Triathlon and the Alternative Facts

We started talking about Postmodernism and alternative facts more than 30 years ago.  The end of the Grand Narratives began and the appearance of the Alternative Facts started.  Donald Trump and Andrés Manuel López Obrador come to my mind in today’s world.  At one-point, psychoanalysis was criticized by Jacques Derrida because of the alternative facts.  Triathlon represented by athletes, coaches and Federations are full of alternative facts to keep their businesses going.  People are willing to believe in alternative facts because reality is overwhelming.  We become delirious believing in alternatives facts or psychotics when we see reality the way it is; training to face reality and alternative facts is needed if we want to achieve something with athletes.

In the last World Series and Mixed Relay, Hamburg, four times the Mexican team was lapped, just one ended in 40^th place; four out of the five competitions.  How can we face this overwhelming reality!  Alternative facts! We have problems dealing with reality and alternative facts:

It’s because so much of what we know depends on the truthfulness of others that the philosopher Immanuel Kant believed lying was always wrong. His reasoning was that when we lie to another person, we fail to respect her infinitely valuable capacity to encounter the world and think about the moral choices she’ll make in it. By refusing to tell her the truth, we treat her not as a person, but as an instrument — a tool to get something we want. We treat her like a thing…When we routinely assume that our fellow citizens and government officials are lying, it becomes impossible to work together to determine how our neighborhoods, our cities, or our country should function. When we abandon the effort to figure out what is true, we cede the field to anti-democratic leaders who derive their “just powers” not “from the consent of the governed” but from the acquiescence of the willingly deceived.

https://truthout.org/articles/life-in-the-united-states-of-trump-confronting-alternative-facts/

There is no point in showing the comments related to this Mexican performance: hundreds of alternative facts with one of two comments looking at the reality.  Reality is difficult to see except for people like Mike Tyson.

Mike Tyson speaks clearly about Constantine D’Amato.  He believed that Cus was crazy because he thought Mike was invincible in a fair fight.  Mike believes Cus uses alternative facts when he says such a thing, but the reality is that Cus had 50 years’ experience in boxing and knew how to produce someone like it.  Boxing children lived in his house.

“You do what I tell you to do and if it doesn’t work, then you can leave.” 

“I’m not a creator. What I do is discover and uncover. See my job is to take the spark and fan it. When it starts to become a little flame I feed it, and I feed the fire until it becomes a roaring blaze, and then when it turns to a roaring blaze I pour used logs on it. Then you really got a fire going.”

“I don’t allow people to intimidate me, for no other reason than to set an example for my boxers.”

“Remember, it’s always good to throw the punch where you can hit him and he can’t hit you. That’s what the science of boxing is all about.”

“I feel that all boys growing up in the environment that he did would require help, patience and perhaps understanding cos’ I try to make them feel, and I hope I did, that I understand this kind of life. I grew up in a tough neighbourhood mysef.”

At the end, Mike ended up with his beliefs without the overwhelming anger he developed growing up. 

Cus D’Amato is not here anymore, but we know that there are people like him, we continue preparing ourselves to look at reality without fear and with the will to face it.  Alternative Facts are not an option for us.

Triathlon and Creating the Learning Environment

What to teach is something we take seriously, but how to create the environment to help athletes to learn is more important.  It is what every country wants or what they say they want; to improve education and wellbeing for the citizens.  The infrastructure, meaning the environment needed, should to be accepted by members: triathletes, coaches, federations and nations.  Selling the idea is not an easy task; and selling the idea when other personal needs are stronger is even more difficult.  In the case of Mexico, we try to convince people that there is a problem in education, but our President says that he has a different data, contrary to the OCDE. Let’s be serious and take the case of France:

Reconciling educational excellence and success for all is not just the best way to tackle social inequalities at the root, but also to obtain good results.

Results from around the globe illustrate various best practices applied to improve the equity and performance of the education system. Portugal’s TEIP programme for example (Priority Intervention Education Territories) targets investment in geographical regions where the population is socially disadvantaged and where school drop-out rates are higher than the national average. Singapore, first in the PISA science rankings, has a comprehensive teacher evaluation system that includes in particular the contribution to students’ personal and academic development, as well as the quality of parent-teacher relations.

In short, the capacity of a system to help students in difficulty and those from disadvantaged backgrounds to improve raises the general quality of the system and thus its overall performance.

In France however, investments in education do not always reach these groups. I had some personal experience of this malfunctioning when I arrived in France and asked people to recommend primary schools for my own children. The answer was: “Don’t pick a school, pick a neighbourhood”.

