“…It’s hard to understand. All I know is that you’ve got to run. Run without knowing why, through fields and woods, and the winning post is no end, even though balmy crowds might be cheering themselves daft. That’s what the loneliness of the long-distance runner feels like.”
I happen to be training for my third marathon. I love running for a bunch of different reasons. One of them is that it has a lot of parallels with investing. It doesn't really matter how well or how much you've trained so far if you take a single catastrophic wrong step, fall, and get injured; it's all over.
The most important thing is to stay in the game. The most important step is the step you are taking right now. For improving aerobic capacity and preserving wealth, the strategies that work are usually the least interesting. A lot of "volume" below the lactate threshold, and dollar-cost averaging into ETFs.
There's also "inflation" in running fitness. It's extremely frustrating to return to running after sickness and realize you've lost a month of progress in less than a week. To realize you are Sisyphus after all. But it's a great reminder that you must fight entropy. That you must rage against the dying of the light.
And finally, it doesn't get any easier. You gain speed and metabolic efficiency, but lactate accumulating in your bloodstream never stops hurting.