Triathlon and ISO – 2014 triathlon

I have been talking with the family about ISO and the need for having the ISO certification.  Everybody is in a hurry getting an ISO certification for their business in Mexico.  A friend mentioned to me that he was going to rent an office in his mother´s house to pass the ISO supervision.  A patient told me that his hospital was going to pass the ISO supervision.  Even the Mexican Federation of Triathlon passed the ISO in management.  Well, I investigated even further what ISO means and how to pass the ISO IN TRIATHLON.

Certification...

to ISO management system standards

Organizations and companies often want to get certified to ISO’s management system standards (for example ISO 9001 or ISO 14001) although certification is not a requirement. The best reason for wanting to implement these standards is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of company operations.

A company may decide to seek certification for many reasons, as certification may:

• be a contractual or regulatory requirement
• be necessary to meet customer preferences
• fall within the context of a risk management programme, and
• help motivate staff by setting a clear goal for the development of its management system.

ISO does not perform certification

ISO develops International Standards, including management system standards such as ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 31000. However, it is not involved in the certification to any of the standards it develops. Certification is performed by external certification bodies, which are largely private. Therefore a company or organization cannot be certified by ISO.

Read more about how to publicize your ISO 9001:20

http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/certification.htm

So, in our beautiful Mexico certification becomes another corrupted organized business.  But it does not take away the creation of our quality standards that we use, which are mentioned in several posts in the blog.

Reading the ISO page took me to another article: “the curve of improvement;” a curve of improvement which is easy to make from results taken by our watch at different times in our life.  We have tackled several times this subject in the blog but let´s keep writing, “it is not a dead horse.”  I write because I blog.  I blog because I am part of this world and have been in the position of being ahead of many; I believe in sharing things to improve as humanity.  I was accepted to Harvard to work on Brain Mapping after my specialty in Psychiatry and subspecialty in Sleep Disorders in New York State and decided to come back to my home town to give a try on how to create champions after what I learned.  I come from a small town in Mexico where I live, Oaxaca, and we have had World Champions in our team as juniors and age groupers in triathlon (created by us); or at least a team member on the podium of a Triathlon World Championship.  We have many arguments to speak about the subject of improvement in adolescents and children after twenty years of working forming triathletes since children (not finding already made triathletes) and training in Team Oaxaca.  There are several papers in the web regarding this matter “curve improvement” and I chose the one below as a benchmark.

http://www.exeterswim.org/neest/__doc__/Improvements%20Torturous%20Path.pdf

Improvement's Torturous Path

By Tom Slear

Special Splash Correspondent

Splash Magazine:May

-

June 2005

Why do some improve steadily and others plateau? Why isn’t the slope of an improvement curve predictable? Basic logic dictates that as swimmers get older, they should be bigger, stronger, better trained and therefore, faster. Improvement might not have a constant, positive slope –nothing in sport is that assured –but it should be steady over the long-term, with peaks of larger magnitudes than valleys. However, those familiar with swimming know this is simply not the case. Improvement’s path contains detours and even U-turns. Many brilliant young swimmers plateau, and then, says Collins, who has coached three swimmers from age groupers to Olympians, the “window of opportunity closes. They are sure bets for the next year and the next year never comes. Kids expect to improve every year, and in many cases, that simply doesn’t happen.”

“You will find that across sports, there is not much correlation between those who have success when they are 10 and 11 with those having success when they are 19 and 20,” says Dr. Thomas Raedeke of the Department of Exercise and Sport Science at East Carolina University. “It could be for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that when success comes early on and you are improving by leaps and bounds, you come to expect that. When it stops, and you are improving only fractionally, that can be very frustrating, especially when others you used to beat are improving more. It may cause you to question your commitment to the sport, which affects how hard you work and whether you continue to improve.”

In a study he authored, Sokolovas compared the swimmers in the best all-time, top-100 times for age groups from 10-and-under through 17-18. Among the 17-and 18-year olds, only 10.3 percent of the girls and 13.2 percent of the boys were listed in any event as 10-

and-unders. When compared to the lists of 11-and 12-year-olds, the percentages were 20.3 for the girls and 12.6 for the boys. Not until the 15/16 age group did the percentages become significant –49.7 for the girls and 53.5 for the boys. As Sokolovas concluded, “Most of the future elite swimmers swim slower than age-group champions, especially at

ages until 15-16 years.”

The top-16 rankings portray a significantly different picture. Of the 43 men and women on America’s 2004 Olympic team, 18 (42 percent) had a top-16 national ranking in either short-course yards or long-course meters as a 10-and-under. Among those were Michael Phelps and Aaron Peirsol, who set world records in Athens, and Jenny Thompson, who, at 31, competed in her fourth Olympic Games. Twenty-five of the 2004 Olympians –58 percent –had a top-16 ranking as 11-and 12-year-olds.

Instead of speaking abstractly, we have examples of improvement and U turns.  As Albert Einstein said:  “What limits my learning is my education.”

11 nov. 2013

Triathlon and Commitment to Improve

I have a 24 year-old-old male patient for the last three years who came to me because of excruciating abdominal pain that made him to bend over and ending up in the ER.  He was scheduled to be operated several times for exploratory reasons, but somehow he called me before the procedures and responded well to treatment in a matter of a few hours.  I treated him with IV major tranquilizers twice when these episodes happened.  I told him that his problem was his “breathing pattern.”  I ventured to make this statement instead of using something as “somatization,” “panic attacks,” etc. It takes years to understand that breathing can help us or destroys us depending on how we have learned to breathe.  This patient works as a musician and also his father. I told him since the first interview that he needed to learn how to breathe and insisted that yoga classes could help him.  He went to yoga classes almost three years after our first encounter!  That is how invested our patients are in their problems and how much they believe in advices. 

In his first yoga class, in a matter of a few minutes, he was able to reproduce the pain.  He stopped going to yoga classes because he could not stand breathing in that environment. He changed his singing teacher and started with a better technique practicing breathing; unfortunately or fortunately, he presented panic attacks during rehearsals and understood that he could work on the anxiety bouts.  Three years later, he understood that breathing was his main problem at this point in his life and increased practicing singing (breathing) more frequently to overcome his fears.  He came back happily and told me two things:

1)   “I spoke to my father about music and my problems and he told me that he wanted to teach me music and I just wanted to play the guitar; so he just taught me how to play the guitar.”  My father said to me:  “Now you are ready to learn music.”  For his father music was a way of living that encompasses the way of breathing and some other things for his soul.

2)   “I learned about many things that happened at the time I was born and after being born, I did not want to know about things happening to me.”

The case is related to our athletes that are unable to learn about training and they do not want to see what is happening to them.  It takes years if they are able to tolerate the reflection about what they have done; and years to return to take a different path according to what they learned from what they experienced without lying to themselves.  We have seen many lives passed by without return because of stubbornness.

More specifically, the case is related to our 21-year-old male triathlete who was 30 kilograms overweight at the age of 8 and now is the best U-23 triathlete in Mexico. He (and we) has come a long way and he continues to improve, he has had the need to improve due to his own circumstances and not because he started late.  We are available 24 hours a day to help with his improvement and he has been with us since the age of 8.

I would not create an ISO-triathlon because there is nothing to standardize, not even training as you can read in the blog; we need to start educating athletes at very young age so they can be able to learn.