I believe that people have some built-in warnings to keep them from hurting themselves, and it's a cultural pathology to make ignoring those warnings into a virtue. It's one thing to push through pain in an emergency or to increase your capacities, but it's another to keep hurting yourself just to prove that you can.
More about injuries being common at Crossfit.
Here's an example of a workout by Scott Sonnon, who encourages athletic ambition while making serious efforts to keep people from getting injured. This is a free workout he's offering because people need free, useful things when the federal government is semi-shut down.
I generally agree with your sentiments. There is, however, a relatively tricky balance to achieve when attempting to optimize athletic performance.
I think overtraining has become a bit of an epidemic among novice strength trainers, and "less is more" can be a helpful lesson to learn sooner than later... but extreme athletic results often involve extreme training methods. Injury is a line that is always (very) detrimental to cross, but not pushing yourself close to that line can result in you failing to reach full potential.
You could argue that op...
Here's an internal dialogue I just had.
Q: How do we test rationality skills?
A: We haven't come up with a comprehensive test yet.
Q: Maybe we can test some part of rationality?
A: Sure. For example, you could test resistance to akrasia by making two contestants do some simple chores every day. The one who fails first, loses.
Q: That seems like a pointless competition. If I'm feeling competitive, why would I ever skip the chores and lose?
A: Whoa, wait. If competitiveness can cure akrasia, that's pretty cool!
Now we just need to figure out how to make people more competitive in the areas they care about...