There is now a cloud appreciation society. You may have heard about it on the radio a few weeks ago. They have named a new cloud — undulus asperatus — from the Latin, which roughly translates as “agitated waves“. And the roughness is what matters. They are highly disturbed, heralding a storm, and yet tend to disperse without one. The pictures above are nothing of the sort: just cumulus or perhaps nearer cumulonimbus.

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now, and it is true what they say: that some clouds do have a silver lining, though I’m hesitant to agree yet that every one does. More research is needed.

It was sports day when these photos were taken earlier this week, and for the first time in a while it was not rained off, not even just the once. So these clouds were silver-lined if you were the harassed head teacher. But the sun did not shine for the smaller Chip off the Hack who came away with no honours. Last year, if memory serves, he won the egg and spoon race. This year, although the video evidence is incomplete, it does look like he finished the course without dropping the egg once, compared with his fellow competitors who all seemed to have at least one upset. Had the eggs been real, this would have been a feat in itself, but that day it was not the one being measured. Shall I add that the spoons were not institutional dessert spoons of yore, but wooden spoons with barely any dish? Ah well. He is his father’s son.

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Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that today Bryan Appleyard published his long-awaited interview with Art De Vany in The Sunday Times Magazine.

For new subscribers to this blog, Professor De Vany is a long-term advocate of a lifestyle that mimics that of our paleolithic ancestors, at least in terms of diet and exercise. The Knackered Hack has been echoing this approach, with increasing strictness, for well over a year now. Appleyard, who has himself adopted the diet and shed about a stone, noted how vigorous the professor was for a 71-year-old in various domains, about one of which I am myself still gathering data . If the professor’s nocturnal experience can be replicated, then this will probably be the clincher for a lot of people as they realise the value of the paleo diet in helping them with more than just weight-loss.

More seriously, you can’t help but feel pleased that De Vany’s devotion to the study, practice and dissemination of a more natural way of health is getting the recognition that it surely deserves. This is perhaps an important landmark when you consider that it was Nassim Taleb who told me in the same context that press coverage overstates the risk to society of terrorism and understates the risk of insulin insensitivity, so that we wander around with the wrong probabilistic map. Gary Taubes‘ The Diet Delusion gets a mention in the piece too.

One objection that could be raised is that economic pressures might now be pushing people towards a more refined-carb diet because it might appear cheaper. But in my own experience of stress — and there has been no shortage this year with a double bereavement and other tricky family matters to attend to — the cognitive benefits of the paleo lifestyle can also provide a necessary fresh energy and focus to tackle these new challenges. My basic advice would be to avoid “comfort” food at all costs.

I’m reading James Le Fanu‘s book on The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine at the moment (a tip also from Art’s early blogposts which I’m also in the process of re-reading). Like Taubes, Le Fanu debunks various post-war social and dietary theories of health, particularly with regard to cancer and heart disease. Cancer, Le Fanu says, is best understood as a disease of ageing rather than lifestyle. And yet, in contrast, it’s evident that De Vany (as Appleyard makes clear) is no quack, but someone who has applied the sciences of complexity to a rigorous examination of what we “modern lab-rats” really should be doing to forestall that process of terminal illness. Weight-loss is clearly such a central issue that a diet capable of returning you to your weight when you were 21 must be taken very seriously indeed.

Well, on my desk for a number of weeks (apart from many august tomes that I should have been reading and absorbing) one has stood out. It’s a 1936 children’s book, entitled Uncle Ray’s Story of the Stone-Age People. It looks like it came out just before De Vany was born. It belonged to my father-in-law: himself a sometime professor of mathematics, WHO health statistician, and poet. Alas, it certainly did not encourage him to follow anything like a paleo lifestyle. The one seemingly useful piece of science that the book contains is the suggestion that our ancestors broke the bones of their prey in order to consume the marrow.

Of course, while our diet may have changed a lot in the past 100,000 years (and arguably for the worse), this humble volume would indicate that casual male efforts to combine DIY and childcare have been alarming womankind for millennia with remarkable consistency. A more up-to-date orange-coloured book of Stone Age advice will soon be available here.

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I had a migraine a few weeks ago. As migraines go it was a breeze, really. There was no piercing headache, just a vice-like tension that I would normally associate with the before- and, to some extent, the after-effects. It was not a muscular tension-headache nor alcohol-related.

I didn’t experience the normal visual aura, but I’m sure it was a migraine because it was preceded by a strange faintness accompanied by shifting vision. I felt funny for most of the following week, then had a severe headache last Friday. The previous day I’d worked out hard in the gym. So I took medical advice. They said it was probably a virus that had triggered the original migraine; it was not surprising for the symptoms to be there a week later. Take paracetamol, they said. You’ll be fine. And so it turned out.

