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Wellness Wednesday for June 26, 2024

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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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.