Colin Hamilton's Blog

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2024-02-12 23:00:02

The thought came to my mind that it really doesn’t seem hard to set records for distance running. It’s just a matter of willpower, isn’t it? I wouldn’t need much of a plan to set a new record — all I’d need to do is sprint as fast as I could, all day, every day, indefinitely.

If I feel pain, I can just push through it and keep sprinting. If I get tired, maybe I can eat something or take a short nap, but then I should get right back to sprinting. It’s clear that this is the optimum strategy, right? Time not spent sprinting is time when I could have been sprinting, so I should just avoid ever stopping or slowing down. If I can do that, those records will be mine in no time.

Anyone who knows anything about fitness knows how this will turn out. Even if I could muster that willpower, this strategy still would not make me the longest distance runner in the world. Every minute I spend sprinting inflicts damage on the muscles and tendons in my body. Ordinarily, if the body has a chance to repair that damage, then it can grow stronger and let you run faster and farther. But if I don’t give my body that rest, and I keep sprinting day after day, then the damage will endlessly continue to accumulate. If I’m lucky, I’ll just find myself getting slower and slower. But in all likelihood, I’ll suffer an injury within the first few weeks that will keep me from running altogether. Either way, I’ll be left a long way from any distance records.

This isn’t a fitness blog. This whole thought exercise came from me considering sprints in software. The term “sprint” originated with scrum, and while most teams don’t follow scrum perfectly, the word has become a standard vocabulary word in software project planning. Sprints typically last one or two weeks, during which time developers have a set of goals that they try to accomplish before the end of the sprint.