Ruthless
People do not understand the full utility of ruthlessness when it comes to winning, and last week they got a demonstration they didn't want.
On Saturday, at the Beijing Hyrox, Joanna Wietrzyk lost control of her bowels somewhere in the middle of the women's pro race. You've seen the memes, you laughed, we all did. She didn't stop, which was unfortunate for anyone following her, and since she finished in 1:01:23 and won, almost everyone was following her. She holds the women's world record. As of this week she has moved beyond a localized meme and become the poster child for a humiliating existence. People look at her and feel embarrassed for her, or disgusted by her, but in either scenario, she is the exact mirror we need to recognize what is actually worth being embarrassed about.
Most of the outrage is warranted because it's about hygiene. This is an organization that would DQ you outright for spitting on the floor and it let Joanna run four more kilometers on a shared carpet with feces on her legs while nobody intervened. That is strange. But there is another aspect to this that bothers me more, and that is the confident voice of the mediocre that have never pushed themselves physically, let alone past a comment section.
Despite what people joke about, Hyrox is a serious competition. Yes, they make their money off people who jog as a max effort, and their brand looks like it was invented by a burned-out German raver, but at the top of the Hyrox food chain what these athletes are doing is astounding. I've had the annoying pleasure of training with a few top 10 Hyrox athletes and their level of fitness is unnerving. I thought we were doing the same thing until I tried to hold their pace. The delusion comes from people who are technically in the same race and have no idea they are not doing the same race.
For everyone commenting but will never experience physical hardship, here is what a body is doing at that pace. Under hard sustained effort the circulatory system triages: blood leaves the gut and goes to the working muscle and the skin for cooling, and the intestinal lining. Starved of blood, the gut shunts and starts to fail. Fluid pours in, motility goes haywire, the barrier gets leaky, and somewhere in the sixth or seventh kilometer, or when fluid is added under too much intensity, the sphincter, which is a muscle like any other, gets tired of holding a position. Studies put gut distress somewhere between a third and a half of endurance athletes. It happens commonly with triathletes, marathoners, and ultra runners. It is not a hygiene failure or a lapse in character. It is the body doing what it can to obey the mind. The people in the comments have never run hard enough for their body to be forced to choose, which is exactly why they think it is a choice.
It is gross, the fact that the average person has no idea what the physical and mental ability is required for winning. The most disgusting thing about this whole episode is that the person sneering at a one-percent athlete's bad day couldn't even finish a Hyrox. The average contestant slugs it out for somewhere between 90 and 110 minutes, walks the table with the refreshments, posts the candid finish photo so everyone in the office can see how active he is, and then takes to the comments about a pro losing her bowels because he's an athlete too and he didn't have to shit himself. No kidding. When you take exactly twice as long, nobody is surprised about your lack of difficulty. That is the disconnect. Very few people will ever understand the mental state required to escape the average.
Discomfort is home to her. The people wondering why she didn't stop should acknowledge that they stop at the first inconvenience and have quit almost every endeavor they ever started. They are shocked because the people are not quitters. To perform at the highest level you have to be willing to sacrifice your well-being, your health, and for certain your sense of comfort. Your performance is a measurement of your intolerance: what you label as difficult makes anything more difficult unbearable, and the average person gets more thrill waxing about their hardship than trying to endure more of it.
Most people hear the word ruthless and aim it at the other competitors. At the top of your game the ruthlessness is most often directed inward. This was hard for me to fathom, because I'd first assumed proving yourself the best is an egotistical pursuit, one admittedly fueled by insecurity. I was baffled at how she managed the embarrassment, until I realized she'd already made losing the most embarrassing act of her life. Winners don't love winning. They hate losing. Someone with that much control over her mind can forgivably lose control of other faculties that were never aimed at winning.
She said as much, at first. After the race she posted a selfie from what looked like a hospital bed with the caption "Go hard or go home… a win is a win." Then she deleted it. Then the co-founder of Hyrox apologized on her behalf and rewrote the rulebook so that race directors can now pull an athlete for blood, vomit, urine or feces and record her as a DNF. Then she apologized herself, said she regretted not stepping off the track, and asked to retroactively withdraw from a race she had already won and forfeit the points. A world-record holder was shamed into un-winning. "A win is a win" lasted about a day against the internet, which tells you which of the two is the stronger competitor.
Within the same fortnight, Sydney Sweeney was condemned by female athletes for using her good looks to sell a sports betting app. So the public found a way, inside seven days, to be disgusted by extraordinary beauty and by the gastrointestinal side effect of extraordinary female performance. The point is that we hate anything that isn't average, and that, to me, is what's actually fucking gross. We mock the side effects of human potential because we can't identify its ingredients.
I keep thinking about the biography of Chung Ju-Yung, the founder of Hyundai. He tried his best to describe the poverty he came from when it isn’t just about a lack of money and landed on this: when he was at school as a young boy and felt the need to relieve himself, he would run home and defecate in a bucket, because they needed their human waste to grow their food, and without it they would likely starve. That was not so long ago. Our incontinence will one day be the least of our worries.
Hyrox's first statement, before the apology, said this: "We ask our athletes to push themselves to the highest levels. At times, they will go beyond what even we thought was possible." If that was a true sentence then their apologies needed to be aimed at Joanna who too their word for it. They retracted it within forty-eight hours, because the people who pay them are the ones who will never find out what that feels like.
