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Comment by jbirer | Hacker News Reader

I see people who overexert themselves in sports not too dissimilar from drug addicts. They are coping with some internal issue by forcing their bodies to produce endorphins & adrenaline, to the point of giving themselves diseases like this one mentioned. They need professional help and take more time to recover.

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I'm sure there's some truth to this but I don't think that is what is happening in this case. From what I can gather, this is about people who trained for a goal, and during the event an unexpected "weak link" in the chain gave out so they found a mechanical solution.

I'm sure if most of them had gotten this during training, they would have taken the time to recover.

A 3000-mile 8-day 1-hour sleep race sounds rather "addict-y" to me.

i think it's more than that. i see two major groups, addicts and users.

the addicts _must_ ride every day, the ride is a major mental and physical block to them feeling good.

the users ride to burn out anxious energy, it doesn't need to be daily, and you focus on sustainable riding so that your coping mechanism doesn't stop working.

i've been in both groups, and tend toward the second now a days. my uncle is in his 60s and his "ideal" day is wake up a 5am, ride till noon, eat one meal, go to bed. his kids recognized this and a few have become users while a few are addicted to it.

Drug addicts? Why not just addicted?

Differently from sport, there’s no such thing as low drug usage being healthy.

I‘m not really sure there’s any meaningful distinction to be made? Like sport, billions of people use drugs for their health every day without becoming addicted. And like sport, the addicts are only a small minority.

Define drug?

> Differently from sport, there’s no such thing as low drug usage being healthy.

I would argue this, as ex. medical cannabis licences are becoming more common, not to mention all the drugs that are prescribed and used healthily/responsibly (not to say all prescribed drugs are properly used).

For an obvious counterexample, caffeine is incredibly safe for people of any age and demographic at almost any dosage level.

Not only safe but also healthy.

Caffeine is actually pretty unsafe as the margin between effective dose and lethal dose (usually stated at around 5 grams) is only 100x of a 50mg dose. The margin between a cup of coffee and a lethal dose can be less, like 50x.

Much safer than heroin, but a deadly poison compared to e.g. LSD.

And coffee is not just caffeine like tobacco smoke is not just nicotine.

"It's dangerous to drink 7 pots of coffee in a row" is something that I would still qualify under "incredibly safe". The human stomach can't even hold that much liquid.

Please, when you make giant claims at least do us the courtesy of explaining why you think what you think. It comes across as opinionated pseudoscience otherwise.

We glorify grit and celebrate toughness. My view is consequently people now try to tough their way through something they are simply not trained for, up to & beyond self-destruction. They have come to think grit is the key, when in reality it’s training + grit.

Ironically, it’s easier to ruin your body for an afternoon than to train diligently for years, so the problem has persisted.

Absolutely. It's common to be reminded of one's failure to the tune of, "you didn't try hard enough." For some people, myself included, the response it to break themselves during the next attempt.

Michael Shermer occasionally refers to his experiences with Race Across America on his podcast and for him it seems more to do with personal drive and pushing himself to go further, longer and faster. It's also community and being a part of something special and bigger than yourself rather than being an adrenaline junky.

Bicyclists seem, to me, to be a very certain and peculiar breed of obsessives.

You find them in any sport. Weightlifting is another one that's easy to see. Go to any gym for a few weeks, you will pretty quickly identify a handful of people who seem to live there.

Being a low-impact endurance sport means that cycling is conducive to really large training volumes relative to other sports. I recall reading that pro cyclists will spend 30+ hours a week on the bike.

Triathletes are even more crazy, though.

Honestly after a week or two riding a bike you will get to that point. You crank out 30 miles in two hours and you will go "well that felt like a jog lets do another 30 miles right now"

30+ hours a week? Did you read that right? To put it in perspective, Jonas Vingegaard averaged well below 30 hours a week at the Tour de France this year. (He rode at a pretty impossible pace, but still… it’s the Tour de France!) That would be an enormous amount of time for anyone to spend on a bike - especially anyone with a full time job and other obligations to attend to.

I think 4+ hours per day isn't too bad. I cycle 2-3 hours per day and I'm not even a professional by any means.

