The question of consequences is real. I graduated in 2008 at the beginning of the great recession, and I watched some of my classmates go off and do startups. I asked them 'Dude, what if you fail?!' and one of them just shrugged his shoulders and said he'd move back home with his parents, and get a job at his dad's company. No big deal.

That's when I realized it was much easier to take those risks when you knew you had a safety net to fall back on and you didn't have to worry about winding up homeless sleeping under an overpass.

> If failure means you lose your one chance in your life of completing a marathon, be conservative

Strongly disagree here. There are many marathons. Push yourself as hard as you can. Worst case, you miss and can’t attempt again. But you had fun and have plenty of other things you can do with your time and physique.

This is pretty much the framework I teach admins at work:

- What impact does the change have?

- How do you get out of that change, and how long does that take?

- And what is your confidence into the change, and the bail-out plan?

And honestly, if you have a high-confidence, fast bailout plan, you can be downright brazen/#yolo about changes. We've recently had to update a central and critical IDP, but we eventually realized: We have the old docker images, and it has a 200MB sized DB. We can dump + restore that in 2 minutes. So if the upgrade goes wrong, we have high confidence to rollback in like 5 minutes. At such a point.. why not just go with it?

Similar things are developing with Postgres upgrades. Setup 1 leader + 3 replicas, upgrade 2 replicas, failover, see how much explodes and at worst, fall back. If we can test beforehand, alright.

Other teams plan complicated upgrades requiring coordinated actions of 6 other teams. And like 3 know how to possibly take back that change? And like 4 know what to actually do? Ugh, this ended up in a fun weekend.

> If the difference between failing and succeeding is minimal in your life, burn the bridges!

The author’s analogy was about burning ships, not bridges, but your quote about burning bridges reminds me of related scenario I’m seeing more frequently among young people I’ve mentored: The idea that burning bridges is not a big deal because there are always more opportunities.

I’m in a big Slack where people come to ask for advice on tech careers. An alarming number of questions in recent years are from people who want to leave their jobs with a bang: Quitting without notice, intentionally making things difficult for their successor, unloading their grievances with specific people as they leave, posting big angry messages on the company Slack on their last day, and other ill-advised ideas.

They’re always disappointed when the Slack unanimously tells them it’s a bad idea to intentionally burn bridges like that. I guess it’s not until later in your career that you realize the value of being able to call on old managers and coworkers for referrals or job opportunities. They see leaving a job as the last time they’ll ever see any of those people. We have to remind them every time that networking is important and therefore they don’t want to leave a lasting negative impression on a place where they spent years building a reputation. Just do your two weeks notice and quietly exit.

Tangential, but it comes up enough in these scenarios about taking on new risks that I thought I’d mention it.

But if the difference is minimal, does it really qualify as failure?

Yet many people attempt K2 summit knowing the probabilities of death. Homelessness pales in comparison to death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jw8GHgyiqw

yeah, getting people to think through consequences is like pulling teeth.

I think failure at a marathon can involve death.

I agree. Fail only applies when talking about losing your ability to house, cloth, and feed yourself (and your family). Otherwise, it is just play-acting at failure.

"Fail" is by definition to be unsuccessful on one's goal.

It can literally mean my cake burned in the oven or my company loses millions of dollars.

Consequences are irrelevant.

I interpreted the "spectacular" part of the fail a bit differently.

The author had options to either 1) try for right at 3 hours, and either succeed or fail, or 2) push harder, get a much better time, and perhaps succeed but risk putting himself in a state where he did not finish at all. The failure to finish at all due to the extra reach is the spectacular fail referred to.

> I think people are using the word "fail" a little too much.

The issue is when it's combined with "spectacularly".

As in: "I spectacularly failed at boiling my eggs. I let them boil for 7 minutes instead of 6 minutes 30. What a spectacular fail".

But nobody gives a flying f--k about my failed eggs.

Good suggestion. I think that my pre-race fueling strategy was better than previous races, but certainly lots of room for further improvement!

Shout out for Slow Horses, one of the best shows on TV.

      “So you're in charge of the rejects.” 
   “They don't like being called that.” 
      “What do you call them?” 
   “The rejects.” -- Jackson Lamb

I appreciate the kind words! Best of luck on your leap of faith -- it takes courage to attempt it in the first place!

Was your path towards the decision point a sudden one or a slow burn?

A British Olympian recently performed this feat despite having a stress fracture in her hip: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0kj07d5gmzo

Some people seem to be built differently!

Cool, now I just need to run one 20 minute 5k and I'll be on track!

> The greats are great because they enjoy the activity and would probably be doing it if no one was around or cared that they were

That's not true. Enjoyment of the game got them there, but succeeding at anything often requires long periods of bleeding for it every day. Amateurs wait for inspiration, professionals show up to the studio and work.

Furthermore, with running suffering is an inescapable part of it. On some days, it hurts bad, but on other days it hurts really good. It's a blissful spiritual form of suffering but to get it you have to grind through the bad parts.

"I hated every minute of training, but I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion." - Muhammad Ali

While I agree with the sentiment, I doubt any of the greats would say their achievements hadn't required _some_ sacrifices

Erm, you have to practice, prepare, whatever in order to do anything apart from sitting on the couch. I participate in motor racing, which is about as type 1 fun as it gets. Seriously, racing other people at the limit of your ability for a whole weekend is about as fun as it gets. But goddamn is there a lot of preparation that goes into building the car, wrangling the team, etc, etc. Yea, I like building the car, but I'd be lying if I said I was absolutely stoked about rebuilding two engines that we blew up in the last race. And all this stuff takes time, and that time has to come from somewhere, which is a sacrifice.

