Why do you have to sacrifice anything? The greats are great because they enjoy the activity and would probably be doing it if no one was around or cared that they were. Do it for the fun, not the glory
That's not true. Enjoyment of the game got them there, but succeeding at anything often requires long periods of bleeding for it every day. Amateurs wait for inspiration, professionals show up to the studio and work.
Furthermore, with running suffering is an inescapable part of it. On some days, it hurts bad, but on other days it hurts really good. It's a blissful spiritual form of suffering but to get it you have to grind through the bad parts.
I enjoy the fuck out of running and don't even compete, but it's still something you think about all the time. What sacrifices do I make and which do I not? I'll give you examples. I wake up between 3 to 4 AM every morning to run. I enjoy it. I'm a natural morning person. This isn't some CEO grindset. But it entails not being to do other things that involve staying up late or going out. That's fine for where I am in my life right now. I doubt I'd have done it in my early 20s when I had more of a night-oriented social life.
I prepare all my own food and weigh and measure everything I eat. I also weigh myself each morning. This allows me to enter everything into a logging app that estimates TDEE and gives you a target. I can't say for sure this is absolutely necessary, but I don't do it universally 100% of the time, and when I'm home I tend to gradually lose a bit of weight because I'm not eating enough. When I'm traveling and eating out, I tend to gradually gain a bit of weight. So it seems that sticking to the strict tracking as often as I can is the best way to go. I enjoy this as well. I have no problem with it. But it means I don't eat out much and prepare everything from raw ingredients so the estimates are actually accurate. That sacrifices convenience.
There are other sports I enjoy. I lift weight. I rock climb. I surf and skateboard. Every minute spent training to run is a minute I could spent training for another sport. In the lifting case, at a high enough volume aerobic training and trying to gain muscle pretty directly conflict with each other. It's not realistic to expect any particularly high volume of leg work in particular. I'm sacrificing squat performance for sure to be better at running.
What am I not sacrificing? Well, I still travel. I still go off script for a few weeks here and there. I don't try to stick to either a diet plan or a training plan when on vacation. I still run and eat reasonably good foods, but I have no doubt I'd perform better if I never let up at all. To me, this isn't worth it. But if I cared badly about qualifying for a world major and was 34 seconds off, maybe I would.
Nobody is saying you need to sacrifice joy or fun. But you have finite hours in the day and your body has a finite capacity for recovery and training adaptation. Every bit of effort you devote to running is a bit that could have been something else.
Fact is that most failures and sacrifices don't lead to great success. But of course most of them don't result in some humble-brag grind-set blog post either.
So those sacrifices and failures are under-represented, and this leads to people who are not well versed in statistics, to conclude that therefore sacrifices and failures are somehow a necessary step in the way to success.
But that's false. There are loads of people with good ideas and talent who have made plenty of sacrifices but still have never seen success, and there are loads of people who gain success without any meaningful sacrifice at all.
Another point is that I don't think those sacrifices were difficult decisions for those 'greats'. Because another overlooked difference between people is an inherent ability to relentlessly pursue a singular goal. So even though they might have felt bad about giving up on something at the time, they did so because it was standing in the way of what they truly wanted.
I this way, could you really say they have sacrificed anything at all? If you really care about productivity and don't care so much about comfort, is it really a sacrifice to spend the night at the office?
It's the people who don't really care about all that who have to make the hardest sacrifices, in which case maybe better advice is to tell them to not make the sacrifice.
Just living your life without wanting to attain status is a perfectly valid go to try to achieve.
> By that same logic you can conclude that eating food leads to becoming one of the greats, because they all ate food.
No your logic is wrong. The data you have is that "All people who are successful eat food." That does not imply that "If you eat food, you will be successful."
But it does imply "If you do not eat food, you will not be successful." And that's certainly a true fact. Starving to death and being dead is not a viable path to success, or at least not any kind of success you will be around to experience.
If you see that all people in category X have a certain property Y, that's good data that you'll need to have Y before you can be an X. But it does not imply that having Y will make you an X. It's a necessary but not sufficient condition.
To the original point, it seems that nearly all successful people have to make some difficult sacrifices to get there. So, yes, you probably will also have to make difficult sacrifices to be successful. But even so, that's no guarantee of success. It's just that not making any sacrifices is a guarantee of not being successful.
I'm ignoring, of course, that "success" is highly subjective and individually determined. But certainly when it comes to marathon runners, you won't find any successful ones that didn't have to make real sacrifices to get there. Long distance running is hard.
Also, isn't literally every sacrifice just an opportunity cost? That kinda what makes it a sacrifice. Sacrifice your first born and give up the extra productivity possible. Sacrifice a lucrative but over taxing job and lose out on the money. Sacrifice a meal for someone and you go hungry. Sacrifice is always about the opportunity cost of the thing you're sacrificing. If it doesn't hurt, if it doesn't cost you something, it's not a sacrifice.
e.g. if you overtrain or don’t wait long enough after an injury, you may permanently damage something forever. Speaking from personal experience and knowing a lot of people who have done the same. There’s also some documentaries about athletes doing it and losing it all. Go the extra mile but don’t look back and have regret about that one time.
And since "important" is relative to the person making the sacrifice, it's easy for a person to declare something a sacrifice when what they were giving up was not especially important to them, or on the other hand for someone to dismiss a "real sacrifice" that someone else has made as unimportant.
Not that this matters, really. But I think it's important not to use them synonymously. In the case of an opportunity cost, you are acknowledging that there were things given up. In the case of a sacrifice, you are saying there were things given up _and it hurt_.
Dude is aiming for a 3h marathon so he’s already there purely for fun. The greats are pulling 2:01 marathons these days.
And while Phelps was certainly a great, I doubt he would’ve spent 6 hours per day training like a maniac if he was just swimming for fun. That’s a lot of hard work.