7 ms·

I see people who overexert themselves in sports not too dissimilar from drug addicts. They are coping with some internal issue by forcing their bodies to produc

• alar44 4y ago
  Agreed. "Yeah so I was running a marathon and had to piss so you just go while you're running, everybody does it." Cooooolsies...
  • _dain_ 4y ago
    Philippides probably pissed himself while he was running from the battle of Marathon to Athens. then again he also died at the end ... think of it as a libation to his memory.
• bmitc 4y ago
  Bicyclists seem, to me, to be a very certain and peculiar breed of obsessives.
  • system2 4y ago
    • Sentino 4y ago
      Srsly? How often are they a problem? Also it's legal and expected
      • zdragnar 4y ago
        It depends on the local culture. You've gotta be pretty dedicated to ride a bike in the metro near me on some streets, because the layout isn't very friendly to bikers. Those that do seem to rarely obey traffic laws- the number of near-miss incidents alone caused by bicyclists who run red lights or weave in and out of lanes, up onto sidewalks, then back down into traffic is too damn high, to borrow a meme. The city would be a whole lot better off somewhere in the middle- more room for dedicated biking, and more enforcement of safe behavior. It's not just the roads either, unfortunately. There's a shared walking and bicycling path that runs around a lake in the city. It's fairly popular, but I've never been more than twice because I find walking there is unpleasant. You can only get nearly clipped by bikers flying past, not staying in their lane, just so many times.
        • egypturnash 4y ago
          To be quite honest, it is very useful for cyclists to behave this way when they have to constantly fight traffic because it makes drivers give them a wider berth. You don't know what that bike's about to do, so you stay the fuck away instead of blazing by too close. On the other hand, people who can't bother to get a bell for their bike and zoom past pedestrians are dickheads.
          • michaelmrose 4y ago
            Honestly no bike belongs mixing with pedestrians any more than any other vehicle bell or no bell. A pedestrian is meandering along at 1-3MPH a bike is comparatively racing at 10-20. Even at only 10MPH you are closing on a slow walker by at least 13 feet per second. If they notice you 60 feet behind they have less than 5 seconds to react. If they don't notice you and you don't maneuver you'll hit them. If you maneuver and they also try to get out of the way you might still hit them. I've had multiple bikes zip by with very little space where a slight step to the side would have let to disaster. Honestly anyone caught biking on the sidewalk ought to have their equipment impounded and sold.
            • NegativeLatency 4y ago
              Biking on the sidewalk is legal in most places. Not saying those people weren’t being dumb but I’d much rather that that getting hit by a car
              • michaelmrose 4y ago
                It's legal in only half the country and its stupid everywhere. "The overall crash rate for cyclists was 0.29 per 1000 cycled kilometres and 6.1 per 1000 cycled hours. The crash rate for cyclists riding on pedestrian paths was 26.4 per 1000 h, which was considerably greater than other road environments. For example, the risk was 8.8 on shared pedestrian and bicycle paths, 5.8 on cycle lanes and 4.7 on roads." https://etrr.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12544-021-00497-z https://etrr.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12544-021-00... I understand it may be preferable from the cyclists perspective to injure a pedestrian rather than risk getting hit by a car but your unilaterally risking them to procure a benefit for your self. Morally you are fucking them. Furthermore some are more vulnerable to serious or permanent injury than others and they don't have an option not to be on a sidewalk especially in the city. If you have access to a car and are cycling for your health or to achieve a warm fuzzy for saving the earth and hypothetical and mostly fictional people while actually risking, injuring, or killing existing people because actually biking on the street is too dangerous you should probably bike on the street like an adult or turn the key in your car.
    • _dain_ 4y ago
      "car roads"? there is no such thing, aside from motorways, on which cyclists are banned by law.
      • egypturnash 4y ago
        There are definitely roads where bikes are allowed, maybe even with a designated lane, that are not safe ones to cycle on.
        • Moru 4y ago
          But in no case is it the bikers fault. If the road is allowed for bicycles, the cars have to take care not to run them over. Most roads are perfectly safe for bicycles, it's the cars that isn't safe for them. Best is to plan a city so you can bicycle wherever you need to, this leads to less cars in the city which is good for you that need your car to get home.
  • SoftTalker 4y ago
    You find them in any sport. Weightlifting is another one that's easy to see. Go to any gym for a few weeks, you will pretty quickly identify a handful of people who seem to live there.