I’ve had one or two really severe migraines, but I’ve been very lucky. Apart from the couple in my teenage years that would conform to the agonising archetype blighting many people’s lives, I’ve been a light sufferer, by any measure. For 10 years of adulthood I had none. Then just a handful with no pattern or recognizable trigger. And some of those were easily knocked on the head by the early ingestion of paracetamol.

Most recently, my first half-marathon triggered one. And after the London marathon in 2005, I succumbed. In both cases my training had been incomplete: I’d overstretched myself. That would constitute a huge stress: an obvious trigger. I’ve wondered too if the demand for calcium/magnesium following that excessive hammering on bones and joints might not have helped. Too much to know.

Because I’ve escaped lightly, my knowledge of the significant progress of migraine science has been almost (but not entirely) non-existent. I noticed only yesterday, for instance, that Oliver Sacks wrote a book called Migraine in 1970 (with a revised edition published in 1992).

But the subject hove back into my view for a couple of reasons recently. I learned, for instance, that migraine as a neurological condition has a close genetic alignment with epilepsy, and that migraine sufferers are more susceptible to background noise; there is a similar phenomenon (which I don’t fully understand) in relation to eyesight.

My late brother suffered from epilepsy. But, because his epilepsy was apparently brought under control by a similar progress of pharmaceutical research, the family had been largely able to forget the underlying seriousness of a condition which reportedly affects 60 million people worldwide; migraine, by contrast, may affect as many as 300 million. The general impression — certainly one that my brother held — was that the major risk to his health came from the long-term effect of such chronic drug dependency on his vital organs. But it seemed that we could feel blessed that it wasn’t a whole lot worse; going back a generation or two, some family members’ lives had been completely wrecked, and this had chronic knock-on consequences for their carers. These days there are still those whose condition does not respond to treatment.

So, when I was researching my earlier post on Didier Sornette and the housing market, I came across a presentation he delivered in Oxford in January. It revealed some of the wider applications of complexity theory beyond the geophysics where Sornette started. In collaboration with several others, Sornette has published a paper or two explaining how the study of data sets of the brain activity of epileptics (specifically those whose condition does not respond to drugs) showed patterns akin to seismic data of earthquake incidence. The hope is that this might lead to some better method of prediction for sufferers.

The maths is rather intimidating and I’ll try to paraphrase the following as I go along, and link to definitions. Fingers crossed:-

That the pdf [probability density function] of SZ [seizure] energies E follows a power law, and more importantly that its exponent is beta almost equal to 2/3 (as for EQ [earthquake]), has far-reaching, statistical-clinical implications: the mean and variance of E are mathematically infinite, which means in practice that the largest SZ in a given time series controls their values (3). As a consequence, variability is dominant and “typical” has no meaning. The energy pdf, and specifically its heavy tail, also suggests an explanation, at a mathematical-conceptual level, for the proclivity and capacity of the human brain to support status epilepticus, a potentially fatal condition characterized by prolonged/frequent SZ during which the brain does not return to its “normal” state, even when SZ activity abates.

Well, I think the key point is ‘variability is dominant and “typical” has no meaning’, which we liberal artists would tend to capture with the expression ‘to be in a constant state of flux’ although that does not quite cover the sense of unbounded potential for an extreme spike. The problem is that we like to convince ourselves that there is some “normal”, some stability. And, on the surface, so it may appear.

And then Sornette explains:-

In seismology, it has been recognized that the many small, undetected EQ provide a major if not dominant contribution to the triggering future of EQ of any size (7). Prolonged recordings of brain cortical electrical activity (ECoG), the equivalent of seismographs, from epileptic humans and animals contain frequent, low intensity, short bursts of abnormal activity unperceived by the patient and observers and interspersed with infrequent, but longer, more widespread, and more intense bursts (convulsions) (4). The SZ-EQ analogy, including the evidence presented here for an inherent capacity of SZ to trigger future SZ, suggest that a workable prediction scheme should use the triggering by, not only past perceived (clinical) SZ, but also the myriad of unperceived (subclinical) abnormal neuronal bursts.

Sornette’s applied work highlights the cross-disciplinary relationship of the science of complexity and reminds us too that some part of our population suffers from extreme non-linearities in their day-to-day lives. And how more vivid can it be, as the picture above shows, than the fractal manifestation that is the migraine aura; when I first used to experience it, it would mark the beginning of hours of debilitation.

