My brother’s goal for 2021 is to run one marathon every week for a total of 52 marathons in a year. When he told me, my first thought was what the hell is wrong with you?
My second thought made me chuckle, bringing back some memories of teenage drama.
Daniel and I grew up doing WWE moves on each other and fighting over the Gameboy and Nintendo 64. While I grew up with a need for outdoor activity, he loved the computer. The computer lived in Daniel’s room. Daniel also lived in Daniel’s room, quite literally holed up for days at a time.
He ran some cool projects: an anime upload site that generated income from Google (eventually shut down by a cease and desist order) and hosting / administrating his own private Ragnarok Online server, a massive online role playing game.
One weekend, the family planned a nice camping trip. Daniel didn’t want to go outside, given computer related commitments. My dad locked up Daniel’s computer in a fit of rage. Daniel matched Dad’s rage in the only way a high school kid can: he escaped the house on his Target bicycle. We cancelled the camping trip.
My brother now works as a Senior Data Engineer at Strava, the number 1 mobile app for tracking physical activity, from bike rides and ski runs to runs and stand-up paddle boarding.
Daniel went from literally running away from the outdoors to running outdoors at a rate most people would consider crazy.
At Strava, he’s surrounded by a bunch of other people with extreme fitness goals, bordering addiction (this is actually a thing). Every Wednesday, they do interval runs from their San Francisco office, 20+ Strava people doing a highly intensive workout together.
Most things look crazy until you find a peer group or a few people that normalize it. This can be making music while juggling a full-time job, training to bike across the lower 48 states, working towards the 1000 pound power lift club, surgeons training for a full ironman, or people who juggle operating and leading two companies.
So, what looks insane but might be something you want to work towards? Find those crazy peers and surround yourself with them. It eventually looks normal to you.
Daniel is finally rubbing off on me, so I’m attempting my first marathon this year with him. I still think he’s crazy.
You can follow him here, he’s working on number 14 this week.
Note: Unfortunately, this effect works in the negative direction–surrounding yourself with people who have normalized drinking a bottle of whiskey every Thursday might make it seem normal to you.