Friday Blues

After several rounds with my advisor, we've gotten to a state where we're both happy enough with my results to publish. This is good because I'd like to have a paper submitted, preferably accepted, before I start applying for jobs. I am presently doing the literature search I should have done before I started this project.  Why, you might ask, did I embark on this ass-backwards approach to things?  The answer is as follows:

1. My advisor gave me a minimal energy problem to work on.  After realizing that direct approaches weren't going to work, we opted to exploit a connection between minimal energy problems and potential theory.
2. "It's easy!" he said, "You just normalize like this and take a limit like that!"  One year later, I've become convinced that the first statement is false and the second is more or less true.  Potential theory, it turns out, can be technical. 
3. Since my potential theory result seemed significant in its own right, my advisor suggested we publish. (This was not the plan from the get-go.)  So now I'm doing what I should have done at the start, which is making sure that this work hasn't been done already, hence the literature search.
   

So I'm digging through papers and books mostly written by Russians in the late sixties and early seventies.  It makes me think of watching the Olympics as a kid.  The event was wrestling, and there was an interview with a Soviet athlete from Siberia.  "How do you train?" asked the reporter.  A man who looked like he could throw cars starts speaking in russian.  The translation is provided in a voice-over.  "He gets up at six, eats a loaf of bread, five eggs, and a chicken. After tea, he carries anvils for his father. He then goes to the gymnasium and trains with the team. In the afternoon he spends three hours running through waist-deep snow to help maintain his fitness."

When I read these papers and books, I can't shake the image of huge, hulking men running through waist-deep snow while working through exceptionally technical mathematics.  I on the other hand feel remarkably soft and ill-prepared to compete in an environment such as this. How can people learn so much in a lifetime?  Where do these people study? There is only one professor I know of who seems to have a handle on this material. What exactly am I going to do as a mathematician?