  • freetime2 4y ago
    Being a low-impact endurance sport means that cycling is conducive to really large training volumes relative to other sports. I recall reading that pro cyclists will spend 30+ hours a week on the bike. Triathletes are even more crazy, though.
    • asdff 4y ago
      Honestly after a week or two riding a bike you will get to that point. You crank out 30 miles in two hours and you will go "well that felt like a jog lets do another 30 miles right now"
      • doliveira 4y ago
        Try a year or two, and even that is quite a stretch. I don't think you quite realize how uncommon your level of fitness is
        • asdff 4y ago
          Just try it out biking and see how far you get before you feel absolutely cooked, you'd be surprised at how much mileage you just covered. Charity bike rides usually have the lowest mileage at like 15-20 miles or so and you can do that in any shape, they advertise that distance route as such, then they might have a 50 mile one that does take some training and will probably leave you cooked, then the more serious ones.
          • doliveira 4y ago
            I used to cycle to work (about 3 miles away from my place) and after 6 months I still felt absolutely cooked after the uphill trip back, and the inclination wasn't even that accentuated. So unless you live in a cold and flat-as-a-pancake area there's really no way to classify 15 miles as easy for anyone but seriously fit people. Even then, it's not something a non-athlete (amateur or otherwise) can just pick up in two weeks.
      • freetime2 4y ago
• hasmolo 4y ago
  i think it's more than that. i see two major groups, addicts and users. the addicts _must_ ride every day, the ride is a major mental and physical block to them feeling good. the users ride to burn out anxious energy, it doesn't need to be daily, and you focus on sustainable riding so that your coping mechanism doesn't stop working. i've been in both groups, and tend toward the second now a days. my uncle is in his 60s and his "ideal" day is wake up a 5am, ride till noon, eat one meal, go to bed. his kids recognized this and a few have become users while a few are addicted to it.
• angrysaki 4y ago
  I'm sure there's some truth to this but I don't think that is what is happening in this case. From what I can gather, this is about people who trained for a goal, and during the event an unexpected "weak link" in the chain gave out so they found a mechanical solution. I'm sure if most of them had gotten this during training, they would have taken the time to recover.
  • curiousgal 4y ago
    A 3000-mile 8-day 1-hour sleep race sounds rather "addict-y" to me.
• vocram 4y ago
  Drug addicts? Why not just addicted? Differently from sport, there’s no such thing as low drug usage being healthy.
  • elliekelly 4y ago
    I‘m not really sure there’s any meaningful distinction to be made? Like sport, billions of people use drugs for their health every day without becoming addicted. And like sport, the addicts are only a small minority.
  • __alexs 4y ago
    Define drug?
  • notamy 4y ago
    > Differently from sport, there’s no such thing as low drug usage being healthy. I would argue this, as ex. medical cannabis licences are becoming more common, not to mention all the drugs that are prescribed and used healthily/responsibly (not to say all prescribed drugs are properly used).
  • crooked-v 4y ago
    For an obvious counterexample, caffeine is incredibly safe for people of any age and demographic at almost any dosage level.
    • BrandoElFollito 4y ago
      Not only safe but also healthy.
    • eurasiantiger 4y ago
      Caffeine is actually pretty unsafe as the margin between effective dose and lethal dose (usually stated at around 5 grams) is only 100x of a 50mg dose. The margin between a cup of coffee and a lethal dose can be less, like 50x. Much safer than heroin, but a deadly poison compared to e.g. LSD. And coffee is not just caffeine like tobacco smoke is not just nicotine.
• ip26 4y ago
  We glorify grit and celebrate toughness. My view is consequently people now try to tough their way through something they are simply not trained for, up to & beyond self-destruction. They have come to think grit is the key, when in reality it’s training + grit. Ironically, it’s easier to ruin your body for an afternoon than to train diligently for years, so the problem has persisted.
  • kelseyfrog 4y ago
    Absolutely. It's common to be reminded of one's failure to the tune of, "you didn't try hard enough." For some people, myself included, the response it to break themselves during the next attempt.
• dwd 4y ago
  Michael Shermer occasionally refers to his experiences with Race Across America on his podcast and for him it seems more to do with personal drive and pushing himself to go further, longer and faster. It's also community and being a part of something special and bigger than yourself rather than being an adrenaline junky.