margins have to be huge and people in your company have to be miserable. Being a very alpha person, you need to dominate everything around you.
But here’s the truth: How far I can push myself is not a sustainable metric. The best version of myself is not necessarily the most competitive.
Usually, the best of anything has a good mix of highs and lows, good and evil. A nice pair of Patagonia trousers are the best to buy because they are made from recycled, fair-trade sourced materials(good) and they manage to sell you stuff based off capitalistic greed (bad). A very competitive version of me is often very unhappy because everything for me is then a competition. An example of this is even if I started work at 6 AM, I will stay until 6 PM and will run 20 miles that day because David Goggins said that’s how you take souls. David Goggins will die a miserable wreck and trust me, there is no God waiting with a checklist at the end. God, if he/she exists, cares about how you treat people. And David Goggins destroyed a lot of lives around him in pursuit of his goals and when he dies, the chances of him dying at peace are rare.
If I start comparing myself to Pro athletes, pushing myself everyday, watching Lionel Sanders videos (who by the way if you ask a psychologist, is a mentally unstable wreck) and then talking to people around me about how fast Kristian Blummenfelt rode his bike, after a while people will stop talking to me. I often catch myself starting a conversation about running with normal people and deflect the topic. If I blabber too long, I apologize to those people. Very soon, they won’t have that problem.
Pro athletes have to risk their lives in pursuit of their goals, elite sport is a selfish mess. The desire to win leads people to do horrible stuff. Lance Armstrong wasn’t innately a bad person to begin with. But his desire to win turned him into that raging asshole who sued everyone who even hinted about his doping.
Being the best is pushed to us as this crucial metric but nobody stops to question: “Why?”
Why do you have to be the best? And what do you have to be the best at anyways? Running? You don’t have the talent to be the best at running. Best version of yourself in running? Certainly a hobbling mess who has 0 friends cannot be the best version. There has to be something more than hitting a time goal.
2020, 2021 and now half of 2022 are all about rebuilding something which is going to just break again because the metrics I am using to evaluate myself with are completely misaligned with my reality. My reality is that I am stuck in a job which I don’t want to do because I am being constantly mistreated and undermined. My priority as such should be trying to improve myself so that I can get out of said job instead of running hundreds of miles. And ok, running fast is fun for me. But if it is coming at the price of being broken down, I would rather choose being healthy as the critical metric and align the stuff I enjoy about running e.g. discipline, time to process my thoughts, freedom with being healthy. This might mean not running a 2:20 marathon but do those numbers, in that order, really mean something?
The best version of myself might be a mediocre swimmer in the pool, lapping around at my own pace. As long as I can stay fit and disciplined, the sport is irrelevant. Heck, I would even ride horses if it keeps me fit, gives me thinking time and allows me to feel free. I know it won’t (and equestrian should not be an Olympic sport and Olympics should not happen) but that’s how little what sport I do really matters in the whole philosophy of life for me.
This is a long winded way of saying, stop watching YouTube videos and Instagram feeds of pro-athletes and gaining “inspiration” from them. They are very unbalanced and pro athletes mostly selfish turds who do stuff which works for them. You have your own journey to figure out and usually you will have gut feelings about everything you are doing.
I don’t mean don’t do difficult things. Of course there is value in pushing yourself and immersing yourself in certain tasks but there is also a certain time period which you should allocate to relax and catch up on the important things in life. If you want inspiration, focus on getting an inner drive at getting better and then make yourself better in all facets of life. Focus on the breadth of your experience and not the depth. And always remember, that being the best at anything is not sustainable. On the other hand, being constantly good is and you often will end up happier.
Post Script: As of yesterday, I got an all-clear from my doctor to be able to lightly resume running. He found lesions, edema or scars on my bone, the bone is in perfect shape. I also got a lecture on sometimes managing training load by cycling and swimming and considering only running to be the way to get faster. So good news :)