Meanwhile, news was reported a few weeks ago that untreatable epilepsy in children responded to a high-fat/low-carbohydrate diet. This is not particularly new. I notice now that Mark’s Daily Apple picked up a Science Daily report back in January to similar effect. Mark was also the original pointer to the picture above (thanks again Mark). So-called ketogenic diets have been known to be effective in treating even the worst sufferers from epilepsy as far back as the 1920s. And I even found a 1910 medical report quoted on a low-carb forum where a doctor had noted high levels of candy consumption among two chronic epileptic sufferers, one adult, one child, he’d been asked to treat. Drug therapies became preferred later because the higher-fat diets were found to be more difficult to follow, ostensibly for cultural reasons. Today there is a shortage of dieticians to help apply what you might call a clinical diet, where each gram of carbohydrate is very closely measured.

Well, it makes more and more sense to me that diet — and our modern carb-laden diet — has much more to answer for than we allow when we think that we are eating a “healthy mixed diet”. But it’s a struggle to remove easy grain-based carbs, and one has to wonder whether it is a sustainable option for the planet as a whole. Since I can afford it, I’m making the switch, but mainly because of the evidence that grains may play a role in activating cancer genes. I can’t ignore those pointers; I’m 43 and since January the oldest surviving member of my immediate family. Both my parents lived ostensibly healthy lives. That alone should predict that at least one would still be with us since my grandmother was alive just 7 years ago at 91.

Because of the complex, fast-moving chain of events that led to my brother’s death in January, it was hard for the surgeons to provide the family with a satisfactory narrative. I missed the chance to speak in person with the clinician; I was racing down the interstate in (melo)dramatic fashion in order to arrive before what turned out to be a technical pronouncement of death. My brother’s state on arrival in hospital the previous day was not materially different from when I arrived 10 minutes after the certification; he was on life-support simply for the purposes of organ-donation.

But that does not matter. What was described was a total neurological event — a seizure that affected all his vital functions. SUDEP — or sudden unexplained death in epilepsy — is what I understand it to have been, although that was not the word the doctor used. Or perhaps it was status epilepticus.

It’s ironic that neither SUDEP nor status epilepticus was something we knew about beforehand, or ever discussed as a possibility within our family. As I said, my brother’s principle pre-occupation in terms of epilepsy-related health (based on counselling I assume he received quite early on in his life) was that his long-term health would be compromised by the medicine he took rather than the diet he was exposed to. I think it made him fatalistic. I have no recollection that a low-carbohydrate diet would have improved his teenage outcomes, and it was something my mother would surely have responded to, had she known.

Later in life, my brother ate a standard North American diet, and there is no suggestion that this was a contributory factor to his SUDEP, but I have to wonder. Not least because the science of low-carb and the science of earthquakes both point to epilepsy from different perspectives. And scientists like Sornette and De Vany are using the same maths across these various domains.

Changing diet may not be a panacea, and I may already have sown the seeds of my own demise, but you don’t not pay into a pension scheme because you didn’t pay in before. That sort of fatalism does lead to literal and metaphorical penury. But above all else, these findings all suggest that a lot more critical reporting should be applied to questions of public health, preventative medicine, exercise, diet fads and even agricultural subsidy. That obviously ain’t happening at the moment. Indeed, the recent coverage of the ketogenic diet in the BBC/Lancet does not consider whether a lower carb diet contributes to a reduced risk of seizure more generally, and therefore might act to forestall a sufferer reaching the kind of tipping point that Sornette’s science is point toward. It is dealt with in the specific of untreatable epilepsy with no extrapolation that more general metabolic risk factors need to be considered or highlighted for all sufferers.

Well, when I asked in one of the leading cookery shops with a vast, if not complete, array of cookery titles if they had anything on the paleo diet, they had no clue what I was talking about, unsurprisingly. So there is much work to be done. That said, Nassim Taleb‘s advocacy in The Sunday Times the other day certainly has led to more Googling of “paleo diet” and other associated terms, from what I can see here, including searches for Prof De Vany.

Photo credit Auntie P @ Flickr (CC)

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So, I was fretting about underdogs in the last post. This past weekend, the Sunday Times Magazine ran a long interview with Nassim Taleb in which he was described as “now the hottest thinker in the world”, charging up to $60,000 per speaking engagement, with the great and good beating a path to his door — from the world’s leading banks to NASA.

Interestingly, the interview by Bryan Appleyard included lunch and, naturally, had Nassim following Art De Vany‘s dietary prescriptions of evolutionary fitness. Well, some of my most loyal readers will have heard it here first.

For other reasons (and by accident) I found an old email pitch yesterday that I made in 2003 to a magazine on corporate governance; let’s say this was during my ugly duckling phase:-

Also, I have an interview idea which you might be interested in. Have you heard of a book Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb–a maths professor and hedge fund trader from the US? He is in town in a few weeks and I thought I might try and get a hold of him. Although his background is in quantitative trading, he has some interesting things to say about luck and probability in a business context, and it has struck me that this could provide some interesting reflections from a corporate governance point of view. The underlying theme would be that over-remunerating senior executives is even more hazardous than we think if both success and failure may owe more to luck than judgement, backed up by a good dose of sound mathematics of course.

