last year i started taking little walks around my neighborhood for enrichment and whatnot, see, and i’ve been more or less keeping up with them barring those 3 months i couldn’t walk. and there’s some pretty big hills around, so there’s some stairs on this route i like to take. and even though i know stairs are a bit of a workout, deep down it was a little embarrassing to me at first, realizing i’d let my cardio fitness slip so badly that i needed multiple breaks to catch my breath on a single staircase. it got better as i kept at it, of course, but i would still internally wince a little at the fact that i’d get so winded on those stupid stairs. they’re just some rickety old hillside stairs by my house, i thought, they shouldn’t take it out of me THIS badly
it was only within the past few months that i got to a point where i was like okay, this is reasonable. they’re not EASY, but if i pace myself i can take the stairs all at once without gasping for air. that’s not too bad. there’s room for improvement and i still get a little winded but that’s a reasonable amount of tired to be, i reckoned, it’s one staircase but it’s kind of a long staircase. i’d always known it was kinda long.
except i recently found out i was underselling it a bit, there. turns out it’s a VERY long staircase. it’s ‘appears in tour guides and news articles’ long, actually. it’s ’annual citywide step challenge event’ long. it’s ’i can’t tell you the number of steps without doxxing myself’ long. and for almost a year i had no idea, because it’s nearby and not very fancy looking and i thought it was just Some Stairs and i was really badly out of shape. but no, i’ve accidentally been doing insane superhell cardio this whole time. i’m pretty sure i’m currently in better shape than i was running cross country in high school. the big hill by my parents’ house feels like flat ground to me now.
i don’t even know where i’m going with this. i guess the point is sometimes you are not uniquely ill-equipped for a thing, sometimes that thing is actually just really difficult. and sometimes you don’t realize this and end up holding yourself to insane standards for no reason. but also this can end up benefiting you in the end? idk. maybe i should participate in that step challenge this year or something
There's some guitar riff that is very fast and my brother thought he'd never be able to match it because the original guitarist is a virtuoso and my brother is just some guy
He was warming up for band practice one day and played it and the singer was very impressed and was like 'oh you're doing a speed challenge of that song' and my brother said no, he's trying to match the original speed but it's impossible because the original is too fast. They relistened to the song and it was slower than how my brother played it
Takeru Kobayashi, the man who revolutionized competitive food eating contests, deliberately never looked up the world record while training for his first big hot dog eating contest in 2001
In 2000 the record was 25.5 in 12 minutes. In 2001, Kobayashi ate 50 hot dogs, almost doubling the record. The judges ran out of pre-made signs to track how many he had eaten and had to start making handwritten signs on the spot
There's a lot of positives with SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant/Realistic, Timely), (i really recommend it for things with work/school or things that have a natural deadline that isn't set by you) but the flip side of that is Godhart's law: when a measurement becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measurement. If OP or my brother or Kobayashi had specific goals and checked their progress against it, it would have inhibited their ability to achieve what they ended up achieving
