Why Soft People Don't Do Hard Things

Learnings From The Olympic Runner That Paces People to Sub-3 Hours

• 🍦Why Soft People Don’t Do Hard Things

• 🏅Learnings From The Olympic Runner That Paces Celebs to Sub-3 Hours

• 🩸Norwegian Double Lactate Threshold Training Formula Explained

• 🌱 Why Plants & Animals Don’t Fight The Winter

• 🤡 An October Bad Dad Joke

🍦Why Soft People Don’t Do Hard Things

What the 2008 Disney x Pixar movie Wall-E got right about humans

I’m pretty sure I’m offending someone in the world with the saying, “Soft people don’t do hard things.” Hell, I have it printed out on my wall behind me right next to my trail, running on almost 45 degrees of slanted sharp rocks in Tasmania, Australia, for all my podcast videos and business meetings. Oh well. It’s true.

I say this a lot in my head whenever I’m about to make a relatively small, lazy decision. Actually, I sing it…

But is David Goggins right? Should we all stay hard all of the time? When is a good time to be soft? Do many soft, meaningless, lazy decisions add up to a life more blubbery than a seal? Let’s unpack this really quick to see.

The statement is for me to remember that when something is mildly irritating, to push through it. Don’t be soft.

Example: I live in an apartment building. The stairs are actually closer in proximity to where I'm usually coming from than it is to get the elevator. I’ve timed it, and taking the stairs down is 2x faster than taking the elevator. Taking the stairs up is about 50% faster than the elevator. This is pure logic here and zero emotions. Oh, and I live on the 8th floor! What about the people on the 2nd and 3rd floors? More softness.

You can take the statement “Soft people don’t do hard things” as a prompt to do more challenging things because, let’s be 💯 here… our lives are softer than whipped cream on top of marshmallows. If you’re reading this and care about running, you most likely have everything you need to live a relatively risk-free and safe life, yet we don’t do a few key hard things to make sure we stay fit for the long run. We take shortcuts everywhere and look for all the hacks in half the time.

But what about rest days? What about relaxing and recharging? That's gotta be an okay time to be soft.

Yes - Rest, sleep, and general recovery are crucial — but that’s actually mentally hard for most to do. Stepping away from things for a short or long while is necessary. And that is the opposite of soft. Most people go too hard with their training and don’t respect the slower pace or the rest days. And boom, they are injured, burned out, or sick. That’s also being soft because it’s mentally lazy even though you are physically doing something hard. That may have sounded like a bowl of word salad, but… it’s true.

You know what happens when you don’t use your muscles and push them? Atrophy — which is when your body goes, “Welp, guess you don’t need these; I’ll put these resources somewhere else.” Before you know it, you’re losing lean muscle mass and gaining body fat, and your bones are now soft and brittle.

After 700 years of floating on a ship with zero worries, the citizens of B&L didn’t have to walk or do anything else. They just laid back with everything that was done for them and complained about being bored. Everyone just became these blobs of unproductive human flesh—zero hard, all soft.

Do you still think soft people don’t do hard things? Tell me why I’m wrong.

🏅Learnings From The Olympic Runner That Paces Celebrities to Sub-3 Hours

There’s something kinda crazy about signing up for a marathon. But there’s something properly bananas about doing one under three hours and attempting that for 20-plus years. So, why did Casey Neistat (the YouTuber) and Lil Nas X (The pop star who actually did a half-marathon) do it? Because they had Roberto Mandje—a guy who’s not just an Olympic runner, but someone who takes “mind over matter” and turns it into a lifestyle choice. Roberto doesn’t just train you to run faster; he basically makes you question everything.

Okay, so we need to talk about marathons for a second—specifically, the ridiculousness of a sub-three-hour marathon. I mean, running 26.2 miles isn’t challenging enough? Now, you want to do it in under three hours? Sure, why not? And apparently, Lil Nas X and Casey Neistat—yes, the YouTube guy and the rapper—decided that they, too, wanted in on the madness. So, they called in the big guns: Roberto Mandje, an actual Olympic runner, to whip them into shape.

Roberto, though, didn’t just hand over some magic training plan. He gave them a whole new way to see life. It’s like he tricked them into thinking it’s about running when, really, it’s about turning you into a better human. Or something like that.

Watch, read and listen to the full episode on your next run/workout here.

🩸Norwegian Double Lactate Threshold Training Formula Explained

Two to three years ago, a blog post from a former pro-middle-distance runner started making the rounds in all of the running forums. It exposed Olympic 1500m/5k Gold Medalist Jakeb Ingebrigsten’s and other Norwegian endurance athletes’ training protocols. On the surface, it looks crazy. They are running a threshold session (the pace you can sustain for an hour) twice a day, multiple times per week… in the off-season!

Yeah, I also spat out my energy drink with the quickness. But after the hype subsided and more experts chimed in, things got more clear and started to make more sense. This is a way of pushing your aerobic system into more of the lower zone 3 stuff but not going into the zone 4/vo2 max work that could deplete it. You’re basically putting your hand on fire and then taking it off very fast. If done right, it actually does lead to significant boosts in aerobic fitness. To do it right, you need a mixture of heart rate monitors, treadmill running, and lactate monitors with finger pricks after the end of intervals(not fun!) But if done wrong, you can easily overtrain, burn out, and get injured.

Someone has finally adapted the training model for amateur runners who don’t run 15+ hours a week and have their whole lives centered around their sport. I might be trying this out in my next half-marathon race block, and I’ll let you know. Find out how to do that in this article by here.

I love this newsletter. I get to make you slightly better with some stuff that I’m digging at a slower pace than usual social media content. I’d love to hear from you if you liked something, didn’t like something, or were confused. Hit the button below to let me know how you’re feeling!

🌱 Why Plants & Animals Don’t Fight The Winter

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is the time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season in which the world takes on a sparse beauty and even the pavements sparkle. It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.

Doing those deeply unfashionable things—slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting—is a radical act now, but it is essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you’ll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel so raw that you’ll need to take care of yourself for a while. If you don’t, then that skin will harden around you.”

It’s one of the most important choices you’ll ever make.”

— Katherine May, from her book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in difficult times

🤡 An October Bad Dad Joke

What does a runner lose after they win a race?

Their breath.