Triathlon and Coaching Style

We have had this discussion before but it came back after the incident between Alberto Salazar and Steve Magness.  We can speak about Miguel “Piojo” Herrera who coaches the Mexican Soccer Team and appears to be more of a cheerleader than anything else; he lacks knowledge of tactics, lacks knowledge about the game in itself, lacks knowledge about his players; but he is very emotional when speaking and looks like he knows something. Alberto Salazar is a real coach regardless of what he has been accused of.  This accusation brought memories to me:

25 avr. 2012

GREGORY HOUSE, BRUCE MILLER AND THE ART OF TRIATHLON COACHING

Dr. House existed before House.  My ex-supervisor and somebody I consider a friend, Bruce Miller, was the living Dr. House before House. I remember when we were in the elevator at Children´s Hospital of Buffalo, a pregnant lady entered it followed by a little girl holding her hand.  She dropped her keys in the elevator and I tried to get them for her.  Bruce just touched my chest and looked at me. I understood that I should not move.  After the elevator´s door opened and the lady left the elevator, he bent over and got the keys for her.  He just told me:  “You do not know what that lady thinks of you; you are liable.”  I understood the game and made up my mind to move back to Mexico. 

The incident of Salazar is worrisome. It is worrisome because of the intention behind Magness who supposedly practices science.  It is unintelligent to speak about something if there is no proof behind what we say or a formal accusation for the same matter.  I have seen many situation similar to this one when working at a University in the USA.  It is endemic to say the least, but usually it involves somebody with less rank than Alberto.  This is what is called “white privilege.”  Donald Trump is just opening his mouth the same way when speaking about Mexicans.

http://nikeoregonproject.com/blogs/news/35522561-alberto-open-letter-part-1

What we learnt from Alberto’s letter is interesting:

1) Asthma is not as prevalent in runners as in swimmers.  Please see our previous post.

2) Hypothyroidism is higher than we expected in athletes.

I have had patients on thyroid hormone and it is not that impressive looking at metabolism.  My own mother takes thyroid hormone replacement at the age of 95, I keep it within the normal range for an adult, not a geriatric patient (we do not know the normal range for a geriatric patient). She wakes up with a pulse below 70 most of the time; her maximum is around 160 when exercising.

How Salazar ends the letter is very meaningful:

Magness was young and inexperienced when I hired him. He had been an accomplished high school runner and was knowledgeable about the science of running. I thought I could develop him into a quality coach. I was proved wrong. In my view, Magness lacked the personality, inter-personal skills and drive to be able to coach elite athletes. He appeared to be intimidated by them and he retreated. He could not run a practice session by himself. He appeared to be unable to motivate the athletes as they ran or observe them. Ultimately, my top runners refused to work with him. It is important to note that as a coach today, in 3 years of coaching the middle and long distance, men’s and women’s programs at a Division 1 school, Magness has not qualified a single runner for the NCAA Track Championships, Indoor or Outdoor.  

I did not disclose Magness’ contract termination at the time. I wanted him to have an opportunity to learn from his mistakes. I recognized that not everything works out in every position, and you should have a chance to move on. I hoped Magness would be able to do so.

Unfortunately, it is now apparent that Magness has not moved on and seems is willing to make these false statements, say anything, regardless of the truth, and hurt innocent people in order to hurt me.

It is easy to become a cheerleader when you have great players and no so good knowledge.  Martino became a cheerleader when he was coaching the Barcelona Soccer Team.  Do we have cheerleaders-coaches in triathlon? Definitely.  It is difficult to coach Jonathan and Alistair Brownlee; it is difficult to coach Javier Gómez, Gwen Jorgensen or Nicola Spirig.  They will have a legitimate chance to win in spite of the coach.  It is even more useful to be a cheerleader-coach.  

Triathlon, an individual sport?

We have been studying more conscientiously about team work and what belongs to athletes or to the environment with the purpose of explaining what a team is to families and triathletes.  We have posted regarding this matter, using other sports like soccer, formula one, but golf gives an example of what a team can hide from us.  Tiger Woods has fallen dramatically after the incident riding the car near his home and the divorce from his former wife.  Since then, Tiger continues looking for a “escape goat.”  He has had multiple surgeries; he has changed his swing multiple times; he fired his caddy, etc.  As a doctor, I have seen this phenomenon daily:  “The game of the escape goat.”  This game does not finish well, we are unable to see our emotional pain and we end up with a surgical procedure done to us: broken physically and mentally.  Tiger´s swing has little to do with his poor performance.  Few people supported and made Tiger a tiger, but Tiger disappeared when they disappeared.