The Tour de France isn't really useful for this comparison, as the riders have to perform at top speeds for several weeks so the riders have to not overdo it and risk not being able to perform well in the following days.

Does your 2-3 hours per day average include rest days and HIIT workouts? I think when you factor those in, 30+ hours a week really is a lot of cycling. And absolutely not something that somebody will jump right into after one to two weeks, which the parent claimed.

To be clear I am not saying that the average person couldn’t build up to 30+ hours a week of cycling. Much the opposite - the point of my initial post was that it’s relatively easy to rack up long hours on a bike, especially if you go at a slow pace. But rather that most people do not have the time or the motivation to spend that many hours on a bike, unless they race professionally.

Looking through Strava, there is nobody in my area who has averaged more than 15 hours a week over the last 4 weeks. My weekly average is well below that. Do you log your workouts in Strava or some other app? What is your actual weekly average time spent?

I think the TdF comparison is useful because it gives a rough idea of the sort of distance you can cover in 30 hours/week. Something on the order of 3000 km per month, which again I just don’t ever see any amateur riders doing in my area.

If you’re really riding that much, or even half of that, then kudos to you. I would love to be able to put in those kinds of numbers. But I still think it’s really rare for amateurs, and requires an obsessive dedication to the hobby.

> And absolutely not something that somebody will jump right into after one to two weeks, which the parent claimed.

Yeah, of course not. I didn't catch that part.

I don't use a tracking app, but I pretty much always take the same route to some mountains. Getting there takes around 45-50min. Then there's an ~800m climb with up to 20% incline. How long that takes me really depends on my form that day, and I don't really care about the competitive aspect. On some days I'll cycle a bit deeper into the mountains to get to the next peak, but that's really stretching it and I'd usually need to bring some extra calories (I do this on an empty stomach usually).

Well I was commenting more on the very large training volume versus 30 hours a week. For running, most people out of shape get gassed and probably puke in about 5 minutes running around the block, and when you are in great running shape its not like you are really running for hours either unless you are endurance training. With biking, you end up with the endurance to ride for an hour or two or longer in one stint pretty fast because its such an efficient vehicle. If the goal is to burn calories before work, a bike is pretty sucky for that unless you are doing hill sprints because its going to take too long compared to running or other activities that can burn the same calories in a fraction of the time.

Enormous? It doesn't sound like that much. Any cycling commuter probably spends at least 5 hours a week on a bike, and that's just a regular person. Throw in a weekend ride and that's 10 hours. Obviously, 30 is 3 times 10, but we're talking about endurance athletes here, compared to regular people just going to work and getting groceries.

According to this article, pros typically train 20-30 hours per week, and will only typically do 30+ hours per week early in the season when building up their aerobic base.

https://www.welovecycling.com/wide/2021/11/30/how-many-hours...

So even the top world tour cyclists are only doing 30+ hours per week for a fraction of the year. Compare that to professional marathon runners who are probably doing roughly 15 hrs/week at their peak. It's a lot... seriously.

Try a year or two, and even that is quite a stretch.

I don't think you quite realize how uncommon your level of fitness is

Just try it out biking and see how far you get before you feel absolutely cooked, you'd be surprised at how much mileage you just covered. Charity bike rides usually have the lowest mileage at like 15-20 miles or so and you can do that in any shape, they advertise that distance route as such, then they might have a 50 mile one that does take some training and will probably leave you cooked, then the more serious ones.

I used to cycle to work (about 3 miles away from my place) and after 6 months I still felt absolutely cooked after the uphill trip back, and the inclination wasn't even that accentuated.

So unless you live in a cold and flat-as-a-pancake area there's really no way to classify 15 miles as easy for anyone but seriously fit people. Even then, it's not something a non-athlete (amateur or otherwise) can just pick up in two weeks.

Agreed. "Yeah so I was running a marathon and had to piss so you just go while you're running, everybody does it."

Cooooolsies...

Philippides probably pissed himself while he was running from the battle of Marathon to Athens. then again he also died at the end ...

think of it as a libation to his memory.

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