I don’t know whether to put this here or in the ultra section
Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 12:37 am
by ultraslacker
Re: I don’t know whether to put this here or in the ultra section
Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 9:48 am
by Habs4ever
That's impressive!
Re: I don’t know whether to put this here or in the ultra section
Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2017 12:37 pm
by jonovision_man
There's always some crazier, isn't there?
jono
Re: I don’t know whether to put this here or in the ultra section
Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2017 9:23 pm
by Dstew
I would be interested to see how these people are doing in 10, 20 or 30 years. Is she still going to be going strong or like football players who play through pain and seem to be able to do almost superhuman feats of strength, power and speed but a few yeas after they retire, can barely walk.
Related is that although inactivity is a major problem, I am not sure pushing oneself that hard and far is any better given the well accepted inverted U graph of effort v reward. One major issue that people face is inflammation and so events such as this seem to be inherently unhealthy. It would be interesting to see how many of these participants genuinely enjoy what they are doing and how many in truth are giving into an obsessive and addictive compulsion to exercise and "achieve". Or another possibility is that she is such an outlier as to be a freak of nature and thus of no real value as a role model or inspiration. That for the average mortal, such an event would literally result in running themselves into the ground.
Having pushed myself to a point where I have restructured my heart where I have created a risk, no matter how small of some very serious consequences and a compression fracture in my back and to the list of chronic hip, leg and back issues, a knee and Achilles, I do have to wonder that things I did just 10 or 15 years ago that were "cured" by a little ice and some medications are now coming back to haunt me. That the body accumulates damage and it does not forget about the abuse and punishment one inflicts. We read about people such as the subject of the article and people like Whitlock but never hear about the multitudes of road kill.
Thus part of me believes it might be amazing but to be honest, on the balance of probabilities I believe it is actually quite stupid. And at a certain point in time, are these events just not getting silly and ridiculous. And from a practical perspective, when there are studies suggesting even 10 -15 a day of exercise has some benefit and may in turn lead to a healthier lifestyle, parading someone doing something for 55 hours may only discourage people as 10 or 15 minutes pales so badly in comparison.
I remember reading an article about the Oprah effect in that when she ran a marathon, that is when there was a spike in people signing up to do ultras. Because if she could run a marathon, it could not be that hard and thus some of the allure and prestige was removed from that event. Thus to further separate themselves from the herd, to confirm their own self importance and special and unique identity, they started to do ultras. This is not to disparage those who actually enjoy ultras and would do them regardless but ... at one time I swear you could not run an ultra unless you kept a blog and that starts to bring in ego and vanity, not just the pure love of the activity. Thus the paradox, the irony is the people who do it not seeking praise and recognition and do it completely anonymously are the ones I actually admire. The rest seem to be more "look at me". And yes, Mea Culpa.