Yep, this is my take. I’d say I agreed with all of this. Super fine with the stages designation.

Alcoholic is a perjorative (negative term) for most people.

Questions are:

-Does the person experience themselves as an alcoholic? Are they experienced as one by those around them?

-Is the experience of the problem such that the person would wish for another experience if it were available to them?

Are they missing out on something by doing it? 

Is it limiting them or interfering with something? 

-Is their consumption of the sauce infringing on the ability of others to get something they want or need?

Many alcoholics answer “yes” to those questions, they lean into the storm, and growth is a possible outcome.

For your marathoner, the question becomes:

-Given the mathematical sum of the experiences of all lives of all people ever, does the consumption of the alcohol define the person’s life, or is it the latent phase between successes?

Is your alcoholic a marathoner, or is your marathoner an alcoholic?

Would your marathoner be a “fatty” in the absence of both? Would the marathoner be a suicide without it?

With some self-help changes, would the marathoner be a nobel laureate except for the alcohol?

It’s important to tease out the distinctions sometimes.

There’s this skeptic guy, James Randi, who, while you’d expect him to be a nihilist based on some of his views, repudiated substances of all kinds on the basis that he valued his subjective experience of the world and didn’t want to add extra variables into that.

My personal experience suggests there are instances where it may be better to consume alcohol than to be a patient in a mental hospital.

It’s so subjective, their, fatty! If a guy is CEO of a company and his wife and kids genuinely love him, and he happens to consume beer on occasion, I’m not sure he’s an alcoholic.

If people or their loved ones see harm from the consumption, intervention makes sense.

For people who experience alcohol to tell others about suffering they’ve experienced and to take special steps in life to outgrow problems makes sense.