How can we ensure that success at school isn’t the result of a postcode lottery? France has already implemented reforms going in the right direction.

http://oecdinsights.org/2016/12/06/lessons-for-france-from-pisa-2015/

Creating the environment in countries like Mexico is possible, but it is micro environment within the country.  Educating the huge bureaucratic apparatus is impossible, and even more when the head of the system, CONADE, barely finished High School (certificate equivalent to a GED).  We gave up trying educating the bureaucracy and limited ourselves to educate six to eight parents.  Our micro-system produced a world champion but so far we cannot influence a bigger population.  Perhaps this is our fate, but we continue trying to teach with the example.

Triathlon and Adversity Score

We have touched this subject several times.  Nations want athletes to perform well and they put money into it.  Now a day’s performance in a test as well as in a race have to do with environmental factors which produce or not a competitive culture.  This is something well study to the point of creating an “adversity score” when taking a test as the SAT.  From the point of view of Human Rights, it is a big step, but let see how the involved parties play out; sometimes the pendulum swings to the other side and catastrophe appears also.  This is something we live in Mexico with the new government and happened after the Mexican Revolution. The rate exchange for the Mexican peso was one peso for two dollars before the Mexican Revolution (1910). The production decreased to almost nothing except for oil and raw materials after the Mexican Revolution; we still depend on these two. The worst part is that Mexicans live in the same conditions more than a 100 years later.  I grew up in one of the poorest states in Mexico and did my medical residency in New York, when these factors were not taken into account!  It took more than 30 years to challenge the “white privilege.”  The point is not to lower standards but to know that other factors are playing a role and we should improve conditions to make the floor even, or at least to know that somebody is competing with a handicap and have a competitive level.  We have paratriathlon for the physical conditions, but the social ones are handicaps of the same degree. I started with an average percentile my medical residency and finished residency at the 87^th percentile (standardized test).

The Environmental Context Dashboard includes information about students' high schools, including the rate of teens who receive free or reduced lunch, and their home life and neighborhoods, such as average family income, educational attainment, housing stability and crime.

The dashboard "shines a light on students who have demonstrated remarkable resourcefulness to overcome challenges and achieve more with less," said David Coleman, chief executive of the College Board, which administers the SAT. "It enables colleges to witness the strength of students in a huge swath of America who would otherwise be overlooked."

The scores won't be revealed to SAT test-takers, but schools will see the numbers when reviewing college applications.

Fifty colleges and universities, including Yale, Florida State University and Trinity University, took part in a pilot program last year to test what some observers are calling an "adversity score."

https://www.npr.org/2019/05/16/724048022/sat-to-score-students-disadvantages-to-try-to-even-the-playing-field

We were asked in an interview why the central Americans and south Americans have not successful triathletes and apparently everything is in place for athletes; meaning Federations, tournaments, high performance centers, etc.  Obviously, the interviewers did not have knowledge that performance depends on the family and environment as it is vision in the “adversity score.”  Garry Kasparov, the one that lasted 20 years as a Chess World Champion, says that intuition is the big player in performance, and intuition is learned by experience in the environment.  Perhaps, fear of snakes is innate, but the rest we have to learn experiencing.

We have the subject of "adversity score" as a lecture in our team:

https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1040&context=edc_theses

To even the floor, we started forming a subculture 20 years ago to overcome the problems mentioned above.  We want to develop and teach a better intuition to be competitive at the highest standards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZNGsTzk7Q4

Triathlon and Nonadherence

“We educate triathletes; we do not train triathletes.”  This concept is very difficult to understand, but let see what happens in Medicine to explain our approach to triathletes.  The following is from Medscape:

James F. Sweeney

May 07, 2019

The True Cost of Nonadherence

Hippocrates warned about nonadherence. "Keep watch also on the fault of patients which makes them lie about taking of things prescribed," he is alleged to have said.

Much has changed in the 2500 years since Hippocrates laid the foundation of modern medicine, but his caution about nonadherence still holds true.

A review in the Annals of Internal Medicine^[1] estimated that medication nonadherence causes 125,000 deaths in this country, placing it between stroke and Alzheimer disease as the sixth most common cause of mortality. It's also responsible for 10% of hospitalizations and costs the healthcare system as much as $289 billion a year. About one quarter of new prescriptions are never filled, and patients do not take their medication about half the time.

With the greater emphasis on value-based care and population health, more attention than ever is being paid to the problem of nonadherence, but there is no single proven way to correct it. And it's clear that current efforts are falling short.

