People who are already over 100 and 200 miles for the year?!

I will make the general point explicitly: people who decide to engage in an activity daily (especially a skill-building activity, though that is not under discussion here) and use their time efficiently in such pursuit are not nuts, psychos, skimping on their family's needs, have issues, and so forth, as this and another recent thread implied. I regret that Go the Distance should inspire such a conversation. As the poster who first used the term "nutcase" here, as in "our nutcases vs. your nutcases", I sincerely meant this in a jocular tone. A teammate here in Western PA, for what it's worth, did coin a phrase to describe my manner: "inappropriate jocularity." Oh, the sting of recognition! The point being that I am no stranger to my words being construed (not necessarily miscontrued, which implies the recipient, not the sender, is at fault!) in a way that is different from my intent. Lord knows I have suffered sufficient pyschiatric woes of multiple varieties that I'd never want to use "nut" in a stigmatizing fashion! Moreover, I know for certain that John K's yards are as sound as the pound. All this said, whenever you get to the extremes of any Bell-Shaped Distribution of human performance, you are--by definition--entering the realm of the abnormal. This doesn't mean there's anything wrong, but it doesn't mean that everything is 100 percent guaranteed to be wonderful, inspirational, and the like. The world's tallest person. The world's smartest person. The world's fastest backwards runner. The world's richest person. I would argue that extreme accomplishment and/or extreme physiological attributes increase the odds (though doesn't guarantee it) of some compensatory abnormality in other aspects of that person's life. My first comment was in response that some OW swimmers, when the ocean proves inhospitable, will pop off a 20-mile swim in the pool. I still think this is fishy, so to speak--not that it's impossible to do, for surely it is. But that a person who would do this regularly is, by necessity, allocating less of his or her resources to other life demands, upping the odds (though again not guaranteeing it) of a somewhat unbalanced life. I think if you were to ask John K., he would freely concede a tincture of obsessiveness in his nature, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a thing.

I will make the general point explicitly: people who decide to engage in an activity daily (especially a skill-building activity, though that is not under discussion here) and use their time efficiently in such pursuit are not nuts, psychos, skimping on their family's needs, have issues, and so forth, as this and another recent thread implied. I regret that Go the Distance should inspire such a conversation. As the poster who first used the term "nutcase" here, as in "our nutcases vs. your nutcases", I sincerely meant this in a jocular tone. A teammate here in Western PA, for what it's worth, did coin a phrase to describe my manner: "inappropriate jocularity." Oh, the sting of recognition! The point being that I am no stranger to my words being construed (not necessarily miscontrued, which implies the recipient, not the sender, is at fault!) in a way that is different from my intent. Lord knows I have suffered sufficient pyschiatric woes of multiple varieties that I'd never want to use "nut" in a stigmatizing fashion! Moreover, I know for certain that John K's yards are as sound as the pound. All this said, whenever you get to the extremes of any Bell-Shaped Distribution of human performance, you are--by definition--entering the realm of the abnormal. This doesn't mean there's anything wrong, but it doesn't mean that everything is 100 percent guaranteed to be wonderful, inspirational, and the like. The world's tallest person. The world's smartest person. The world's fastest backwards runner. The world's richest person. I would argue that extreme accomplishment and/or extreme physiological attributes increase the odds (though doesn't guarantee it) of some compensatory abnormality in other aspects of that person's life. My first comment was in response that some OW swimmers, when the ocean proves inhospitable, will pop off a 20-mile swim in the pool. I still think this is fishy, so to speak--not that it's impossible to do, for surely it is. But that a person who would do this regularly is, by necessity, allocating less of his or her resources to other life demands, upping the odds (though again not guaranteeing it) of a somewhat unbalanced life. I think if you were to ask John K., he would freely concede a tincture of obsessiveness in his nature, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a thing.