If you are a parent of a state school pupil in the UK, it is sports day across the country this week. Even though it is already Wednesday, tardily I’ve decided that we’ll focus on sports this week; coming first is not important, it’s the taking part that counts.

Sports day itself presents a variety of hazards for the modern parent. On average you can expect to lose two afternoons of work. Worse still you may get caught in an on-again, off-again spiral caused by the British weather. There is also the obligation to join what can be the life-threatening race between parents that normally concludes proceedings.

It’s no joke. A friend of ours once broke an achilles tendon in the fathers’ sack race. As far as I can recall, it took a good year to heal properly. And there’s worse when you consider the headline on the front page of Peak Performance sports science newsletter that dropped through the mailbox this morning screaming “Why fit athletes suddenly drop dead, and how to stop it happening“. Even dedicated, fit parents will throw themselves into a thirty-yard dash without any thought of a warm-up, potentially jeopardising months of marathon or triathlon training for a few moments of juvenile competition and the kind of glory that may have eluded them when they were at school. Having just turned 42 last birthday, even my hopes of acquiring such cod-glory are now fading.

But I did threaten to attend in Lycra and running spikes after last year because it was getting so competitive. I don’t know what evolutionary principle is at play, but paint some white lines on a few short metres of a grassy field and the whole gamut of free-market capitalist behaviours becomes apparent. Last year, one class teacher cleverly mitigated against most of this by organising a team-based egg-and-spoon race, with the each class’s parents competing against the other. It was a way of enforcing the collaboration of, let’s say, diverse perspectives; and of course it slowed everything down. But that did not stop me landing on my April in Paris, to the amusement of several hundred kids.

But I needn’t have worried this year. The parents’ — let alone the teachers’– race never got started. There was no explanation — perhaps it was health and safety considerations? Some may have been relieved. But, on reflection, I think the kids get a lot out of pleasure out of seeing their parents give their all. And last year’s team competition was a lot of fun, despite the damage to my coccyx and pride.

I was also raring to go this week because last Thursday my resting or basal heart rate fell to 42. This is about the lowest I’ve ever recorded it. It indicates, in a way, that I am not knackered any more, but very fit.

For people not familiar with heart-rate monitoring, average untrained individuals have resting heart rates ranging from 60 bpm to 80 bpm. I’ve become sort of obsessed with heart rate, and the past few months, while very little has gone into the heart-rate category of the Knackered Hack blog, lots of work has been going on under the bonnet/hood.

Regular readers will recall that the kind people at Polar gave me an RS800 computer to prepare for the London Marathon, but a combination of viruses over the winter kept me from training for nearly two months. As I’ve been tentative about getting injured or ill again, I’ve been intrigued to use a particular feature of the watch/monitor which tells me exactly how hard to exercise. It stops me from getting too gung-ho. It sets a zone based on something called “heart-rate variability”, which the mathematically-inclined will probably understand has something to do with Mandelbrotian fractals. Basically, an algorithm can assess (through changes in the period between heart-beats) exactly how fit you are that day. The weird thing is that because heart-rate is correlated with mental function too, it appears to know you well, body and mind! More on that in another post.

So, I have patiently followed this computer’s guidance through its OwnZone function which has, for a couple of months, advised fairly cautious training in terms of intensity. It does not indicate duration, by the way, so the length of my runs has been extending.

But, in the past couple of weeks I felt fit enough for some higher intensity stuff. And so, inspired by Art de Vany’s guidance on the value of sprints and a beginner’s-guide-to-strength-and-endurance- training-for-runners from Peak Performance, I did two sessions in the past fortnight running flat out for 30 seconds with 15 second breaks to a total of six times in a set. This is followed by a minute and a half of rest before repeating another three times.

It takes commitment, and I would not have dreamed of doing it years ago when I first started making tentative steps to get fit through running. My previous attempts to do higher intensity training also ended in failure because I bit off more than I could chew.