Earl Dennison Woods (March 5, 1932 – May 3, 2006) was a US Army infantry officer who served two tours of duty inVietnam, and retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was a college-level baseball player and writer, whose son is professional golfer Tiger Woods. Woods started his son in golf at a very early age, and coached him exclusively for his first years in the sport.

Elin Nordegren took over after the death of tiger´s father and Woods basically disappeared as a golfer after breaking up.  Tiger is incapable to survive by himself.  Is it Tiger´s age? We know that everything comes to an end but there were old people playing well.  One that is a minority who survived many obstacles is Lee Treviño:

Boycotts of the Masters tournament[edit]

In the 1989 Masters, at the age of 49, Trevino shot an opening five-under-par round of 67 to become the oldest man ever to lead the field after a round in the tournament. It came despite Trevino's words 20 years earlier, when he said after the 1969 Masters: "Don't talk to me about the Masters. I'm never going to play there again. They can invite me all they want, but I'm not going back. It's just not my type of course."^[8] Trevino said that he felt uncomfortable with the atmosphere at the Augusta National club and that he disliked the course because his style of play, where he liked to fade shots left to right, was not suited to the course.^[9]

Jack Nicklaus is another one:

Wins 6th Masters at the age of 46 (1986)[edit]

In 1986, Nicklaus capped his major championship career by recording his sixth Masters victory under incredible circumstances, posting a six-under par 30 on the back nine atAugusta for a final round of seven-under-par 65. At the 17th hole, Nicklaus hit his second shot to within 18 feet (5.5 m) and rolled it in for birdie, raising his putter in celebration and completing an eagle-birdie-birdie run. Nicklaus made a solid par-4 at the 72nd hole, and waited for the succeeding players, several of whom (Tom Kite, Greg Norman) were still in contention, to fall short. Nicklaus played the final ten holes seven under par, with six birdies and an eagle. At age 46, Nicklaus became the oldest Masters winner in history, a record which still stands. On the feat, sports columnist Thomas Boswell remarked,

A few people are able to recognize the reason for declining.  Dave Wottle was able to see that, he started to decline after losing his team:

I knew myself well enough that I didn’t think I could have kept the competitive fires burning until the Montreal Olympics in 1976. My strength was really taken from my teammates and coach at Bowling Green. I lost that when I graduated and had to train on my own and just wasn’t the same runner.  

http://www.garycohenrunning.com/Interviews/Wottle.aspx

Dave is one of the greatest runners who disappeared too early.  Beautiful technique when running.  I leave you with him:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LHid-nC45k

Triathlon Basic Training

We have heard about resilience and we know that children are resilient until certain age.  I would say until they have a consciousness.  I have had patients who lost one parent when they were adolescents and called me more than three years after the death of the parent to let know that they were grieving. Working on resilience is working on basic training for triathlon:

 re·sil·ient

  (rĭ-zĭl′yənt)

adj.

1. Capable of returning to an original shape or position, as after having been compressed. See Synonyms at flexible.

2. Able to recover readily, as from misfortune.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/resilient

There is a book written by somebody who has worked on resilience.  I listened to an interview with the author and it prompt me to write this post.  He is somebody who knows how to teach resilience because he worked very hard to acquire it and achieved it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VV5_MhD030

Resilience and consciousness oppose each other if we are unable to have goals.  Some children experienced the death of a parent; years later, until they have a consciousness, they experienced the loss.  They were just postponing the catastrophe: “Ignorance is bliss.”  The point is to be resilient without ignorance, for what a purpose in life is needed.  To be a champion in triathlon, the athlete should be resilient without ignorance.

Resilience is built day by day and is practiced for life.  The more conscious we are about the world and our limits, the harder we have to work on resilience.  In this sense “ignorance is bliss.”  It is the building block of a champion, it is just basic training for anybody.

Gennadi Touretski told me that the “best athletes” in Russia came from Siberia, he mentioned that he had a group of 800 athletes chosen by the system in the 70’s-80’s, including cyclist Ekimov and Alexander Popov.  They were good for any sport (Ekimov was a swimmer).  He worked with them starting at the age of eight.  Resilience was already present in most of siberian athletes because they used to dig holes in the winter to come out of their homes.  Resilience is the most important ingredient of “talent,” that is why Touretski believes that talent is “discovered” after 10,000 hours in the water.

