10 avr. 2015

Triathlon Middle Game



It is called middle game in chess; meaning that it comes after the opening and before the end:
The Middle Game in Chess by Reuben Fine lists three major factors in the middlegame: king safety, force (material) and mobility, although not all of these factors are of equal importance. If king safety is a serious issue, a well-executed attack on the king can render other considerations, including material advantages, irrelevant. Material is another important consideration, Fine notes that—if all other things are equal—any material advantage will usually be decisive. According to Fine, a material advantage will usually not give a direct mating attack unless the advantage is very large (a rook or more), rather it can be used as a means of gaining more material and a decisive endgame advantage. The issue of mobility is ensuring that the pieces have a wide scope of action and targets to focus on. The concept is largely strategic in nature, and involves concepts as space, pawn weaknesses (since weak pawns can compel pieces to defensive duties, reducing their mobility), and securing outposts for the pieces.
It keeps us on the direction of education, which is the only middle game in life.  Education at very early age to create a different culture with options to overcome cultural handicaps. 

The middle game in triathlon is not as clear as the one in chess.  I will show you what could happen if we do not master the middle game in an experiment that took place in Manhattan with a homeless.
A homeless man learned to code and became famous; one year later, he stopped programming because 'life' got in the way
In the summer of 2013, a man named Patrick McConlogue offered a man named Leo $100 — or the opportunity to learn how to code.
Leo was homeless, living on the streets of New York City, and McConlogue used to pass him every day as he commuted to work. McConlogue figured he could teach Leo a skill that Leo could then parlay into work that would help him back on his feet.
Leo took the opportunity.
Business Insider
Tech writers from various outlets ridiculed McConlogue, who first wrote about this on Medium.
But he kept his promise and taught Leo how to code, and the two built an eco-friendly ride share app together by December 2013.
The pair became a dream team and were covered extensively in the media (we wrote about them here), and showing up on morning TV shows like NBC's "Today" show.
When Business Insider caught up with Leo months after the successful launch of his self-made and self-coded app, Leo was still homeless. It seemed he didn't want access to the money that was available to him, which was being held in McConlogue's account. It was too overwhelming.
On May 27, 2014, McConlogue told Business Insider: Leo "has a year to find a way, be it with a bank account or proxy, to claim his money, every penny, from my account. If he doesn't want to do that, I told him to pick a homeless shelter and we'll donate it."
With that deadline fast approaching, Mashable caught up with the two men to see how Leo had progressed.
Leo, they write, is still homeless, over a year after the launch of "Trees for Cars," his ride-share app.
Robert Libetti/ Business Insider
Grand still lives on the same back alleys where he and McConlogue first met. Although he rents a storage unit, Grand occasionally keeps a shopping cart full of his possessions by a pile of sandbags near the Chelsea Piers in New York City. He no longer codes every day; Trees for Cars has long since disappeared from app stores, since he does not want to pay for server space for its upkeep. He occasionally takes on odd jobs as a welder, and whiles away time by walking around the High Line public park.
In a video interview with Mashable and McConlogue, Leo says he plans on getting back into coding, but things have gotten in the way and he hasn't been able to get to the space where he codes.
When the reporter asks why, Leo sighs.
YouTube
"Life," he responds. "Because you know, life, you know. Things going on. You have to do this, you have to do that."
"Homelessness is not a feature of someone, or a condition," McConlogue says in the video. "It's not a way to describe someone."
Leo says of his media spotlight: "You're hot one minute, you're gone the next."


Middle game in triathlon has to do with education to be successful in life, and as in chess, 95% of the success is in this stage of the game; meaning that even before starting triathlon we know if we are going to succeed or not just by looking at our education.  We have posts related to this subject:
11 août 2013
Mexico is a sui generis country.  All the times Mexicans try to live together in the here and now; this is something impossible to happen because we do not share the same concepts of humanism, experience, science, religion, etc. Our extremes are a caveman and a Nobel Prize winner in Science.  How to have a grammar that allows us to communicate has been the problem.  Science is far behind in the community to permit a bridge to have a human consensus.  I found a post to illustrate my point.  What he describes happens in any city of Mexico.  According to the following article our assumptions are very different from what it is; “The map is not the territory.”  We think people want to learn and particularly how to improve triathlon performance, but they do not have the intention by culture. 

In 1988, the World Bank estimated that 1–2% of the global population subsists by waste picking.[9] A more recent study from 2010 estimates that there are 1.5 million waste pickers in India alone.[10] Brazil, the country that collects the most robust official statistics on waste pickers, estimates that nearly a quarter million of its citizens engage in waste picking.[11]
Vázquez, J.J. (2013) Happiness among the garbage: Differences in overall happiness among trash pickers in León (Nicaragua), The Journal of Positive Psychology, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2012.743574
Imagine you are an itinerant individual living in absolute penury in a third-world country. You survive by going through other people’s garbage and extracting your food for the day as well as other essentials like clothing and footwear. You live your life hand to mouth and what your hand finds are the things others have discarded. You recycle what you can for money, and this considerable effort earns you about $3 a day.
By downward social comparison, almost anyone seeing a person living in these conditions would assume the individuals engaged in this activity would resent their life circumstance and view their life as anything but happy.
But this study shows this is a false assumption.
Not only are these people not depressed, they are optimistic, have good relationships, and many of them play sports and read. The majority of them are happy with their lives.

Are our athletes educated to be champions?  Take a moment of reflection.  Your success will depend on your honest answer.  Otherwise, you have a long way to go before starting “real” training. 

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