So what does it all mean? Somehow, I’ve got my heart-rate well down by strengthening the heart muscle by about eight beats per minute over three months. But the benefits are more than purely physiological. I’ve more energy, and I’m more efficient. I get more done. Stuff that used to fox me — like figuring out how to use more than the basic default position on the digital camera — now comes naturally. There are other things I’ve been doing which have been contributing to feeling better, but this high intensity stuff has been the kicker. Just as de Vany and Taleb have observed, an exercise regime that includes some extremes of effort appears to work better than one of slow routine.

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Sport is usually about expanding one’s aerobic capacity. Knackered Downunder spots a story where that logic gets turned upside down

A 15-year-old who was born with a rare congenital heart defect, or “functional single ventricle” — which means she is missing one of the four chambers of the heart, and the blood vessels are reversed, so that there is no pump to take oxygen to her lungs — is rewriting sports history. Her story shows how a combination of technology and determination can redefine the boundaries of those suffering from some form of impairment.

According to the Observer, American MacKinzie Kline, who survived heart surgery soon after she was born in 1992 and was given only five years to live, is fast becoming a golf champion and ranked as the world’s number one 14-year-old golfer in 2006.

Mac — as she is known — lives with 80 per cent of the average person’s oxygen and has no aerobic capacity at all. But by age 10 she had beaten girls four years older to become California junior champion: a feat she repeated the following year, the newspaper says. Then, at age 12, she qualified for the US Women’s Amateur Public Links tournament and now competes at the country’s highest under 18 level, in the USGA’s Junior Girls’ Championship. She is expected to turn pro in three years’ time.

Annika Sorenstam, one of world’s best female golfers, said of her:-

She is amazing, and the true definition of a grinder. Her accomplishments speak for themselves: her inspiring story, of overcoming odds and of chasing her dreams both on and off the course, is a life story in and of itself.”

Last month, Sorenstam invited Mac to play as a guest in the LPGA tournament of which she was the host. Mac was allowed to travel across the course in a motorised cart, which — and this is where the technology comes in — carried a special oxygen machine from which she breathed between strokes. She thereby became the first disabled athlete to compete in the LPGA tour.

The machine, called the Eclipse and designed by SeQual Technologies in San Diego, has been on the market for only a year, says the Guardian, adding, “It’s the size of a small suitcase or large laptop and magically performs the job of several hefty oxygen canisters by producing medical-grade oxygen out of thin air. ”

Mac’s father, John Kline thinks the ever-present backdrop of death might be what gives Mac her abilities:-

You know, if you ask her she’ll say, “It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care if it’s 15 years or 30 years.” But I really think she thinks about it. Maybe that’s why she has a better perspective on where she’s going, what her time frame is, and how she’s going to get there – which I haven’t seen in many 15-year-olds.”

One in every hundred newborns suffers from a congenital heart defect. In the US, 40,000 affected children will be born this year alone.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

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Nassim Taleb, author of the New York Times bestseller The Black Swan, was the first person ever to email me here at the Knackered Hack.

No, honestly, it’s true. In the annals of this blog, that was seen as something of a red-letter day (if not a black swan event). But its relative importance on the part of the sender was naturally quite insignificant. Let’s say, our relationship was perfectly asymmetrical. So, when I turned up to meet Taleb at his London hotel recently, without the more imposing affiliation of a national media title with which to introduce myself, it took a while for it to sink in just who in publicity hell I was.

Finally, after 10 minutes, the author exclaimed in his soft Levantine accent: “Ah, I remember! You’re the marathon guy with the picture!”

Rarely have I been so pleased to be recognised for so little. It was nice to know that I registered with Taleb less as a total “unknown, unknown” and more as just faintly forgettable. Taleb had been researching blogs with a view to publicising his latest book, and had hit on this humble site. “I saw you writing about my book Fooled by Randomness on a marathon blog. I said to myself, this guy’s interesting!”