Triathlon and Asthma

This is a touchy subject but very interesting:

1)   Asthma and asthmatics are related to doping.  Asthmatic athletes look for the best management of their illness that help them to take advantage of their illness with the same token.

Asthma rife among elite athletes, finds study

It’s not unknown for elite sports people to have asthma – Paula Radcliffe and Paul Scholes are among well-known British examples – but the good news for wheezy children wistfully dreaming of a sporting career is that research is increasingly uncovering just how many asthmatics there are in top-level sport.

In fact, the figures can seem astonishing. John Dickinson from Kent university, a world expert on asthma in sport, who has tested all 33 UK-based swimmers from the British Swimming squad found 70% have some form of asthma. A similar test on the cyclists from Team Sky revealed about a third are prone to a wheeze, against a national asthma rate of about 8% to 10%.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/dec/28/asthma-elite-athletes-study-swimmers-cyclist-eid

2)   Asthma is related to overtraining.  Low receptor sensitivity to epinephrine is a characteristic of asthma and is related to the immune system.   Asthma is also related to low testosterone level.

Disturbed Neuroendocrine-Immune Interactions in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome*

We conclude that CFS is accompanied by a relative resistance of the immune system to regulation by the neuroendocrine system. Based on these data, we suggest CFS should be viewed as a disease of deficient neuroendocrine-immune communication. (J Clin Endocrinol Metab 85: 692–696, 2000)

Vutr Boles. 1988;27(4):29-32.

[The serum testosterone level of patients with bronchial asthma treated with corticosteroids and untreated].

 Low blood testosterone was found mainly in the patients with severe (37.76%) and moderate (40.00%) form of the disease and very rarely in patients with mild form of bronchial asthma (8.51%). The basic testosterone level changes are probably due to the stress, hypoxia and corticosteroid treatment. The possibility of a direct suppressive action of exo- and endoallergens on the testes are discussed.

Let’s take a look at a real clinical case:

Rupp adds that he has had asthma and severe allergies since childhood, "long before I met Alberto," and, "at all times, my medical treatment has been for health reasons."

One month after the mystery pills, Magness was sitting at his cubicle on the Nike campus when documents from the on-campus lab were delivered to Salazar's nearby desk. The lab documents contained years' worth of athletes' blood testing records, which were used to see how runners responded to altitude training meant to boost their levels of oxygen-carrying hemoglobin. According to Magness, Salazar told him to peruse the records and share his observations.

When Magness came to a page charting Rupp's hemoglobin, he was stunned to find a note that corresponded to a date when Rupp was still in high school: "presently on prednisone and testosterone medication." Magness already knew Rupp used prednisone, but various testosterone medications comprise perhaps the greatest scourge in all of sports doping, and are strictly banned save for cases of extreme medical need.

Bewildered, Magness huddled anxiously in a secluded stairwell. He took pictures of the documents with his phone, and then reached out for advice. "I called my parents," he says, to ask what he should do. They told him to ask Salazar to clarify the document.

Magness returned to his desk. He sat nervously for 15 minutes before working up the courage to follow his parents' advice, hoping there was a convincing reason for what he saw. Instead, Magness says Salazar immediately impugned the sanity of longtime Nike lab physiologist, Loren Myhre, and suggested that Myhre's battle with ALS must have diminished his faculties. (Myhre passed away in 2012, but the record Magness asked about was from 2002, a year when Myhre was given an award by Nike for his work, according to an obituary.) Salazar said Myhre was "crazy and he must be mixing it up with something else," Magness says.

"It's like, well, you're still taking advice from this guy, so why now all of a sudden is he crazy?" Magness recalls thinking.

Low testosterone level is a common finding in asthmatics because of the prednisone given or because of the asthma severity.  But the problems encountered by the Nike Project are more related to how we see each other or to the hypersensitivity with the subject.  I said once that most likely the whole cycling peloton was using performing enhancing drugs during the time of Armstrong.  The victories of Mo Farrah and Rupp have little to do with performance enhancing drugs, if they use them.  If what is said of Alberto Salazar doing experiments is true, it means that Alberto has little knowledge about performance enhancing drugs and a lot of stupidity.  If Alberto wants to know, it is just a matter of asking the cycling peloton. 

