What do you realize as you get older?

You're on the right team - so to speak.

Dylan Thomas said "rage rage against the dying of the light". It's the only way to go out. Rage rage against the ignorance of the right.

That there are more hobby joggers pretending to be serious athletes on LRC than at Reddit r/AdvancedRunning.

THIS^

Because of the very high childhood mortality rate in the past people think that nobody lived past age 50. Far from it, IF you were lucky enough to live past age 5, you could expect to live well into your 70's.

Most modern people just have the life expectancy thing completely backwards. The highest risk was as an infant, not being old.

That isn't true. When I was a youngster the average life expectancy was early sixties for a man and later sixties for a woman. There were two main reasons for this: virtually everyone smoked, and the medical profession didn't yet know about the effects of cholesterol on heart disease. Advances in medical knowledge and hence life style in those two regards have greatly increased average life expectancy.

As you age you get perspective, and you have been around long enough to see patterns emerging in pop culture and politics. That should give you some small degree of what we call "wisdom".

Wisdom is different from intelligence. There are A LOT of very intelligent young people, but just due to their age they lack experience and think they are the first people to discover X problem or Y activity. The wise don't deny these are issues, they just do not run head first into them like the young. They sit back and ponder a bit more.

I'm 36. When I was younger I should have thrown myself into everything.

At 36 I'm still living the peter pan lifestyle of no kids, no house, no career or responsibilities.

That life is in large part about input and output.

Stay poopy!

I find the older I get the less I realize I know.

I realize that my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and ancestors further back lived lives of work, hardship and deprivation with very little leisure time. Their options were highly limited as your class determined your opportunities and occupation. Each generation hoped their descendants would have a better quality of life. I have that better quality of life because of everything they endured.

I forgot.

There are so many things, but one that stands out to me is that I need less "stuff" as I get older.

Few things are worth getting upset over and you can't change people. That is how you can stay married and have a happy relationship.

Get as close to nature as you can while still having a flush toilet and the internet. Plant a garden. Learn about plants, birds, etc. Don't just use nature as a backdrop for social media posts.

Athletics provided me social mobility in middle school, high school and college. Therefore, social options were somewhat of a given.

As I have grown older, the fear of missing out vanished and I became introverted which introduced a subset of issues such as shyness that ought to be overcome during typical teenage years. I had to now work on maintaining relationships.

I stopped running for about 5 years and gained a ton of weight because I still had eating habits like Ollie Hoare. I really should have never stopped running.

There are four primary functions of sport:

1) as an educator

2) as a competitive measure

3) as leisure

4) as a pathway to virtue

I had a difficult time letting go of the second function I listed which was the causality to my time off and early struggles getting back into the sport. Instead I should have embraced the other three functions for what they are and always have been. But perhaps I didnt know this as explicitly as I do now.

Finally, as you grow older, you notice the little things that enable you to be the best version of yourself. Despite how different and/or odd they may be, you do them as long as they are legal and socially & morally ethical. In fact, as runners who potentially stood out during their schooling, those hints were already dropped.

I no longer need to compete but I like to run (a lot). I know what is going in and out of my body from a consumption standpoint. I know specifically what kind of music I enjoy (Led Zeppelin & band members later pursuits). I know what makes me feel good (90 minute runs in the morning). And so I have uniquely found an equilibrium that allows me to function and perform careerwise on a high level. I encourage everyone to find that same equilibrium inside of themselves. No matter how tough life gets (job loss, relationships, family), as runners you have already been seeded with a framework to perservere.

I part with a quote from the great Galileo Galilei:

"You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him find it within himself."

Embrace.

It is funny how little people change. Sure there's the girl that was a wall flower that blossoms after HS, or the nerd the becomes "cool", but those are outliers- far from the norm. The people I have known since HS, are largely still the same person they were back then. They just are heavier with gray hair.

A DanM post I appreciate, I don't think I would have ever seen the day.

I've learned to remove people from my life faster once they display bad traits because they won't change. Hire slow fire quickly

We stand on the shoulders of those who have come before us.

Nothing matters. Just exist.