Even better! It’s a rare journalist who gets an actual compliment from the The Black Swan author.

As we exchanged initial small talk about exercise, I explained that I was a bit annoyed by all this complexity stuff of his, because his work has devalued most of my post-graduate business studies. Moreover, after leaving business school I moved on to devote a lot of my spare time to marathon training. But lately, having suffered repeated illness and injury and read the blog of another student of complexity, Art De Vany, I’d been led to the conclusion that this marathon malarkey might be injurious to health as well.

At this point a jet-lagged, publicity-dazed Taleb came alive: “So you also read de Vany! So we read the same sites! Let me tell you. Art de Vany is a phenomenon!” And we were off into what seemed like a byway of distraction, but is actually central to what The Black Swan is all about: empirical medicine, serendipity, variation, fat tails, fractals, self-experimentation, and the potential value of blogs and bloggers to Taleb’s utopian world that he calls “Epistemocracy”.

The interview wasn’t supposed to be very long because Taleb was weary from his packed publicity schedule, but he suggested we grab some lunch, and I leapt at the chance. We headed for an Indian restaurant round the corner where the ensuing conversation was as rich and intense as my chicken jalfrezi, and it’s highly probable that I didn’t understand everything. Taleb’s notion of Epistemocracy is a world where we are all more circumspect about the quality of our own knowledge. So, very much in that spirit, this interview should be taken with the health warning that, while I’m sure Taleb knew what he was talking about, the interviewer may not have done. However, Professor Taleb, if he is still watching, always has the option of the comments section for redress and clarification.

On Diet, Art De Vany, Exercise and Empirical Medicine

I’d heard Taleb explain to an audience at the RSA a few days earlier that on a visit to Italy, where he talked about Umberto Eco’s library (as he does in The Black Swan), several people pointed out the physical likeness between him and the slightly portly Eco. It was at this point, Taleb said with a smile, that he decided to go on a diet. So, I was a little interested to see how healthy his appetite was.

Once seated in the restaurant, Taleb told me he had stopped commuting by bicycle to his offices at his trading fund Empirica LLC four years earlier. He had been doing 50km per day, every day. He started going to the gym instead, but no amount of work seemed to keep his weight down. So, when he decided to diet, De Vany’s ideas on fitness suddenly struck home.

I realised that bicycle riding was making me lose weight because along that route there were four of five spots that are so tough that you think you are going to die at the end. And that was the only thing that was useful. So now what I do is use my bicycle to go up one of the hills four or five times, once a week. That is sufficient. Or I go to the health club and bring my heart rate to the max for 15 minutes. So 15 minutes’ work out – and that I got from Art De Vany – and look, I automatically lost 15 pounds.”

The essence of De Vany’s ideas is that the body is a complex, adaptive system, so lots of variation is important. To quote De Vany:-

In fact, all bodily processes are highly non-linear and these non-linearities must be exploited in any effective fitness program. The key to exploiting the highly non-linear and dynamic adaptive metabolic processes of the human body is to achieve the right mixture of intensity and variety of activities: we are adaptive organisms that thrive on variety, not machines designed for high volume routine.”

As Taleb went on to say to me:-

Our expenditure of energy should be very fat tails. We should have a lot more variation.”

At this point, concurring with Taleb’s experience of the benefits of high-intensity activity – for instance, De Vany recommends sprints over long-distance slow running – I drifted into a little bit of theorising about why my co-ordination seemed to improve when my marathon training has reached the point where I run on hills or use sprint intervals. As we started to consider why this might be, Taleb brought us both up short:-

It’s experimental. Let’s not understand the mechanism. That is Menodotus de Nicomedia*. Now we are hitting on the centre of this book, which is empirical medicine. Don’t have theories. De Vany has theories, but the core of what he is saying is that this is how it seems to work. So existing theories are blind to empirical reality.”