Let me know if you think it a bit too outlandish. My owns sense is that Taleb and others are leading market thinkers and their ideas will permeate downwards in due course.

I didn’t get a commission.

Back in those days, even though Fooled By Randomness was a bestseller, you could still turn up at the now-disappeared Financial World Bookshop in Bishopsgate and hear Taleb talk for nothing to a small and select audience of besuited quants and the odd unshaven, head-scratching scribe. And you try and tell that to the young people of today — will they believe you? No.

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Great Britain again dominated the World Track Cycling Championship at the Manchester Velodrome this weekend. I watched only briefly, taking a break from the Twitter stream to see an interview with team psychologist Steve Peters.

Peters is something of a phenomenon, if not a genius; Undergraduate Dean of Sheffield University, much in demand in a variety of UK sports, he’s a sometime visitor to the England rugby training camp here at the Sports Training Village in Bath — which, by the way, seemed to be a secret he did not want told on national TV.

But most interestingly, perhaps, he is a former forensic psychologist, who spent many years working in Rampton Secure Hospital, exemplifying our own belief here at Knackered Towers that the study of that which is broken yields useful lessons if you want to succeed.

If that were not enough, the unassuming Dr Peters is a highly competitive Masters M50 sprint champion (that’s running fast for old folks). His training regimen, discussed here, would likely pass muster with that most eminent of critical thinkers on all things sporty, Professor Art de Vany. It’s very unorthodox.

Now, recently I’ve been tempted to comment on Reuters’ CEO Tom Glocer’s blog, but held back. Tom was talking about national character, negativity and optimism. If I understood his point correctly, he was saying that if only you think positively, good things will follow (that was the post title in any event). He referred to the need for an optimistic outlook, drawing on the athletic coach and the self-talking salesman as examples.

You can’t really argue with that. Except that, as Ed Smith painted in his book, the truth is a lot less certain and requires a more subjunctive qualification: think positively and good things might happen. The corollary being, think negatively and it ain’t gonna happen, not now, not never. And that’s more my own experience; as Woody Allen would have it, 80 pct of life is about turning up.

But, in my own corporate experience, positivity and negativity tend to be understood in very binary terms. And because of that, useful information about how products could be improved (or an organization better configured) does not flow freely up the ranks. With tools like wikis, of course, it now flows much more freely across reporting lines, if managers take the step to encourage their use. And it flows pretty freely among the folks who stand outside the office smoking, but let’s not go there.

Returning to individual and team confidence, what Peters had to say was quite brief but highly nuanced. What was clear was that positive thinking, and the psychological tools needed to create it, were not straightforward: they were specific to the individual, but also situational depending on the person, whether a team was involved, the type of event, the coach, championship and location. What mattered was educating athletes into how their minds worked, what trigger points led to negative emotions, and how those could be turned around.

Vicky Pendleton, the diminutive and self-confessed “girly girl” who won two gold medals and a silver over the weekend, had lacked confidence, according to Peters, when he started working with her. But he described how she had been able to train herself to turn her mood around within 10 minutes of a setback.

Peters explained how large events, such as the Olympics, create a huge range of distractions (from transport to security) each of which will affect each athlete differently, and for which all need to be prepared if they are to secure their own best chance of success.

What makes sport an interesting crucible through which to understand performance these days is that there is just so much of it, it is so professional, and there is so much research (physiological, neurological, psychological) . And it produces characters like Peters, Martin O’Neil and Ed Smith.

Sportsmen and women are dealing with the most intense of situations in which their vulnerabilities are very public, even on a day-to-day basis in training. They have a lot of complex information to understand, and failure to self-manage can quickly lead to injury, loss of form, loss of a place on the team, loss of funding, denial of access to quality coaching, etc. And that ignores the consequence of a random fall or illness at a critical moment in a training schedule. This cascade gathers its own momentum because at each stage the athlete finds him or herself increasingly isolated, so the reversal becomes commensurately difficult to effect.

It should not be forgotten, and if you have ever trained really hard you will know, that resulting sharp mood swings can affect motivations and relationships outside of the sport as the body and mind adapt and recover from the process of extreme exertion. Indeed, a protracted bad mood is a sign of over-training syndrome which is very hard to pinpoint in oneself until it’s too late, and takes a surprisingly long time to recover from.

There don’t seem to be enough Steve Peters to go round sport, let alone international business. I wonder how we should go about making more?

