On doing hard things

This is the boring truth for health and fitness: It’s very easy to be top quintile in health and fitness by putting in very little effort. The only requirement is that you do it mostly consistently for a lot of years.

The people cycling between fad diets or doing bouts of extreme Crossift every several years until they get injured or lose motivation have a much harder time with health and fitness, despite putting a lot more pain and effort in during their bursts of activity.

One of my high school friends was always a little overweight and out of shape. Later he thinned out and got into decent shape. Everyone asked him what his secret was, but most people were disappointed with his answer: He said he stopped buying junk food and drink when he went grocery shopping and he started walking a little bit every day.

Everyone assumed he was on some intense diet or getting sweaty at the gym 4X per week. Instead, he was just consistent with good but low effort choices.

EDIT: This was pre-Ozempic. I’m sure today everyone would assume GLP-1 drugs.

Heart rate training is key for a smoother onboarding. Most beginners (myself included) simply try to do a pace that they simply can't sustain, think running is too hard, and then quit. Building that aerobic base is something I wish I understood far sooner.

No laughing. Heart rate training is the best way to build endurance

GSP’s trainer Firas Zahabi prescribes to this. I remember his mentioning this in a Rogan podcast. His philosophy to training is minimal to 0 pain/soreness.

Instead of doing pull ups till you drop start with 1 and do it daily. I started running after a long time. I’m 49. I work out with weights but needed mild cardio. I started with 0.25 m run / 0.25 m walk cadence. I can easily do that for 5-6 miles and keep my heart rate below 165.

Bottom line is - take it easy. The goal is to burn calories, stay mobile and not get injured or sore.

Shoe Dog is a great book. That book + "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" by Murakami also had a similar effect on me.

ChatGPT and Claude are perfectly acceptable for this. I’ve used them along side my training plans in Runna as well as just getting some baseline for my progress in Golf.

I worked out half seriously for years and then fell off the first 10 years of having kids. I just couldn’t figure out how to balance it and being a dad. About 3 years ago I got back into it.

I was 245lbs at 6’1. Big frame but fat. My gym was near a college so just packed with people in their prime. I was able to get back to benching 315lb in the first year back. Set a goal of 405lbs and just been trudging on day by day for ~2 years. Hit it last month at 46 years old and 211lbs.

Just takes time.

In most gyms people start watching when someone unracks 315lb. I tried and failed at 405 4 times over 3 months before I got it. There is something odd feeling about failure in such a public setting. I can only imagine how a professional athlete feels and soldiers on.

For honesty, im also on steroids ;)

Awesome. I agree with the habit building. My knees are shot so I don't run, but I try to walk for 90 minutes a day. I look forward to this every day.

I normally start to wind down around 6pm, so around 8pm I close my computer and go for a walk. Come home and sleep.

Yeah, somewhat relatedly… I think the real lesson (at least if you grew up near the coast) is that everything is hard for somebody. I can’t really think of a kayak as an easy-to-flip craft, but that doesn’t really matter for this person’s journey.

I think the real message is:

to be okay with repeatedly looking dumb in public

It is the same with going to the gym for the first time.

People can be easily overwhelmed by simple challenges. At some point everyone experiences this and we learn to overcome bigger challenges through life.

Another point that might apply is that OP probably has a high center of gravity which can make kayaking really challenging. They should probably clarify this.

It does feel a little more about psychological courage and grit than doing hard things.

The thing is a lot of what looks like a natural talent from the outside is also just learning on the inside. I won my provinces swimming competition without ever having swum in a competition before against swimmers who were all in a club. Reason: I grew up near a lake and was there every day during my whole childhood.

The thing is that people with "talent" are often just people who did what you're trying to do for fun their whole lifes. So talent then is just code for: "had a natural preference for doing it and both the means and time to do it".

Yeah, maybe the original message sort of got lost along the way. I think there is still some truth in the post when applied to the title.

I think one of the most important things I ever learned is that hard things take time. There is an obvious relationship between the effort required and the size of the undertaking, but also the worthiness of the effort. In other words: rarely, if ever, can you build great things in a short amount of time or with little effort.

And that's where this post makes sense: to build something great or to solve something hard, you have to show up every day and chip away at the problem, piece by piece. The progress will be slow and nearly invisible to you as you experience it, and is usually only clear in hindsight after a year or two (or more), when you can look back and see all that's changed -- hopefully for the better -- since you started.

Having tried SOF selection myself (once, didn't get selected / quit before it was over), I can say that the selections are almost 100% designed to weed out people on their willpower, not physical strength. The people that aren't cut out physically, tend to be weeded out on the very first day.

And even if you get past the immediate pain stage, sooner or later you'll ask yourself "is this what I really want to do the next [N] years?".

Plaster is so much nicer than drywall. It’s a shame we got away from it.

It looks like he was using a very long and rather narrow kayak. Those are easier to tip. I once used a friend's friend's sprint kayak. I've never tipped a kayak, but it was very easy to tip the sprint kayak. Any waves and that thing was almost unusable.

Most recreational kayaks are, like you suggest, almost idiot proof and can only be tipped if you're really trying.

The author must be talking about Sprint Kayak, which is incredibly unstable, must be in flat/calm water. Commercial paddling kayaks are incredibly stable, you have to try really, really hard to flip.

K1 (racing) kayaks are unstable and very narrow, most other types are fairly stable tho.

Depends on the waters you're moving in I guess?

This part stood out to me too.

I got into spearfishing years ago, and I knew I wanted to see under water and eat fish, but wasn't really prepared for how hard it is and how common it is not to eat fish.

Like the author, despite numerous failures, bad choices, and sometimes suffering very cold British Columbia ocean temperatures, I kept showing up. My dives went from 7 or 8 metres to 10, to 15, to 20, and sometimes deeper. My breath hold went from a panicked 30 seconds to 2 minutes.

Initially when I saw a legal fish I'd take it every chance I got, because I could be certain I wouldn't find another. These days when I get in the water, due to that sort of immersive calibration, I find a lot more fish. Ironically, I don't shoot any of them despite being so much more capable of it now.

The ocean is such a complex, powerful, and simultaneously soothing yet deeply engaging environment. It gets incredibly cold, and it works with such incredible force that you constantly have to operate on its terms rather than your own. The qualia of the medium and your surroundings is so rich, it almost feels like a part of you. The same as a tool in your hand becomes an extension of you, the ocean becomes one as well, yet completely out of your control. It's really beautiful.

Kayaking is similar in how you're largely at the whim of this incredible body of water. Your success depends so much on how you read it, understand it, and respond to it accordingly.

I think humans are meant to be deeply engaged in environments like this. The easier we make it, the less we need to care about our environments (such as with this 21°, still, quiet room I'm in), the less engaged and stimulated we are, then the less we're challenged to adapt and endure in ways we probably should.

As a tall individual who enjoys kayaking, you're going to spend a lot more money and research to find good kayaks. Depending on your location in the country you may not even be able to find a retailer near you with them in stock.

With that said, this is probably going to be the most available and comfortable kayak for most tall people. For me as a 6'4" 220 (mostly fat, little thigh muscle) I've used it and it's good.

https://wildernesssystems.confluenceoutdoor.com/en-us/produc...

> I never kind of was the best

Who cares? You only need to be slightly better than you yourself were last week.

Not everything has to be done for competitive purposes. Or the one person you are really competing with is just yourself.

> I find so cool about learning with AI, you get to try, mess up, and improve without judgment

I agree. There is no judgement in going very deep in as simple concepts as you need, whereas with real people you'd feel like you are wasting their time and that you should know that already, or at least find out on your own.