Endurance as a Distraction

According to my extremely rough figures after a quick google search. Around 4.41 billion people play sport on planet earth. That is well over half of our 7.67 billion population. Good job earthlings! They say only the 1% of the 1% actually get paid to play sport at the top level (again, these are rough figures). One percent of 4.41 billion is 44,100,000, that is fourty-four milllion, one hundred thousand and 1% of that is 440,000. That still seems like a lot to me but relax for a second.
If you are not one of the 440,000 that gets paid to play sport, you are using sport as a distraction. Definition of distraction, a thing that prevents someone from concentrating on something else. We do hobbies to take our mind off work, life, home, stress. People also drink alcohol and eat shit food to do the same. I want to make this very clear, doing sport as your distraction is in most cases far healthier than most other options!
But when does it become unhealthy to use sport as a distraction? and in particular endurance sport. I am writing about endurance sport for two reasons, 1) it is what I know and 2) it is probably the sport most abused for distraction.
The benefits to endurance sport are in my eyes, endless. Day to day we (at InnerFight Endurance) use endurance sport to make people better at life. We in still self-belief, we empower, we dig out true potential, we discover grit in all our athletes. They then take those new found traits and go smash life with it, it’s why we have the best job in the world. Like all good things though, these trainable traits can be addictive. How good does it feel to cross that finish line and be the most confident person in the world for a few seconds? It’s epic. But do we get it each time we cross a finish line? No… only when it’s gone really well. The more we race, the more chance we have to go wrong, that is just statistics… but we also have more chance to go right… now we are gambling.
Here are some more stats for you; World gambling statistics show that around 26% of the population gamble. That means around 1.6 billion people worldwide gamble and 4.2 billion people gamble at least once every year. The average US gambler loses $400 every year.
So when we enter event after event after event, or set big goal after big goal after big goal… we are gambling. The reward is self-beleif, empowerment, potential realisation and grit, the punishment is the loss of them all.
So endurance sport should be used wisely, we want to load the odds into our favour. It’s why we have training blocks, coaches to help us and better equipment year on year. So we aren’t like those average US gamblers.
If we just enter things to distract ourselves from life and not pay attention to the odds, you are going to fail at some point. You will get injured or burnt out because you don’t care about the process, you just want the thrill of the gamble…
I’d love to help you figure out your odds.