Marathon Mistakes, Career Concerns, Laws of Communication
Thursday Three: Episode 13 (on a Friday)
read time 2 minutes
Here are three interesting ideas you won’t find doom scrolling.
TL;DR
Huge mistake I made during my 1st marathon (and how I’m planning to avoid it during my 1st Ironman 70.3)
Quote that’ll put your career concerns at ease
Six laws of communication
Huge mistake I made during my 1st marathon (and how I’m planning to avoid it during my 1st Ironman 70.3)
If you follow me on Strava — or Instagram — you know I’m training for my first Ironman 70.3. I started training a couple of months ago, and I’m quickly realizing how important nutrition is for training and race day performance.
Quick story.
I ran my first marathon back in 2020. I didn’t take my hydration or nutrition seriously and my body nearly completely shut down around mile 20. It was literally to the point where if I straightened my leg, my hamstring would cramp. And if I bent my leg, my quadriceps would cramp. It was a disaster.
Nonetheless, I ended up finishing the race, but didn’t achieve my goal of going sub-four hours because I was a dumbass and didn’t take hydration and nutrition seriously.
Granted, it was my first marathon, I ran it virtually, and there were no aid stations. I will go sub-four in my next marathon…
Anyways, I’m not going to make the same mistake for this Ironman. So the past few weeks, I sent myself down the Ironman hydration and nutrition rabbithole.
As you might’ve guessed, there’s A LOT that goes into it. I have a lot to learn, but one critical component is coming up with a hydration strategy. This involves calculating your fluid loss — an estimate of your hourly sweat rate during exercise. Believe it or not, you can lose a ton of fluid when biking or running. For context, the average sweat rate is anywhere from 1-1.5 liters per hour.
General advice is to replace 60-70% of fluids lost. So if you’re producing 1 liter of sweat per hour, you should be consuming 600-700 milliliters of some sort of electrolyte drink per hour.
I’m just getting my feet wet with this stuff, but it’s all super fascinating. I had not idea our bodies produced that much sweat.
It’s also a good reminder about how much your bodyweight can fluctuate when you’re hydrated versus when you are not.
I always laugh when people say “Holy sh*t! I gained 5 pounds in two days!” No you didn’t. It’s just water.
Quote to help you navigate your career
Sahil Bloom shared this quote in his weekly newsletter, The Friday Five.
"If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's."
- Joseph Campbell
Most people crave certainty. So they pursue careers in areas that offer just that — doctor, lawyer, banking, consulting, etc. My friend, Jack Raines wrote more about this in his recent piece, No Rules.
The reality is if you’re on one of these paths, you’re following someone else’s path rather than your own. Nothing wrong with that, but that’s what you’re doing.
I started my career in management consulting. It felt good to tell people I was a management consultant. It also felt good knowing that I had a clear path to making $500K+ per year if I grinded it out to partner. Although that path sounded enticing, it was the path my company wanted for me. Not the path I necessarily wanted.
I’m not knocking on those who pursue the clear path. Just that it oftentimes isn’t your path — or maybe it is. Just know that the other path — the one where you carve your own — is often more fulfilling.
Six laws of communication
Osmo Antero Wiio was a finnish academic, journalist, and author. He’s best known for his laws around communication — something to think about next time you have to send an email, Slack, or deliver some news:
Communication usually fails, except by accident
If a message can be interpreted in several ways, it will be interpreted in a manner that maximizes the damage.
There is always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message.
The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds.
In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be.
The importance of a news item is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
The more important the situation is, the more probable you had forgotten an essential thing that you remembered a moment ago.