Well, Medicine started to see why we have a high failure rate when treating patients.  The reason is simple:

Treating a nonadherent patient is frustrating for a physician and can feel pointless. In addition, nonadherent patients can hurt a practice's bottom line, as medicine shifts to outcome-based reimbursement.

We do not have the problem of reimbursement when coaching but we should.  Many countries and Federations have a huge budget without results.  Reimbursement based on outcome should be the way to go to be effective and professional in what we do.  This is something touched a bit in a previous post.

28 févr. 2019

Triathlon and Perseverance

The bottom line is that coaches have not idea of what makes an athlete succeed just as doctor have limited knowledge of why patients do not follow instructions.  If the coach is correct and there is a plan to follow we should look at the problem of nonadherence.  We have been looking at it for a long long time and have tried hard to overcome it but my guess is that we are 50/50 regarding achieving adherence.  This is without touching the point of how many points (subjects) of adherence we want to achieve.  Adherence to paying attention is our main adherence; adherence of nutrition and recovery are easier to achieve.

We try using electronics:

 How effective tech has been is the subject of debate and conflicting studies. What's clear, however, is that tech will continue to be a part of comprehensive adherence programs.

Jason Rose, MHSA, CEO of AdhereHealth, said the most effective technology will rely on data, but add a personal touch. For example, AdhereHealth (formerly PharmMD) scrapes data from pharmacies, physicians, insurers, healthcare systems, and elsewhere to identify instances in which patients are not filling prescriptions, not taking medication, or otherwise not adhering to treatment plans.

We have known Dorian Connix since he finished 10^th in the Junior World Championship held in New Zealand.  Our competitor was 9^th then.  Connix continue learning because he had multiple point of adherence to his life plan.  Nonadherence is the main cause of failure; even if the plan is not so good, it works if there are many adherence points from the part of the athlete.  “It is better a bad plan than no plan.”

Triathlon: Translational Model Vs Talent Identification

We are looking at a huge problem in Medicine: The number of patients needed to treat in order to have the expected response:

Number Needed to Treat: A Double-Edged Sword

This concept can best be understood using the number needed to treat (NNT).¹ If a novel drug has an NNT of ten—a fairly robust effect by most standards—we are implying that we would need to treat ten patients to prevent one from experiencing the outcome of interest. In other words, 90% of individuals who received this highly efficacious drug would actually derive no benefit. Are we meeting our ethical obligation to this 90%? Do physicians owe our patients an explanation of this phenomenon when we prescribe a medication? Should we say that “this medication probably won’t make a difference in your life, but there is a chance that it may. I suggest you take it.”?

https://jasn.asnjournals.org/content/29/11/2615

During decades we ignored the above concept due to excess of optimism from colleagues.  Money is getting shorter and patients do not want to be subjected to side effects without knowing their chances of getting better.  This is not different from “talent identification” in triathlon.  So far we know that at the Mexican National Center for Sports (CNAR) the cost per athlete is too elevated and we have not triathletes capable of winning a World Cup; they hardly obtained a podium at Continental Cups.  They take athletes into their program based on their ability to swim and run short distances.  It is obvious that swimming and running is needed to win in triathlon, but there are more important variables to take into consideration if we want to develop viable triathletes.

In the case of the Mexican National Center, they have the numbers to start looking at this problem differently, none of the triathletes is viable.  The problem is that people at the Center are so ignorant that they do not know what is needed to have viable triathletes.  Looking and studying Mario Mola or Javier Gomez could give us information about what is lacking in our athletes, but we run into another problem.  In order to see the differences, we have to know what we are looking for and to be knowledgeable about the subjects; the value of perseverance, passion, and simple professionalism (something that lacks in the Center) need to be studied and pursue by mentors/coaches.

As a team, we have the translational model that allows to target the athletes that could benefit with triathlon training to the point of being at least the National Champions.  Jack Daniels puts it simple and explains the reason why the Center fails producing viable athletes:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2WuInZs0ag&list=PLnAKD1Q8PRQ-lo2fMXbYdLyaJUHznbfvG&index=10

Triathlon and Perseverance

Perseverance is a key element to accomplish something.  Einstein would say: “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” At the same time, he said: “The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.” How long should we perseverate trying to solve a problem?  That depends on the culture and experience.  I remembered a friend doing a fellowship at Harvard who found out that a patient forged a signature to obtain more psychotropics, the pharmacy called him up to inform him.  He wanted to speak to the patient regarding the matter, but the “boss” just told him to call the police because he could end up in jail without a license.  The boss knew by experience that the best solution was to call the police.  My friend wanted to perseverate with the patient to learn more about her.

