Today may be one of the most bizarre videos I've done yet. And no, I'm not planning on becoming a streamer on Twitch, where I'm going to be playing games, but we are going to talk about Elden Ring and I want to talk about how Elden Ring has become a waypoint for me, and it's made me a better runner.
If you love Elden Ring but you don't love running, this is probably not the channel for you. But if you're thinking about getting into running or you love Elden Ring and you love running or you love games and you love running or you just love running, you should subscribe. Stick around. More episodes come out every Tuesday and Thursday of this show I call Runner's High. I'm Jesse Funk your host, and I've been running for nearly 20 years and for that amount of time and even longer, I've also been playing video games.
Now, if you aren't familiar somehow with Elden Ring and you're on this video, where have you been? Elden Ring is already the best selling game of 2022, and I am at this point as I shoot this video about 30 hours into the game. I can't be super super heavy is like Twitch streamers are but I get in my time. So how does Elden ring play into running? When I told my wife I was going to shoot this video, she went, What? Like, how could that possibly help you be a better runner?
But the thing is that there are a lot of life lessons to learn from Elden Ring and the other Fromsoftware game that I played recently, Sekiro. I guess not recently, but I've got about 100 hours logged in, Sekiro of being it twice now. There's a lot of things you can learn from them. You can apply to life and running in particular. So let's get into the thick of it.
Number one and what hopefully is the most obvious thing is patience. For the love of everything good, you have to be patient. Elden Ring and all the Fromsoftware games like Sekiro The Dark Souls series. They test your patience because they drop you into this brutally difficult game. If you've never played any of their kind of series before and they don't give you much information about what to do, it seems simple, right? You usually have some kind of weapon. You try to beat up baddies. Improve your stats, move on in the world, follow the storyline, whatever it is.
It's the same thing with running, right? It seems simple. I've got some shoes, got my shorts, my shirt on. I'm going to go out and run. And on the surface, it is simple, but both under the surface get very complicated very quickly if you want to maximize your skills and you want to maximize in the case of running speed, because you don't have a lot of hand-holding, you don't have somebody unless maybe you hire a coach, you don't have somebody to help you give you the tutorial on how to get this done.
I guess that's why you're here if you love running. So subscribe I can be your tutorial to running and just like you may get on YouTube and try to find tips and tricks from other people when you want to get better at Elden Ring. So patience is number one. You've got to be patient if you want to get better at both the game and at running.
Number two is experiment and learn from failure. So if you've played this game or any of them Fromsoftware's games, you know you're going to die. Your character is going to die. I don't know how many times, but over and over and over. It's simply part of the experience. And although you are hopefully not going to die in real life because you don't get another try, you are going to fail at running. You're going to fail by probably getting injured. If you're trying too hard at some point, you're going to fail by not pacing properly. You're going to fail all over the place.
But what we can learn from Elden Ring and Fromsoftware's games is that failure is feedback. It's not the end, right? When you die. Yeah, maybe you lost your runes. Or in Sekiro's case, maybe there's some unseen aid. You know, you failed, but it wasn't too bad. You know, you got away with it. It is feedback. It's something to learn from. So when you try something, it doesn't work or it fails spectacularly great.
You learn one thing that doesn't work. Don't do that again. It's the same with running. It's it's a long term endeavor where you need patience, the number one, and you need to experiment and fail with some of the things that are going to work for you that may not work for somebody else and vice versa.
So that actually leads me to number three and that is ask for help when you need it, because these games are so brutally difficult. You probably look for a walkthrough at some point, right? Unless you're a professional. You probably if you're a casual gamer like me, you're going to need some help at some point. You need a little hint. That's what I do about running here on this channel, and that's what other people do for these games. They help you when you need it. You go and look up a guide because we are not. No one is the saying no man is an island unto himself, right? That means that we are a conglomerate of knowledge.
We as in humanity, we share knowledge with each other so that we can help each other get faster. Think about the extreme example. Let's suggest that you are born into this world. You can learn nothing from anybody, and then you just have to figure it all out. How much time would you spend trying to invent the wheel? We are a collection of knowledge and the same thing goes with the game as it is from running.
There is a collection of knowledge about this game or the series of games that Fromsoftware makes, like Elden Ring that follow kind of similar format. There are always little tweaks, little changes, but you ask for help when you need it. You go to YouTube, you look up a tutorial, and that helps you get past something where you're stuck.
The same thing with running, so you're stuck at a certain speed. You can't get faster or you don't know what you're doing wrong. What should you do next? You can't find the right shoe. You're getting injured doing this thing. You ask for help. You come to somebody like me, you leave a comment down below asking questions or you look for a video.
You ask for help because where you may be inexperienced, somebody else like me and running, or all of the different streamers and gamers for Elden Ring, they may have a wealth of knowledge that they can share with you and make the process easier.
Number four is that the reality that this game and running are sometimes just a grind interspersed with a little bit of fun here and there. In the game, you may be forming runes, or that means you're doing any number of things. You've looked up a guide, you've asked for help. Where can I farm? Four rooms and you're just going over and over killing these bad guys one by one to collect the runes you can level up. Similarly with running, maybe you are farming runes. By going on a long run, you need to improve your aerobic capacity. You're trying to level up your physicality.
That means that you've got to spend time grinding, doing those long runs, putting the mileage in, putting the time in. And it doesn't necessarily mean that every single moment is going to be fun, but there is a point where maybe you've killed all those baddies over and over and over. You collected all your ruins, you've leveled up, and then you get this really cool moment of discovery. It's the same thing with running. You put in all those miles, you improve aerobically and over time you get better.
And then you notice all of a sudden all my times are dropping. Oh, I felt really great today. And you have this moment where you go, Yes, that was all worth it. All that time I spent was worth it. So you embrace the grind, you know that it's simply part of the process. If I want to get better, maybe I like Elden Ring and Sekiro and the Fromsoftware games because they are similar to running in many ways. They are similar to the challenges that life presents us because they are brutally difficult for anybody that's not a pro level gamer. They are more similar to the reality of life than many games that give you fast feedback and handhold you through the process.
I think if we think about the skills we can learn from games like Elden Ring and we apply them to our lives. Not only are we able to enjoy our entertainment time, but then we can also enjoy the fruits of our labor. We are running or whatever it is you want to apply it to in life. So do you have any thoughts on this video today? Do you have any other things you think that Elden Ring maybe can teach you about running? Leave in the comments below. I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'll see you next time on the next episode of Runner's High.