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Wellness Wednesday for November 29, 2023

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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One of my running buddies was a 4:08 miler in college and ran with his D1 team up through 10K cross-country and doesn't have any real interest in local races for exactly that reason - he's older, chunkier, and slower, so those college times are never coming back and he has no impulse to post slower times with a tradeoff of increased injury risk. Instead, he's just a pretty fast dude that cruises with whatever pace group before we all get a beer.

I don't know whether I'm unfortunate to lack that experience or lucky that I get to keep getting faster, but I didn't start running until my late 20s, so I don't have these problems! I have enough experience to treat marathons very differently than every shorter distance though, so I don't have any real impulse to run another when I'm not up to going hard (I've run 5 at actual race effort, a couple more that weather/injuries didn't cooperate and scrapped that plan, and a couple more after that as a pacer). At some point, I won't be able to get any faster and I'll have to think about whether I want longer distances, age-graded goals, or something else, but for now I'll keep working on it.