We have a case of perseverance in triathlon that has cost a lot of dollars to Mexico without expected results.  Any other nation would stop trying the same format except that money for the Federation/organizer in Mexico would stop flowing.  The economic reasons for perseverating won even when “fake news” were needed to support the program.  At the end, the purpose of keeping the program even when using “fake news” was not sport related.  It is just like my friend who wanted to call the patient to know more about the situation and the patient, losing the purpose of helping the patient to overcome addictions (sometimes the police can help to put limits to the situation).  Remember what Einstein said: “The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.”

The Mexican State has supported Crisanto Grajales since he started practicing triathlon because he has been the Mexican Champion, he even won the National Amateur Sportsmanship in 2016.  Camps around the world for him and his crew were paid by the state; budget is justified by winning events like the Central American Events:

02 Sep
200641

2006 Lausanne ITU Triathlon World Championships

Junior Men01:01:5526 Aug
20063

2006 Veracruz ITU Triathlon Pan American Cup

Elite Men01:57:4011 Sep
200546

2005 Gamagori ITU Triathlon World Championships

Junior Men01:00:0227 Aug
200521

2005 Veracruz ITU Triathlon Pan American Cup

Elite Men02:02:3906 Aug
20053

2005 Bogota PATCO Triathlon Pan American Championships

18-19 Male AG01:04:2408 May
200431

2004 Madeira ITU Triathlon World Championships

Junior Men01:09:5906 Dec
200338

2003 Queenstown ITU Triathlon World Championships

Junior Men01:07:14

Recent Highlights

- 16th place at the 2017 ITU World Triathlon Leeds;
- 13th place at the 2017 ITU World Triathlon Gold Coast;
- 19th place at the 2017 ITU World Triathlon Yokohama;
- 24th place at the 2017 New Plymouth ITU Triathlon World Cup;
- 21st place at the 2017 ITU World Triathlon Abu Dhabi;
- 7th place at the 2016 ITU World Triathlon Grand Final Cozumel; and 
- 12th place at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games.

 https://www.triathlon.org/athletes/profile/7503/crisanto_grajales

Resources are limited as well as time.  Ignorance allows "fake news" to be part of our History and our governing bodies believe in these news; people called it marketing effect.  The format we have used as a nation to create triathletes have failed long time ago and we continued using it because of economic reasons.

Triathlon Training for Beginners

The marketing on how to teach coaches triathlon training is just that, marketing.  The subject of teaching is related to the environment; it is not the same to teach in Afghanistan than in Norway.  To know the circumstances implies to know the level of understanding of the culture and education of the people receiving the training.

Like other advisers, Fontana, who served in a combat unit in the southern Afghan provinces of Zabul and Kandahar in 2011-12 as well as in Iraq, speaks admiringly of the fighting spirit of Afghan soldiers.

But he said the army is dogged by persistent problems with supplies, maintaining equipment and making sure units get proper support, issues which for years have been an obstacle to creating Afghan forces capable of standing on their own.

“They’re not scared of much, they will fight back fine, they’re good shots. Some of their soldiers are pretty crack,” Fontana told Reuters. “But it comes down to logistics and mission command.”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-usa-training/new-u-s-training-unit-in-afghanistan-faces-old-problems-idUSKBN1L20D1

When dealing with this kind of education we have to know that teaching the basics is the only thing to do to improve training; it comes down to teaching logistics and mission command.  Logistics and mission command are not subjects to teach easily and they are not appealing for the ones receiving training; they are not marketable or paid for.  Unfortunately, these two subjects are necessary to be taught if we are on the task of creating champions in these cultures and countries.

We have another rude example of lack of knowledge regarding the circumstances surrounding a specific population:

The quotation, first attributed to Marie Antoinette in 1843, was claimed to have been uttered during one of the famines that occurred in France during the reign of her husband, Louis XVI. Upon being told that the people were suffering due to widespread bread shortages, the Queen is said to have replied, "Then let them eat brioche."^[4] Although this anecdote was never cited by opponents of the monarchy at the time of the French Revolution, it did acquire great symbolic importance in subsequent histories, when pro-revolutionary historians sought to demonstrate the obliviousness and selfishness of the French upper classes at that time. As one biographer of the Queen notes, it was a particularly useful phrase to cite because "the staple food of the French peasantry and the working class was bread, absorbing 50 percent of their income, as opposed to 5 percent on fuel; the whole topic of bread was therefore the result of obsessional national interest."^[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake

Our athletes become outliers because they receive this basic education at early age, and even with this knowledge and actions we have a high degree of failures.