This is straight gold, love the insider perspective! He has an incredibly mature stance on training and competition. I especially liked the bit about motivation, and the bit where he implies everyone is cargo-culting a little bit.
Are elite athletes the same as us or fundamentally different? Thats the mystery at the heart of celebrity. And this guy splits the difference about as well as I've ever read.
That's an interesting question. I've never found an activity I could spend that much time on, besides perhaps playing computer games when I was a kid, but even that I would get tired of sometimes.
I don't think these people are fundamentally, orthogonality, different, but I assume they are outliers on some spectrum of features where most people are closer to the median.
Are elite athletes the same as us or fundamentally different? Thats the mystery at the heart of celebrity. And this guy splits the difference about as well as I've ever read.