Photo: British Cycling

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In 2005, I came 9,405th in the London Marathon in just under four hours (3:55:36, to be precise). Last year I had a plan that I would do better, and would cover it as a freelance journalist too. The organisers obliged, and I realised I’d better start a blog. The Knackered Hack was born to track my exploration of endurance fitness, and some of the issues sports can reveal to us as amateurs: something like the professional lessons of Ed Smith’s book, which I reviewed only the other day.

But I lost eight weeks of training from the first 10 of 2007 to two viruses. Thus my hopes of running a marathon were in shreds. That was a lesson in itself. And it was about that time that Nassim Taleb contacted me so that his publishers could send me a copy of The Black Swan to review. The rest, as they say, is path dependence…

Last week, Guy Kawasaki listed The Knackered Hack as one of the web’s leading journalism blogs at his newly-launched aggregation site: Alltop.com.

Not all of you will be familiar with Guy. That’s OK, because the patron saint of us uncertain folks is Herbert Simon, who some will know coined the term “bounded rationality”, which incorporates the idea that you can’t know everything. Admitting as much did not stop Simon from winning a Nobel Memorial Prize.

But I digress. Guy was one of the early Mac team, he is a venture capitalist, and renowned speaker. And Alltop.com is aimed at us head-scratchers, who don’t quite know where to start sometimes. His company is also called Garage Technology Ventures. QED.

I’m bound to say that Alltop.com is a great site, and if you start using it you’ll be an early adopter because Guy and colleagues only really announced it a few weeks ago. Although I’m no expert in these things, some of you may find that the concept is broadly similar to popurls.com. What Guy is doing is taking a non-Google, non-quant view at the web, looking for influencers and connectors, especially through the prism of Twitter and the trust networks it is both generating and reflecting.

Here is what Guy said about it on his blog:-

A good metaphor is that Alltop is an “online magazine rack” that displays the news from the top publications and blogs. Our goal is to satisfy the information needs of the 99% of Internet users who will never use an RSS feed reader or create a custom page. Think of it as ‘aggregation without the aggravation.’”

If I’m allowed to say one thing I really like about it, it is the clean way that the first few lines of each news or blog entry open up as floating text (see above) and allow you a quick preview of the contents. There are other technologies that try to do something like that, but this reminds me of something I wanted way back in the 1990s as a way to allow the reporter to mask explanations of complex terms that would get in the way of readability or the patience of cognoscenti. Like many bloggers, I use Wikipedia for that these days in most instances, but it does involve opening up a new window/tab. So it will be great when that technology finds its way into more general use.

The week before last was Annie Hall week at home here, which contains Woody Allen’s paraphrased reference to the Groucho Marx joke: “I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member”. It was not my intention to start a journalism blog, and I’m not doing this for the brethren, but I’m grateful for the recognition. Of course, I do think journalism is important, and I do write about journalism frequently on this blog. And just so that there’s no doubt that this IS a journalism blog (amongst other things), I’ve decided to celebrate my Alltop accolade with the introduction of a new category on the right there: “journalism”. As I’m learning more and more, there are two certainties in this new world of ours: death and taxonomy.

And before we get carried away that we’ve reached the A-list, Guy shares some interesting ideas about influence from different sources on his blog here and here, that further explains perhaps our apparent non-linear rise out of the Long Tail‘s long tail.

Of course, for regular readers of KH, especially those who’ve subscribed to the email, or feed or follow the marginal entertainment of my Twitter service, you can feel especially vindicated for your loyalty and encouragement of this tired soul . Thank you.

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With it’s playful green and red cartoon dust jacket, Ed Smith‘s What Sport Tells Us About Life: Bradman’s Average, Zidane’s Kiss and Other Sporting Lessons (Penguin Books, £14.99) could easily be taken for a belated Christmas stocking-filler, destined for a long stay in the bathroom’s literature section. But it deserves to be taken seriously. As the inside cover says:

Sport is a condensed version of life — only it matters less and comes up with better statistics.”

I realised this myself some time ago, and periodically spend more time following sports science than business and finance. And it was one of the thematic reasons for starting the Knackered Hack in the first place, to explore what could be learned from sport in general and my own participation in it in particular, without being glib. The road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions…

Smith, who is captain of Middlesex County Cricket Club, offers up sport as an under-used analytical resource from which can be drawn a number of intellectual and practical lessons about education, business, politics, the study of history, etc. The book takes the form of a series of essays, each kicking off from one sporting theme and following where any beam of light is usefully shed.

Smith takes in some of the old chestnuts such as: are our sporting heroes what they used to be? (the golden age hypothesis says no) or are our sportsmen and women getting perpetually better? (evolutionary theory says yes); is sport too commercial? — you’ve heard these discussed in the pub no doubt. He also covers some remarkable new ground for me, making some startling and insightful connections.

