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What would be a spectacular way to fail a marathon, though? Because you can aim to win, but pretty much all versions of "not winning" are just... not winning? T
by TheRealPomax 2y ago
What would be a spectacular way to fail a marathon, though? Because you can aim to win, but pretty much all versions of "not winning" are just... not winning? That's not particularly spectacular.
Maybe accidentally forgetting you're in a marathon and bootstrapping a billion dollar startup sometime between starting and forgetting to finish?
- ChrisGammell 2y agoSpontaneous combustion, for sure
- legacynl 2y agoThere is no way to spectacularly fail a marathon. Hell even if you didn't finish in the alloted time you still did something healthy. The author is just trying to inflate his personal goal, to achieve some self set time, big enough so he can turn it into a self serving post that he can post to HN. I don't really blame the author to be fair, nowadays this is kinda the thing people do, but I do get tired of the constant hyperbole.
- travisjungroth 2y agoIt’s spectacularly failing at his goal of under 3 hours. It’s not an objective, absolute measure. It’s a subjective, relative one. I’m guessing he’d consider finishing with a time of 3:15 a spectacular failure.
- julianeon 2y agoThere is a disconnect between what most people imagine spectacular failure to be (probably something publicly humiliating and/or financially ruinous) and this, where even a spectacular failure when running a marathon wouldn't be noticed unless you told other people about it.
- TheRealPomax 2y agoSpectacular failing doesn't need to be humiliating or ruinous, but it does need to be a spectacle. An incredibly obvious, public showing of failure that needs no additional explanation for people to recognize it as such. Even if the additional explanation makes it even better. This is just "failing a personal goal", sans spectacle.