Triathlon and FIFA Scandal

Let’s start with Jon Stewart's video regarding FIFA scandal. 

http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/he-shoots-he-scores-jon-stewart-brilliantly-takes-down-fifa--xJeOoZ37Tbb

It is obvious that many people are involved from different backgrounds.  The levels of corruption are extremely different from nation to nation.  How can one control corruption?  Corruption is link to our education and economy.  Why FIFA accepted nations without control over corrupted countries?  It is said that FIFA HAS MORE AFFILIATED COUNTRIES THAN THE UNITED NATIONS.  Did FIFA (Blatter) do it to buy votes or to feel superhero trying to help the world?  Blatter says that he was trying to help the world but cannot control the nations and people. 

https://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results

In Mexico, unions have an old practice, creating zip codes for homeless (squatters) in order to increase the number of voters. ITU is more involved in Asia nowadays (helping Nepal after the earthquake, for example), and our Mexican Federation continues to pay dues to ITU for the power given to them.  The FMTRI made business with our corrupted State Government and our State Government did not pay what it was promised (somebody took that money); supposedly, "dog does not eat dog," but it does happen:

Huatulco se queda sin Copa Mundial de Triatlón

Tamaño de Fuente:  

Vicente Quiroz Gómez 31/05/2015 11:16:00 || Leído 163 veces

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Debido a la falta de apoyo económico, FMTRI comunicó a los integrantes del gremio hotelero que el 2015 será el último año que se lleve a cabo la ITU World Cup en Huatulco

Huatulco será por última vez en 2015 sede de una de las etapas de la Copa del Mundo de Triatlón, organizado aquí desde hace ocho años por la Unión Internacional de Triatlón (ITU) y la Federación Mexicana de Triatlón (FMTRI), debido a la falta de apoyo económico del gobierno del estado de Oaxaca.

El presidente de la Federación Mexicana de Triatlón, Jaime Cadaval, informó que las secretarías de Turismo y Desarrollo Económico (STYDE) y de Finanzas (Sefin) se negaron en esta ocasión a aportar el 50 por ciento del financiamiento para la realización de esta justa deportiva prevista para junio de este año con una bolsa en premios de 60 mil dólares.

En un comunicado enviado a la Asociación de Hoteles de Huatulco, Cadaval precisa que desde 2008 este evento surgió con el compromiso conjunto entre el Fondo Nacional de Fomento al Turismo (Fonatur) y el gobierno estatal de Oaxaca de apoyar económicamente la Copa Mundial ITU en partes iguales.

A partir del 2013, cuando el Fonatur retiró su respaldo financiero la Comisión Nacional del Deporte (Conade) decidió aportar ese financiamiento para darle continuidad. No obstante, para la edición 2015 la STYDE y la Sefin negaron su aportación pese a que el gobernador Gabino Cué Monteagudo dio su autorización verbal hace unos meses de seguir apoyando este encuentro deportivo.

Ante la posibilidad de que se cancelará o pospusiera su realización, la FMTRI decidió asumir el compromiso económico con la ITU y evitar así fuertes sanciones económicas y deportivas que implicarían que los atletas mexicanos no pudieran participar en otras Copas del Mundo y en los Juegos Panamericanos de Toronto, además de perder las plazas olímpicas que ya tiene el organismo deportivo.

Ante tal situación, Jaime Cadaval comunicó a los integrantes del gremio hotelero que el 2015 será el último año que se lleve a cabo la ITU World Cup en Huatulco y que buscarán una nueva sede en 2016 para la realización de este tipo de magnos eventos internacionales

As Jon Stewart hints, Blatter did not learn from the Nuremberg trials or he believes he is God:

Superior orders, often known as the Nuremberg defense, lawful orders or by the German phrase "Befehl ist Befehl" ("orders are orders"), is a plea in a court of law that a person, whether a member of the armed forces or a civilian, not be held guilty for actions which were ordered by a superior officer or a public official.^[1][2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

Franz Beckenbauer left the boat as a good German who learned from Nuremberg:

Beckenbauer, 68, was part of the Fifa executive committee that voted to give the tournament to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022.

He has been banned for 90 days...

Fifa said Beckenbauer ignored "repeated requests" to assist with an independent investigation into the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments…

On Friday, Beckenbauer told German television: "I am the Bayern Munich honorary president. Even if I cannot do this for 90 days it is something the honorary president can survive."

http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/football/27841486

It took 24 years to get to this point in football, how long will it take in triathlon?  Removing Blatter with his “grandeur delusion” is not going to help Football.  Beckenbauer said that there is no proposition to make FIFA better at this point, and believe or not, I believe so.  They need to clean the house first and then remove Blatter.  We have the examples of the Mexican Revolution and others; things are worse more than 100 years later (more corruption, more nepotism and more poverty), without education we cannot do much; democracy with a majority of corrupted citizens is even worse.