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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I think the body is just resistant to change. There are some major things that seem to alter the body:
Even making drastic changes in one area you'll be held back by the other things. But get drastic enough, and you'll still break through the effects of the other things. This can be seen in the extremes. Take in zero calories and you will lose muscle mass no matter how much you exercise. A severe alcoholic is on the path to liver failure and death no matter how good their diet and exercise are. Be Michael Phelps and swim miles every day and you can eat 5000 calories of sugar for breakfast and still look like a chiselled Greek statue. Be old enough and no amount of dieting, exercise, or healthy living will save your body.
The original advice is probably helpful in the sense of telling people to avoid trying to do a thing that is very difficult. I think outrunning a diet specifically is very hard, because as you've experienced injuries are not uncommon. I think people can hit a death spiral with running. Where they need to run a dangerous amount to burn off their excess calories and fat, that amount of running leads to injuries. While they are injured they still have the bad dieting habits so things get even worse before they can get back to running. Rinse and repeat until they learn that swimming is a superior sport for exercise.
FWIW, this part seems largely sorted over the last couple years. The main sources of prior injuries were classic stupidity - too quick of builds, too much high-intensity work, not recovering well, pushing through soreness. My current higher mileage has been generally well-tolerated in part because of a reduction in pace on easy days, shifting them from putatively easy to actually easy. Even though I academically understood the difference, it took running with genuinely fast guys in a club to really internalize that just going really slow greatly improves recovery. During the last training cycle, I peaked with a 290-mile month, then tweaked a calf muscle during a race and needed to ramp down for a couple weeks (replaced with a bunch of light cycling for base), but other than that, I've been pretty consistently healthy for quite a while now. The shift to focusing on high-quality recovery has been the big difference.
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The death spiral point is interesting. As I get older, I realize over and over how much injury prevention and management is the long term key to fitness.
Amen to that, you can't do shit when a major joint is out of commission.
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