Before we get into cricket v baseball, as Smith himself explores, know that Smith understands both games well, and bigs up baseball as a crucible for pithy life observation, just as obsessive fans would claim. And he critiques the Moneyball strategy of the Oakland As from a player’s perspective. He also reveals baseball to be most likely a French invention, overtaking cricket for popularity in the Civil War (American of course) because of rough pitches, and then being gamed by some 19th century spin doctor called A. G. Spalding, who touted it that baseball championed the egalitarian, in contrast to the effeteness of cricket. Yes, he was just trying to sell more gear. And it worked. Despite the fact that cricket had enjoyed wide social acceptance in the US earlier in the century, it fell into terminal decline as a national pastime.

I’m no expert on Schumpeter’s oeuvre — though I’ve lived through one or two creative destruction episodes. But after 87 pages of What Sport Tells Us, all I could think of was Schumpeter, Schumpeter, Schumpeter. Smith elaborates on the fluctuating fortunes of sport, not just in terms of games and spectacle. He shows how at an industry (and at a national cultural) level the individual sporting disciplines are so rich themselves in creative destruction, confounding the stereotypes that fans, commentators and team owners all too frequently apply. On page 88, Smith finally drops the great man’s name. For the reader like me it was a back-of-the-net moment, as they say in soccer. Well-scored, Ed! When Penguin offered me the book for review, I hadn’t expected to find a discussion of how the free market has worked its invisible magic to raise the salaries of “left tackles” in American football. These hulks go unwatched on the field of play because all eyes follow the star quarter-back; but their presence determines whether the star player makes the goal or ends up face down in the mud. It all made sense to me. Schumpeter, he the man!

Someone should get Russ Roberts at EconTalk to interview Smith for a podcast. Smith is a broadcaster himself, having fronted a BBC programme called Peak Performance, which is sadly no longer in their online archive. In Roberts’ podcast with Schumpeter biographer Thomas McCraw, he highlights that when we observe an economic phenomenon like income inequality, the dominance of particular corporations (or, I’d suggest, the current credit crunch) we tend to see only the present snapshot in time; we miss the continuum. This can be both positive and negative. Bad news and bad money can drive out the good. But, Smith shows us that in the larger sweep of sporting history as well, so much of the hand-wringing of the short run is misplaced.

He also despatches sporting cliches all over the ground like loose bowling. He sends the concept of professionalism for six, hits a homerun against the notion of talent’s primacy, but saves his best shot for the role of luck and our contradictory and mistaken attitude to how it operates both in games, and also how it influences entire career paths.

Believing that ‘you can be whatever you want to be’, on the other hand, is actually a rather easy doctrine. (At least until you realize the idea has led you up the garden path.) The fallacy that desire and determination hold the keys to all success appeals to the inner adolescent in us that cannot bear the thought of hard work going to waste. I try, ergo I succeed; the world is just, so I will prevail; there is a fair distribution of justice, so I will be lauded. Such a shame that it isn’t true.

Of course, that logic is not reversible. Sitting around waiting for luck to come your way is as misguided as thinking that good things always come to those who ‘want it enough.’ The truth is that determination and desire are necessary but not sufficient. We have to try like crazy; we have to retain a relentless sense of determination; we have to make sacrifices and take the road less travelled. And yet still there are no guarantees. Even after all that, we may come up empty-handed. That is the bleak but unavoidable logic of anyone who has deep ambitions.”

But before we get too depressed by the potential tragedy of it all, he has a whole chapter celebrating the need to retain a sense of amateur love for the game, but not in the long out-dated Corinthian notion. Quoting Simon Barnes, quoting Brazilian World Cup Coach Felipe Scolari:-

Scolari said: ‘My priority is to ensure that players feel more amateur than professional. Thirty to forty years ago, the effort was the other way. Now there is so much professionalism, we have to revert to urging players to like the game, love it, do it with joy.’

[Barnes continues] This is not romantic twaddle. It is a fact that the more important something gets, the harder it is to do it well. We can all walk along the kerbstone in safety, but if the drop were not six inches but six miles, how then would we walk? Football matters too much; it matters to the players too much. As a result, the mattering gets in the way of the playing.”

In Smith’s own words:-

All professional sportsmen battle with their fears and anxieties. And by no means do they always conquer them. We live on the brink of disappointment, of failure, of being dropped, of getting sacked, of retreating back into civilian life with our dreams unfulfilled. That is the parlous state in which most sportsmen usually find themselves. All of us have experienced downward spirals of anxiety and introspection – I am losing form, my place is in jeopardy, my career could be in danger. Often you deny the problem, which secretly increases your anxiety – you are scared of admitting your fears even to yourself – and your form worsens still further.

