Ruthless, a follow-up
I posted the email intro to the last article on social before the article itself, which means most of the people who had an opinion about it read a paragraph, assumed the rest, and decided I'd defended a woman shitting on a carpet because I lack human decency. I probably should have left Mitch out of the intro. Watching the two events unfold in the same week was what made me think about them at all, but on its own the comparison read as a punchline instead of a thought. My fault for not taking the time to explain it properly.
I don't have a stake in defending Joanna Wietrzyk, and it wasn't the point. If you've been here a while you know the topic that most fascinates me is the average person's lack of self-perception. Training is the mechanism I find most useful for examining my own, and the higher you get on the spectrum of human capability, the tighter the lens you get to see yourself through. That isn't always true, but it's true often enough that when an athlete does something abnormal it's worth asking why. What I tried to build was an inspection of the psyche that sets world records, set against the average person who remains complacent but doubly opinionated. I called her a mirror in the first piece, and I think the reaction proved it. Nobody was angry at her. They were angry at what they saw when they looked. I stand by it.
I never claimed she should have been left to race. I tried to establish the frame of mind that wouldn't quit despite dire circumstances, and the gap between the mob trying to lynch her and me trying to understand what makes a person built like that is still the disconnect I care about. But it raises a question I didn't get to. If your position is that she lacked human decency because she failed to recognize the danger she was putting everyone in, and you weren't there, and your entire picture of the event was built from memes, then why do you think no one stopped her? If it was as bad as people are projecting, then either thousands of spectators and dozens of officials tasked with running the event were more morally deficient than the average outspoken commenter, or it was not as bad as the memes made it. It is the organizer's job to make that call, for a breach of rules or for the safety of the other competitors. Nobody made it. The co-founder of Hyrox has already said so himself, that it was his job to foresee the situation and he didn't, which is the blame landing exactly where it belongs. The mob didn't read that either. It still leaves the question: why the fuck didn't anyone say anything?
What the mob did do was enough to work. She apologized, asked to withdraw from a race she had already won, and forfeited the points. A world-record holder was held captive by people who weren't there. That is not a loud crowd, that is a crowd that decides outcomes without effort, and it should worry anyone who wants to do anything abnormal in public.
There's a larger thing under this. The public does not like to know how the sausage is made. You may have noticed, as I have, that people at the top of any endeavor are rarely full of gab about how they got there. We assume it's an industry secret. More often it's that they know the public doesn't want to hear it. How do you get insanely fit and break world records? The people who've done it will all tell you the same thing: get to work, put everything you have into a single task with laser focus, multiply that by a thousand, and then get some luck. I've only talked to a few billionaires in my time but I've talked to many self-made multi-multi-millionaires, and they don't talk about it either, unless they're selling you a course, in which case it's a confabulation of what it actually took. The answer is the same. Give everything to the goal, be ruthless in the pursuit, then hope for some luck. Building something exceptional is more work than any of us wants to realize. I have fallen short of it more times than I like to admit, so when I see someone who can do it I don't go looking for the pretty answers. I look for what they don't talk about, or have been conditioned not to mention. Her bowels were a miscalculation. Her ability to run through it was what caught my attention. That she ignored whatever signals she had, and the embarrassment, to keep going is gross and fundamentally more interesting than a spectator sneering at her while sipping a large soda.
Most of us will seek out what we want in life, at least for a bit. After one to a few attempts, or a few months of "hard work," the average person gives up. Some might say they shit the bed. Nobody holds it against them, because the average person is average for a reason: they have the most in common with most people, and success is not one of the things. As I've said before and plenty of others have too, the average person is broke, fat, and lonely. Escaping that is rare, it is difficult, and apparently it is sometimes gross.
Good writing doesn’t need defending, which is my first tell that the original piece needed more time, or maybe people needed to actually read it first, otherwise I wouldn’t feel compelled to explain myself. Either way, none of these ideas are hardcore belief systems, they change with new information. I’m not saying that reading this would convince you of my idea, but I would be hard pressed that someone could read it thoroughly and think it was a completely absurd idea.
One thing to wrap up. The argument, from the usual suspects who understand that I like to explore ideas, was in good form, they brought clarification or at least nudged where I needed to fill in the gaps. The outrage came from people who don't know me or my background and, on average, hadn't read the article. My fault for talking about a spicy subject. And then the part I didn't expect: the number of private messages I got from high-performing athletes thanking me for the viewpoint. Private. Not one of them said it where the comment section could see, which is the sausage point making itself. The people who know what it takes have learned not to say so out loud. Draw your own conclusions. There is a deep separation between the few who do and the many who watch and comment, and if there was a lesson in this for me, it was simply a reminder of which side I want to be on.
