One thing to bear strongly in mind when considering what sport to play is how prone that sport is to injuring you. Young people generally don’t realize that pretty much any injury you get is a permanent injury.
Breaking your arm and needing a cast creates muscular imbalances that don’t correct themselves without therapy. Twisting your ankle makes your ankle permanently more prone injury. Practically any blow to the head, even sub-concussive blows, yield cumulative brain damage.
Chronic pain sucks. It deflates your willpower, your emotional energy, your joie de vivre. Normal, non-athletic old people experience massive diminishment of life-enjoyment from normal aches and pains. Athletic injuries have the potential to drastically compound this.
I simply didn’t have enough time to put in the 14 hour days I envisioned.
I’ve been guilty of similarly over-ambitious athletic goals in the past. It seems like I have a hard time motivating myself to do anything at all unless that thing is epic—unless accomplishing that thing would be amazing to have accomplished. So in the past I’ve been prone to shoot for goals that are actually impossible, because if I aimed for realistic goals, I wouldn’t be motivated to work towards them.
Ex. running suicides until you collapse. And then getting up to do more until you collapse again. It takes a lot of willpower to do that. I think willpower is like a muscle, and you have to train yourself to be able to work at such intensities.
However—at a certain point, some module of your brain may check in, notice that running suicides is extremely unpleasant and that it’s not providing any hedonic benefit, and metaphorically cut your legs out from under you. You wake up one day and find that you just don’t care to do that again today.
This happened to me when I did Crossfit. I was very intense about it for about two months, doing three or more sessions a week, and then woke up one day an the whole idea just seemed stupid. The shift had happened at some level below consciousness. So now I’m more wary of “overdoing it”.
Knowing that I am capable of working at high intensities has given me confidence that “I could do anything”.
I find this to be true for non-physical work as well. Various stages of graduate school were somewhere between “marathon”, “series of sprints” and “death march” in terms of how hard I pushed myself, and now I will always know that I can push myself way, way past the point of feeling like I can’t push any more.
Competition can go to your head. My final round in the last Taekwondo tournament in which I competed saw me behind on points and desperately trying to kick my oponent in the head hard enough to knock him unconscious, basically just wildly pummeling his upper body with my feet and shins. This is funny to reflect on, because it feels like going temporarily insane. (It’s also valuable to have a reference for the emotional experience of “crushing defeat”, which is what followed after.)
Taekwondo specifically had pros and cons. One of the pros was that we trained as a team but we competed individually, so I think the bullying was less than it could have been. That said, it only takes one jerk instructor willing to knock you out to prove a point to make the whole enterprise a waste of time.
your lengthy basketball quote
I really enjoyed The Art of Learning for its general approach to breaking things down like this.
One thing to bear strongly in mind when considering what sport to play is how prone that sport is to injuring you. Young people generally don’t realize that pretty much any injury you get is a permanent injury.
Breaking your arm and needing a cast creates muscular imbalances that don’t correct themselves without therapy. Twisting your ankle makes your ankle permanently more prone injury. Practically any blow to the head, even sub-concussive blows, yield cumulative brain damage.
Chronic pain sucks. It deflates your willpower, your emotional energy, your joie de vivre. Normal, non-athletic old people experience massive diminishment of life-enjoyment from normal aches and pains. Athletic injuries have the potential to drastically compound this.
I’ve been guilty of similarly over-ambitious athletic goals in the past. It seems like I have a hard time motivating myself to do anything at all unless that thing is epic—unless accomplishing that thing would be amazing to have accomplished. So in the past I’ve been prone to shoot for goals that are actually impossible, because if I aimed for realistic goals, I wouldn’t be motivated to work towards them.
However—at a certain point, some module of your brain may check in, notice that running suicides is extremely unpleasant and that it’s not providing any hedonic benefit, and metaphorically cut your legs out from under you. You wake up one day and find that you just don’t care to do that again today.
This happened to me when I did Crossfit. I was very intense about it for about two months, doing three or more sessions a week, and then woke up one day an the whole idea just seemed stupid. The shift had happened at some level below consciousness. So now I’m more wary of “overdoing it”.
I find this to be true for non-physical work as well. Various stages of graduate school were somewhere between “marathon”, “series of sprints” and “death march” in terms of how hard I pushed myself, and now I will always know that I can push myself way, way past the point of feeling like I can’t push any more.
Competition can go to your head. My final round in the last Taekwondo tournament in which I competed saw me behind on points and desperately trying to kick my oponent in the head hard enough to knock him unconscious, basically just wildly pummeling his upper body with my feet and shins. This is funny to reflect on, because it feels like going temporarily insane. (It’s also valuable to have a reference for the emotional experience of “crushing defeat”, which is what followed after.)
Taekwondo specifically had pros and cons. One of the pros was that we trained as a team but we competed individually, so I think the bullying was less than it could have been. That said, it only takes one jerk instructor willing to knock you out to prove a point to make the whole enterprise a waste of time.
I really enjoyed The Art of Learning for its general approach to breaking things down like this.
I recommend painscience.com for chronic pain problems.