He continues:-

Remove the obstacles to playing well. Anxiety is one of the obstacles. Worrying is one of the obstacles. Failing to focus simply and only on the job in hand is one of the obstacles [...] Dreading failure is one of the obstacles. Now you are thinking like a player again that is usually a beginning of a return to form.

The exposure to failure that really loving your sport entails is painful. The following paragraph(s) sang out particularly plaintively to the Knackered ears:

Trying desperately hard and not getting what you want is decent summary of what almost all sportsmen go through. The more deeply you compete and the greater the quality of your caring (to lift a line from Larkin), the more it hurts when you lose, or fail, or fall short. Each time a competitor taps into the essence of his personality in an attempt to win a sports match, he takes a risk. The risk is that he will get no reward — in the sense of a win or a personal triumph — for exposing himself to that degree of psychological rawness. It is easy to resent having tried so hard in the first place.

On the other hand, being too disengaged isn’t the answer, as the next paragraph elaborates:-

If it didn’t get us anywhere today, why should I bother to care so deeply next time? One answer is that being prepared and able to experience such deep emotions, and being exposed to that degree of disappointment, is a privilege not open to many. It doesn’t feel like a privilege at the time. It feels like hell. But it makes for a life more fully lived. After ten years playing professional sport, I have come to the startling conclusion that a big part of me actually enjoys caring about sport, even when that caring expresses itself as pain at losing. I wouldn’t rather life was more pallid. It sometimes reminds me that I am not wasting my time — and protects me a little from the resigned emptiness we all dread in sport.”

So don’t be put off from ordering a copy from Amazon.uk or Amazon.ca to steal a march on any US publication plans that Penguin has. He is good on this stuff, you know. He read History at Cambridge, and because he is younger than me, has been more exposed to counter-factualism, which he uses quite devastatingly to examine some rather controversial sporting triumphs, like England’s unexpected win in the 2005 Ashes cricket series against Australia.

And to show that someone has already deftly combined sport and philosophy, a re-run of one of my favourites. Schumpeter didn’t make the team on this occasion, but then… that was the story of his life.

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For anyone who missed it, Peter Day’s In Business programme on BBC Radio 4 several weeks ago highlighted the peculiarities of competition and collaboration in the Cambridge University Boat Club in preparing for the selection of its 1st VIII for the annual Oxford vs Cambridge Boat Race, or The Boat Race to be precise. (Podcast for download here.)

Judge Business School reader Marc De Rond said that business researchers have had difficulty identifying the impact of one individual within teams. In sport, it is a little easier and he set out to study his local rowing club. Cambridge coach, Duncan Holland, put it thus:-

Rowers are very experienced at making teams because in an eight, in comparison to other sports, you can’t have a star and some water carriers… An eight really is as fast as the slowest member, so rowers have a lot of experience of getting on together and working out how slightly better people can get on with slightly lesser people and focusing on a common goal.”

However, there was an added complexity. All members of the squad have to row perfectly together, but this requirement to co-ordinate their actions perfectly together was simultaneous with their own competitive need to capture the next person’s place in the first team, or “blue” boat.

De Rond’s study noted that the qualities that make the alpha-male rowers good competitors, also make them difficult. They think quickly, believe they can anticipate what will be said to them, and are surprisingly oblivious to the feelings of others. In this instance the skills needed of the coach are of a high order if the team is to be successful.

It may also mean picking an inferior rower in some instances to provide social buffering between otherwise dysfunctionally aggressive behaviours. They highlighted the way in which a majority of the Blue boat chose Dan O’Shaughnessy to row with them rather than a stronger rower, because his sense of humour, among other things, permitted them to relate to one another in a way that they could not on their own. And so they would row faster.

Echoing the work of Scott Page, which we have noted several times, Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice at the London Business School said:-

We know that the relationships we have in teams are at the heart of how we feel about our companies. We stay in our companies because we love working as a member of a team and we leave them because we hate working in that team. There is an argument that people are naturally cooperative and that what has happened in organizations is we’ve put an overlay of competition which actually destroys the humanness of being in a team and the pleasure of working.

Having studied companies including Goldman Sachs and Google, she said strong teams had three things in common: all teams were prepared to cooperate with one another, they all had diverse points of view, they all had a mission or a question that was very exciting for them.

She said the best teams for a highly innovative product comprise members from different countries, different mindsets and different genders. Male and female teams are more productive than single gender teams.

A group of experts is only good at finding a better way to do what they do well. Yet they struggle to innovate. Innovation comes from a clash of ideas. And a common mistake leaders make is in believing they should choose all the participants in a team. The best teams are those where there is a core, and then volunteers come in because they are excited by the idea of participation in the project. Naturally, Google’s “twenty-per-cent time” was offered as a compelling example.

Another interesting proviso was to not make diverse teams socialise before they work together. It only makes them realise how much they don’t like each other.

