I used to do cross country in high school, and there was this guy on the team that was wonderful. Great guy. But his advice to everyone that asked how to get good was to run 20k a day.
If you don't run, I'll just tell you, most people's bodies cannot take that kind of abuse. No matter how much you train, you will not be able to run 20k a day. It's like how you can't train to make your cuts heal faster. You recover as fast as you recover. So while a big part of what made this guy so succesful was the dedication and mental toughness needed to actually run 20k a day, an equally big part was that he healed like fucking Wolverine. And that's fine, but it would've been nice if he knew that and stopped telling new guys to commit suicide by jogging.
Different guy on the team ran like, 5-6k a day, which actually isn't all that much. His problem when he gave advice was that he didn't really get that 5-6k a day doesn't generally produce elite results for most people. He was lucky in the sense that he didn't have to work all that hard to get great results, and unlucky in the sense that if he pushed himself much further than that, he fell apart.
I think about those two whenever I get advice from succesful people. The very things that make them outliers also make their advice useless to most people. Worse, they're often outliers on totally separate ends of the same spectrum, so their advice will be contradictory.
@creamsoda-slut no, this was a thing on our team too. The 20k guy had a cast iron stomach and he loved hotdogs. I eat hotdogs as a like, a nostalgia thing, but he just truly genuinely loved them. So some runs, he'd duck into a gas station and buy some. Pair it with the fact that this guy also had a major league pot belly, and it was a sort of accidental psychological warfare tactic. I'd be running along, panting, sweating, dying of heastroke by the AZ canals, and then Mr. 20k would blitz past, potbelly jutting 3 inches past his nose, a greasy gas station hotdog in both hands, and then he'd yell HEY BABS YER DOINGF FERFIFIC and I'd realize in the kind of sluggish way you realize everything when it's over 100 degrees that he had a third hotdog in his mouth and wasn't even out of breath. And then he'd slap my ass and chortle through his hotdog in this sort of huffy HEUHEUHEUHEUHEU and just rocket over the horizon. It was incredible. Like running with Dionysus.
Another time, we had a girl who wore a tankini on a run to the pool. Some of the other girls were Scandalized, so the coach made a thing about it and she was super embarrassed to be called out and then for the next pool run he showed up in a yellow speedo, gave himself a wedgie up to his nips and just slow jogged in front of the complainers the whole way to the pool. There was nothing they could do. If they tried to go fast, he could just pick up speed indefinitely, he was impossibly fast, and if they went slow, he, he had no issue just taking a mozy with his buns out.
Nobody complained about the tankini after that.
At another race, him and a few other varsity were having a contest to see who could pee up a tree the highest. He won when he ran up to the tree, still pissing, and did a sort of half-backflip that resulted in him falling straight on his head while also whipping piss like 12 feet up the tree. Everyone cheered him on so fucking hard, and he was ecstatic, I distinctly remember doing one of thus chest bump things with him and getting pushed back like 8 feet, but immediately afterwards he had his race and he kept getting lost because it turned out that the whole landing directly on his head thing gave him a concussion. And despite going on like, 3 wrong turns, he still won that race.
I was never friends with him personally, I just kind of watched him in awe from a distance. An incredible human being. One of my favorite people of all time. Only flaw that he had is that he casually would tell new guys to join him for workouts, and then the rest of us poor saps who had actually tried it once would go over and have to tell the new guy to Actually Please Don't Do That.
Dude, that was fucking Wario. You met Wario.
I'm not much of an artist, but this was my best attempt.
