Triathlon: Do not do it if you have not practiced it!

“Do not do it if you have not practiced it,” it is a phrase applied to any kind of performance and applies to triathlon.  During a performance we cannot try different things from what we have practiced unless it is our second option after the first one failed.  Triathlon is “practiced” in Mexico by overweight people and "practicing" triathlon in those circumstances is against their own health.  In regular circumstances triathlon taxes our whole body and mind, and performing in a triathlon when one is overweight can cause damage to our body: heart, bones (legs, hips, etc.) and so on.  Recovery from a triathlon is very slow if we do it overweight or without the proper training (being fit is part of the objectives of training).  But let’s talk about the supposed trained athletes.

There is a nice research done by Global Cycling Network which gave light on, “do not do it if you have not practiced it:"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jh-5TYAtJI

Michel Jouvet, Medaille d’Ore en Sciences in France would say; “Il y a un Dieu pour celui qui cherche.”  As Albert Einstein would say:

The only justification for our concepts and system of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy. I am convinced that the philosophers have had a harmful effect upon the progress of scientific thinking in removing certain fundamental concepts from the domain of empiricism, where they are under our control, to the intangible heights of the a priori. For even if it should appear that the universe of ideas cannot be deduced from experience by logical means, but is, in a sense, a creation of the human mind, without which no science is possible, nevertheless this universe of ideas is just as little independent of the nature of our experiences as clothes are of the form of the human body. This is particularly true of our concepts of time and space, which physicists have been obliged by the facts to bring down from the Olympus of the a priori in order to adjust them and put them in a serviceable condition.

https://is.muni.cz/www/2603/59344179/_Albert_Einstein__Brian_Greene__The_meaning_of_rel_BookZZ.org_.pdf

“Obliged by the facts to bring down from the Olympus.” This is like stopping fake news if you want to do research.  Interestingly, the experiment says: Do not do it if you have not practiced it!  The subject tested did not practice cadence above 90 rpm, so he is not fit for that specific work.  His lactate increased dramatically.  I will show you a video of two female triathletes going uphill, 13 and 15 years of age, practicing cadence going uphill.  95-100 rpm, 8% average grade going uphill.

Triathlon Talent and Leeds

Talent is a word overused and misused.  Coaches and laymen considered talent a physical attribute but what happened in Leeds should make us think about what pure talent is about.  The chasing peloton was just five seconds behind the Brownlees and nobody from the peloton could bridge them because the Brwonlees have talent.  The main ingredient of talent is perseverance and knowledge about the “who is who.” Nothing physical:

“… I nearly gave up actually first lap in the city centre, and I said to Alistair ‘stop, we’re getting caught’ and he said to keep on going and suddenly we had 10-15 seconds from nowhere, and then I thought ‘wow, this is going be a long day out!”

“I’m used to getting told what to do by Alistair! But thankfully it was the right decision – it was the hard way of doing it but it was the right decision. It made it a fun race – it made it a hard race. I played into his hands – I made it a long-distance race, not really an ITU race. It’s great to have a good course – a course where you can actually show an all-round triathlete. Weaknesses get exposed.”

Talent is cultural, educational, it is far from being physical:

3 janv. 2014

Triathlon and ISO – 2014 triathlon

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.

As a doctors, seeing patients dying, we need to keep believing that things could change if we perseverate on the treatment because we believe in the treatment, we can motivate the patient to continue struggling if the patient believes on us as doctors.  Many doctors give up on patients because they are tired or because they do not believe in what they do.  The best doctor is the one who perseverates on the treatment because the doctor believes in the treatment and is able to influence the patient to continue fighting the illness.  Alistair could be the best doctor treating patients.