This dissonance was central to Scott Page’s RSA seminar last spring. The New York Times interviewed him in early January here. He offered a mathematical reflection of how all this works:-

What the model showed was that diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups of the best individuals at solving problems. The reason: the diverse groups got stuck less often than the smart individuals, who tended to think similarly.

The other thing we did was to show in mathematical terms how when making predictions, a group’s errors depend in equal parts on the ability of its members to predict and their diversity. This second theorem can be expressed as an equation: collective accuracy = average accuracy + diversity.”

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Bonking. It’s not such a good idea to mention this in polite company, unless you’re amongst cyclists. You’ll find that “bonking” means something quite different to these athletes. Whilst for most of us (in the correct circumstances) the idea of “a bonk” would normally be welcomed, for the cyclist it’s something to be avoided.

I used to understand “the bonk” as a sensation felt by a competitor towards the end of a Tour de France stage, where all the glycogen or fuel stores in their muscles has been exhausted. They’ve hit what marathoners call “the wall”. They are basically out of gas*.

For many years I commuted by bike between Twickenham (in West London) and Fleet Street. I would ride hard and fast. I knew nothing about modulating effort or recovery. And this intensity of a monotonous daily activity, I now understand, led to overtraining syndrome.

On occasions I’d cycle home late in the evening, perhaps delayed by a transatlantic conference call. I’d have eaten a chocolate bar (usually Snickers) earlier in the afternoon. By halfway, where I crossed the Thames at Putney Bridge (the famous start of the Boat Race) I was in an unexplained state of collapse, as if I had rowed stroke to the Mortlake finish for the Oxford eight. My head was light, my legs were leaden, like I was pedaling through treacle. Ready to faint, I’d dash to the nearest gas station and stuff my face with potato chips*.

I used to joke that these episodes were “the bonk”, thinking that I was probably misusing the term. Because how could 6 miles pretty much on the flat equate to a professional stage over the French Alps? However, while reading Art De Vany’s blog only a few weeks ago, I saw the term “bonk” applied to just such a modest implosion, and it gave me pause. It seemed to be saying something about my metabolism which confirmed a growing intuition that I had been, was, or was becoming, somewhat insulin-resistant.

The really bad part of all this is that there are a lot of high insulin people out there who can “bonk” from low blood sugar if they don’t get their carb hit. And then after the hit wears off, they may “bonk” again. They may be driving when this happens and are easily angered and lose concentration. They can be a danger to themselves and others when this happens. I would bet a fair number of auto accidents could be traced to blood glucose/insulin surges.”

And when you’re on a bike, you don’t want to meet those people coming the other way.

So, since Christmas I’ve been trying to apply De Vany’s paleo diet strictures (which have informed some of my thinking for a while now) with much greater observance. The effects on my current health — as far as I can determine — have been tangible, and arguably dramatic.

Way back in those glorious days when I used to dash home on my hand-built pillar-box red Condor racing bike, with its 27 gleaming Campagnolo gears (see below) I figured out a strategy to see off the bonk.

I called it “bringing the banana forward”. This terminology caused much mirth among my Canadian in-laws at the time. But I’d realised one thing about diet through this experience: the mid-afternoon Snickers bar was the principal cause of this strange loss of fuel-supply by late evening. I cut that out and ate a banana just before leaving the office instead. But that did not immediately do the trick. I guessed this was because, depending on how ripe a banana is, it can break down into sugars quite slowly. Timing the banana became an obsessive-compulsive ritual ahead of my evening departure. I eventually solved the problem by eating the banana a little earlier – i.e. bringing the banana forward.

Now, what De Vany’s blog was describing was in the context of hypoglycaemic episodes. The essence of much of this is that you don’t have to be diagnosed diabetic to experience wild swings in energy, attention, and perhaps even consciousness. In short, too many carbs at the wrong time can drive you bananas.

* I have self-consciously americanized this post, so apologies to all my British readers who expected to see the words “petroleum spirit” and “crisps”.

Photo credits: banana -eko- , campag: knackeredhack

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As promised from yesterday, another great clip, which will be the best eight minutes you spend today.

If surfing brings out the extreme then surely Grant Washburn‘s double-negative referring to Jeff Clark, Maverick’s organizer and the first person to tackle the waves head-on, takes some topping:

It wasn’t obvious that he was..uh…not crazy.”

And here we are talking about an earth-moving experience. As Bill Martin, KTVU Chief Meteorologist says:-

When you talk about energy release the most amazing thing I have ever heard — and this is absolutely the case — when the waves get big out here and they crash onto the North American plate, they register on the UC Berkeley seismograph.”

Go here for full screen version from KQED. If you have kids, show it to them.  They’ll love it.

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