TRIATHLON TRAINING SCIENCE AND HISTORY

Watching the movie Enemy at the Gates (2001), reminds me of many things I have heard about Russia (I have not visited Russia).  Over the years I have known and studied Russians from Russia and learned from them.

This Hollywood film about the Battle of Stalingrad is a hugely atmospheric piece with stunning battle scenes. The central plot – a sniper battle between a Russian hero and a German officer – is loosely based on real life. Rather than focus on the entire six-month battle, the film reduces it to a duel between a single Russian (who actually existed) and a single German sniper (who never existed). See a great review of the historical accuracies and inaccuracies of this film http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/Battle_of_Stalingrad.htm

I also read a book written by Michael Coe, Breaking the Maya Code.  A Russian without knowledge of the Maya culture was able to read Maya without leaving St. Petersburg.  He was the first one to recognize the patterns of a language in a book he found by mistake.  Of course, he did not have the full occidental coordinates that inhibits our innovation in our thoughts.

How much innovation can we practice away from our majorities’ current knowledge and politics?  Gregory Bateson calculates that changes in natural selection (genetics) takes place at least 150 years after the environmental changes, in order for the genetics changes to be viable.  Ernest W Maglischo, Swimming fastest, speaks about how changes took place in swimming in a matter of 50 years, swimming from 800 meters a day to 15,000 meters a day to win an Olympic medal.  The same thing for triathlon, training changes in a matter of decades.  We speak about all these issues with our athletes so they can be knowledgeable.

I met Nicolas Romanov a few years after his arrival to the US.  I invited him to come to Oaxaca.  He mentioned to me that he practiced on himself for two decades before he started teaching how to run in the occident, perfecting his technique during those two decades.  That is how POSE METHOD was born. The same thing when I met Gennadi Touretski, http://vimeo.com/9751843 . Both coaches are very innovative and revolutionaries in their thinking.  Russia was pretty much isolated for almost half of a century.

Isolation and at the same time focusing on the task does not appear to be the way now-a-days, as it was during the time of Mendel.  Through the selective cross-breeding of common pea plants (Pisum sativum) over many generations, Mendel discovered that certain traits show up in offspring without any blending of parent characteristic.         http://anthro.palomar.edu/mendel/mendel_1.htms .

Information and scanning information is necessary.  We do not need to “build the fire again” if we know where it is going to end by informing ourselves; and if it is possible, to see things with our own eyes.  We have ventured in the “sea of information” in order to innovate and for the same reason we are not married to any global narrative.  That is why we blogged.