Tuesday Cannon Fodder: you are not a professional athlete

Every so often a tweet goes viral from some regular person who isn’t a professional athlete but thinks they could accomplish something on the field against one. Those tweets have included hit a home run in 20 at-bats, return a Serena Williams serve, score 10 points in an NBA game, convert a penalty kick, and so on.

Today, some human was spewing nonsense about how they did a bunch of long-distance running to stay in shape and from that experience, they cannot understand how professional footballers get tired during matches. They concluded that it must be because the players are lazy and don’t value / care enough about the team, because fitness is easy.

Let’s put aside the clear logical fallacy that going for a run in the morning or the evening or whenever you put on your ASICS and take a jog around the neighborhood is anything resembling the physical exertion of running in a football match. It is nothing like it. You get zero insight into the requisite levels of physical fitness for a footballer by running four times a week. And in football, on top of the running, you’ve got to do other things as well.

At the most basic level, all those scenarios are ridiculous. When one of those types of tweets goes viral, we all need reminding: we are not professional athletes. We cannot compete with them on the field. Full stop. It doesn’t matter how many times we were named to the local paper’s team of the year in high school.

Bear with me. Think about the best athlete you personally knew growing up / in college. How outclassed were you by them back then? Odds are, from a strictly numbers-based perspective, that person is not a professional athlete. If you couldn’t keep up with them, why do you think you could hold a candle to someone from an even narrower pyramid with years more athletic training?

My goodness, y’all. For all our sakes, please stop thinking you can keep up with pro athletes. Or don’t - it gives me something to laugh and write about. But you can’t hang with ‘em.