"The only side effect of too much training is that you get into better shape. There is nothing wrong with that"
About this Quote
Spitz frames discipline as a kind of harmless addiction, and that’s the sly power move in the line: he takes the language people use to warn you off extremes and flips it into a dare. “Side effect” usually belongs to pills and consequences, to the fine print of choices you’re not fully controlling. Training, in this framing, is the opposite: controllable, cumulative, self-authored. The joke lands because it’s half true and half provocation. Anyone who’s trained hard knows there are plenty of real side effects - fatigue, boredom, injury, the way life narrows around a schedule - but Spitz isn’t being literal. He’s staking out an athlete’s worldview where discomfort is reframed as evidence of progress.
The subtext is competitive, even when it sounds casual. “There is nothing wrong with that” reads like permission, but it’s also a quiet dismissal of excuses. If the worst thing that happens is you get better, why wouldn’t you push? Coming from Spitz, it carries the confidence of someone who lived at the edge of what “too much” looked like - the 1972 Olympics, seven golds, a public image built on relentlessness. In that era especially, training was becoming both more scientific and more mythologized; the modern athlete was turning into a full-time project.
The line works because it sells a fantasy of clean cause-and-effect: effort in, improvement out. It’s motivational, sure, but it’s also cultural branding - the idea that excellence doesn’t just require work, it requires loving the work enough to call the costs “nothing wrong.”
The subtext is competitive, even when it sounds casual. “There is nothing wrong with that” reads like permission, but it’s also a quiet dismissal of excuses. If the worst thing that happens is you get better, why wouldn’t you push? Coming from Spitz, it carries the confidence of someone who lived at the edge of what “too much” looked like - the 1972 Olympics, seven golds, a public image built on relentlessness. In that era especially, training was becoming both more scientific and more mythologized; the modern athlete was turning into a full-time project.
The line works because it sells a fantasy of clean cause-and-effect: effort in, improvement out. It’s motivational, sure, but it’s also cultural branding - the idea that excellence doesn’t just require work, it requires loving the work enough to call the costs “nothing wrong.”
Quote Details
| Topic | Training & Practice |
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