One of adulthood’s little curses seems to be the steady procession of impossible-to-convey epiphanies about old platitudes.
“Oh I get it! It’s like you just have to be yourself. And it really was all about the journey.”
Plausibly, the most fundamental truths are the most commonly rediscovered and the most purely distilled.
They suck everything in their vicinity into their whirlpool of triteness.
Their simplicity belies their depth.
Like good cryptic crossword clues, they can only be understood after you figure them out yourself (usually through some unrelated, roundabout, totally wrong-feeling guess).
But not all platitudes are gems.
If they were, you could start following them in your younger rebellious years, trusting that you would someday attain the wisdom to be grateful.
Unfortunately, the worthwhile ones are hidden among plenty of nonsense.
With such red herrings as “Life is a marathon, not a sprint”, what can you do but live in utter depravity until you can finally discern the wheat from the chaff in your old age.
I’ve been reflecting on the phrase recently because, in a moment Morissettesque irony, the Seattle Marathon fell in the middle of a two week period of unusually low motivation.
(I asked them to move it, but everyone was really set on doing it that day).
I gather that the intended meaning is that is not sustainable to give 100% effort all the time, and it’s better to pace yourself before you burn out.
I take no issue with this meaning, and I’d rather not dwell on silliness (This is a lie. In any given situation, I would prefer to being dwelling on silliness, but I’m trying to restrain myself here), but the worst offense is that you pace yourself in every race of finite, pre-established distance—which life, even metaphorically, is not.
Rather than nitpick, I think it would be more productive (and fun) to propose some alternative mental models.
Since I care so little for the original, I don’t much care if my proposals are right or even better so long as they’re different and interesting (and, as always, constructed all out of association, conjecture, and one middle school experience rather than “data”).
This particular period of low motivation was notable for two reasons.
I would have chalked this recent period of low motivation up to burnout if it had followed a period of over-exertion (which I avoid as a rule).
As it was, with ambiguous etiology (although I suspect Winter), it felt like a random end to a blessedly long period of middle to high motivation.
That is, rather than seeing my motivation levels as the effect of my previous pace, I saw it as mostly determined by external factors.
One of the most best pieces of marathon advice that I followed this year (and ignored last year to my detriment) is that, on hills, you should run with even effort rather than even pace.
The benefit of maintaining a pace up a hill is outweighed by the cost of the fatigue you incur.
Similarly, it’s easier to run downhill, so you can do it faster (it may even be easier to go faster than to brake too much).
No matter how well you pace yourself in life, you’re likely to run into some hills.
In some cases, you may need to keep pace up those hills, but in general it feels more sustainable to focus on the inputs.
Just because you run into a hill, doesn’t mean you were running too fast.
Although if you regularly find yourself running into walls or off cliffs, you may want to reconsider your route.
An obvious objection to this is that you do need true breaks in life; you can’t just keep up constant effort.
I would agree.
Life is more like training for a marathon than running it (especially if you’re training for a marathon).
At that point, you’re really leaving analogy territory.
In middle school science, I learned about limiting reagents.
In a chemical equation, you need enough molecules of each reactant in order for the reaction to occur.
This is the same reason it’s so frustrating when someone won’t trade you one ore so you can build your city when you already have so much wheat, but unlike Catan, there’s no 4:1 trade in cellular respiration.
If you don’t have enough O2, you’re SOL.
Hope you like anaerobic respiration.
Normally I would be able to run infinitely fast, but because of Physics, I’m constrained by the speed of light.
Over very short sprints, I’m constrained mostly by power and technique: how quickly I can generate force to accelerate to race pace (much more obvious in track cycling.
Sprints are like power lifting competitions where you lift your body weight 100m.
Longer sprints are basically anaerobic respiration competitions.
See who can build up lactic acid the slowest!
Marathons are like breathing competitions.
It’s impossible to run distance anaerobically, so the winner is the person with the highest VO2 max, who can deliver oxygen to their muscles the best (which also involves consuming water and electrolytes so your blood continues to work the way it’s supposed to).
I’ve never run an ultra, but I’ve heard them referred to as eating competitions.
Put another way, whenever you’re racing, going as fast as you can, there’s some (usually one) reason you’re not going faster.
Maybe it’s that pain in your shin, something you did or didn’t eat, a mental block, poor form.
If you could resolve it, you could run faster and faster until you hit the next block.
Normally I would be infinitely happy and motivated, but sometimes things get in the way of that too.
The burnout model prescribes taking a break and coming back at a slower pace.
In my experience, once you are burned out, that’s about all you can do.
But it might not be that you were running too fast.
Maybe you just had a pebble in your shoe.
Running on it at any pace will tear your foot up.
This fools me sometimes at work.
Something unrelated will frustrate me which makes me feel unmotivated.
I think I must be working too hard, so I start taking restless breaks.
Then I get anxious about it outside of work, and I become less motivated to have fun outside of work, and the cycle continues until I figure out the root cause and how to fix it which often involves working a little harder for a while.
Even though I did have work work in mind when I thought of this, I wanted to write as much of it to be agnostic since it could be applied to most facets of life.
If anything, life is many concurrent marathons and now one big, mixed metaphor tying them all together. Merry Christmas!