[dicktalens]

>Are they really that set apart from the rest of the population and that similar to one another?

Yes. :) Lifestyle is one of the biggest factors into fitness regimen fit. The lifestyle of folks who work in tech/startups, especially with regards to variability, tend to be far different than your average working Joe.

[EnderMB]

But is it REALLY that different to a lot of office workers? Developers and startup types like to think that they are unique in having work hard for long periods of time, but they really aren't. Junior Lawyers work long hours, apprenticeship labourers work long hours, anyone involved in the creative process for digital agencies work long hours, teachers that are starting out work long hours. It's really no different to those careers, and they all seem to manage to exercise and have some form of social life just fine.

My first job was a startup, and the hours weren't much different to working in an agency (where I work now). I still manage to go to the gym three days a week, and I manage to get a run in every week.

[jc4p]

So I clearly don't know you or what you do, but ou're definitely not wrong in the general sense.

However, Dick and I spent the last year working 60-80+ hour weeks while our company was stationed out of a pretty big coworking space. I can tell you that in our time there, I only saw a single person out of the (what must be at least several hundreds of other people) peers sharing our space with us at the gym, where as Dick and I went at least 3x a week every week.

I also lost 60lb while working more than I've ever worked in my life (by following Dick's program) and here's the punchline: 20lb of that was the weight I gained from my last start-up job.

I think the issue is the exact mindset Dick wrote about, of having to "pay off your credit card" by going and running hours and hours after eating badly (a mindset that I still default to sometimes and have to try really hard to stop myself from doing) makes it so that people who are already insanely stressed eventually just give up and decide to go into a default instead of "paying off their card", so to speak.

P.S. There's already been some lawyers, creative agency folks, and people from big government funded organizations applying to take part in the course, I think the difference between what they saw on the page versus what you saw on the page is that they (correctly) assumed being "in tech" meant "work really long hours" to the people that wrote the page versus "do you work at a company that has an AngelList page".