It's amusing how much discussion this provoked. Does anyone here actually run? There is plenty you have to decide whether to sacrifice or not and consequences of that. He's talking about a margin of 34 seconds over the course of nearly 3 hours.

I enjoy the fuck out of running and don't even compete, but it's still something you think about all the time. What sacrifices do I make and which do I not? I'll give you examples. I wake up between 3 to 4 AM every morning to run. I enjoy it. I'm a natural morning person. This isn't some CEO grindset. But it entails not being to do other things that involve staying up late or going out. That's fine for where I am in my life right now. I doubt I'd have done it in my early 20s when I had more of a night-oriented social life.

I prepare all my own food and weigh and measure everything I eat. I also weigh myself each morning. This allows me to enter everything into a logging app that estimates TDEE and gives you a target. I can't say for sure this is absolutely necessary, but I don't do it universally 100% of the time, and when I'm home I tend to gradually lose a bit of weight because I'm not eating enough. When I'm traveling and eating out, I tend to gradually gain a bit of weight. So it seems that sticking to the strict tracking as often as I can is the best way to go. I enjoy this as well. I have no problem with it. But it means I don't eat out much and prepare everything from raw ingredients so the estimates are actually accurate. That sacrifices convenience.

There are other sports I enjoy. I lift weight. I rock climb. I surf and skateboard. Every minute spent training to run is a minute I could spent training for another sport. In the lifting case, at a high enough volume aerobic training and trying to gain muscle pretty directly conflict with each other. It's not realistic to expect any particularly high volume of leg work in particular. I'm sacrificing squat performance for sure to be better at running.

What am I not sacrificing? Well, I still travel. I still go off script for a few weeks here and there. I don't try to stick to either a diet plan or a training plan when on vacation. I still run and eat reasonably good foods, but I have no doubt I'd perform better if I never let up at all. To me, this isn't worth it. But if I cared badly about qualifying for a world major and was 34 seconds off, maybe I would.

Nobody is saying you need to sacrifice joy or fun. But you have finite hours in the day and your body has a finite capacity for recovery and training adaptation. Every bit of effort you devote to running is a bit that could have been something else.

> The greats are great because they enjoy the activity and would probably be doing it if no one was around or cared that they were. Do it for the fun, not the glory

Dude is aiming for a 3h marathon so he’s already there purely for fun. The greats are pulling 2:01 marathons these days.

And while Phelps was certainly a great, I doubt he would’ve spent 6 hours per day training like a maniac if he was just swimming for fun. That’s a lot of hard work.

This sounds like "they're successful because it's easy for them."

Boston keeps a table of qualifying times that need to be hit. But it's such a popular race, that people train to hit that qualifying time, and they end up with too many runners. The solution is to use a cut-off time to adjust all of the qualifying times. As an example, an 18-34 year old male had a qualifying time of 3 hours exactly for the 2025 Marathon (which qualification ended for last month). The cut-off time required athletes to be 6 minutes and 51 seconds faster than the qualifying time for their age group and gender. So qualification was actually 2:53:09, but no one knew that when they were running. (Next year they've adjusted the times all down 5 minutes to compensate, though they'll likely have around a 2 minute cut off, since the times have been getting faster.)

https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/qualify

They call that a "BQ" or Boston Qualified.

But it actually doesn't guarantee you entry because for that age group (Male 18 - 30?) there ends up being too many qualified entrants so they have to shave down the actual time required for entry.

When I was running, it was 3:05 for example but you had to run a <3:03 to make it in.

There is no way to spectacularly fail a marathon. Hell even if you didn't finish in the alloted time you still did something healthy.

The author is just trying to inflate his personal goal, to achieve some self set time, big enough so he can turn it into a self serving post that he can post to HN.

I don't really blame the author to be fair, nowadays this is kinda the thing people do, but I do get tired of the constant hyperbole.

It’s spectacularly failing at his goal of under 3 hours. It’s not an objective, absolute measure. It’s a subjective, relative one. I’m guessing he’d consider finishing with a time of 3:15 a spectacular failure.

Spontaneous combustion, for sure

There is a disconnect between what most people imagine spectacular failure to be (probably something publicly humiliating and/or financially ruinous) and this, where even a spectacular failure when running a marathon wouldn't be noticed unless you told other people about it.

It is all about variance. Higher variance activities have both more potential upside and more potential downside. Risk management is all about figuring out how to improve average upside. In investment, that probably means placing a variety of bets. In one's personal life, nearly everyone I know has a story about how they benefited from being talked into trying something they wouldn't have otherwise presumed interest in. Be that a hobby, a blind date, a job, going to talk/meetup. Even just listening to a song/album.

"Oh that's a cool bird in that tree. Dang, they have an odd gait. Would my shoes have been 20% off at that other place? Oh I forgot to get shampoo at the store today."

"Oh wow, the race is done. Fancy that"

Succeeding boringly?

survival is overrated

Ahh failing upwards - seeing this concept up close and so often early in my career really messed with my head.

Now that's one way to counteract the Peter Principle!