Reference * Menodotus of Nicomedia , if you check out Taleb’s website, he confesses some bemusement about the significance of being in the New York Times bestseller list, but hopes it is some vindication for the forgotten ideas of various thinkers, including this Greek philosopher and physician. Menodotus regarded medicine as an art rather than a science, and thought empirical experience more important than theory, but held that even experience needed to be treated with a high level of scepticism. [Note: Encyclopedia Britannica has an entry for Menodotus, but Wikipedia so far does not.]

De Vany’s concept of evolutionary fitness argues for the reduction or removal of grains from the diet, because they are essentially agricultural products and would not have featured much on a hunter-gatherer’s menu. So when the waiter offered us onion bhaji as a starter, Taleb asked the waiter wryly, as if the poor man would know, “Does Mr De Vany agree with it?” And as the ordering was concluded without any utterance of pilau or naan, the waiter looked understandably puzzled: “No rice? No bread?” You just don’t get too many cavemen going for an Indian near Russell Square these days. But then two come along at once. Now, what are the chances of that?

Come back for the main course of CAVEMAN LUNCH WITH TALEB, and discover what Taleb has to say about journalism, blogs, video and TV.

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Five weeks ago, I was set to run the London Marathon. Training was back on track, my near-term target was last week’s Bath Half. Apart from a tentative run last Thursday, I did not train at all in the intervening period because of the most persistent virus I’ve encountered. As of now, the London Marathon, less than three weeks away, is a pipe-dream, and I shall withdraw. The Bath Half – achievable based on my recent mileages – would have been dangerous while still nursing an infection, even though it seemed relatively mild.

When I did step out last week in an attempt to burn off the residue of infection, the Polar RS800 heart rate monitor I have been testing provided a salutary warning. Intuitively, because the infection stage of a virus tends not to last long, you think at least after four weeks, you’re probably in reasonable shape. But the computer said no. Using the “OwnZone” feature, the Polar watch set me an extraordinary modest exercise range of just 111-141 bpm. That equated to a brisk walk up to light jog. Unadvised, I would have run off at 145-150 bpm.

The idea of burning off a virus seems well established. Raising body temperature does that. Mistakenly, I ran my first marathon in 2005 with a virus, and indeed it had disappeared the following day. In effect raising body temperature to burn off virus is what a fever is doing. But, nervous of myocarditis (viral infection of the heart that can be fatal) I prefer not to exercise at all if I feel under the weather, and I would never “compete” unless I felt optimal. As I trained last Thursday, the Polar RS800 was telling me much the same thing. I jogged for about 30 minutes, having to walk more and more toward the end because my old war wound (ligament trouble in the hallux) was irritating me a bit. I felt really ropey when I got home. The following morning, my resting heart rate, which had been a routine 50 bpm, was up at 62 bpm, compared with a well rested level of 45-46 bpm when I have been training regularly and virus-free.

So my near-term goal now is to ignore the London Marathon and rebuild my fitness. After five weeks without exercise, I have not gained any weight, but there has been a noticeable deterioration in my day-to-day cognitive function, coordination and overall work efficiency.

Resting heart rate 48 bpm

Weight 72 kg

Mood

Exercise (ready to resume later today)

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It may be a punishment for being rude about economists on the Marginal Revolution blog. These people have supernatural power, you know. But for 24 hours I’ve been feeling a bit ropey again. It’s definitely the man-flu feeling. Heart rate was up this morning after a rest day Monday. Looks like it might pass in a day though, fingers crossed.

I don’t think I overdid it with the long run. There was no pre-indicator I was ailing, but the previous few days involved some significant stress. Twice in eight weeks I’ve been in situations where elderly relatives have been critically, disturbingly ill, including a New Year’s Eve near-death vigil, followed by a miraculous recovery.

They say stress weakens the immune system. Given that the running, certainly in the short period after each exercise, causes a redistribution of white blood cells away from the upper respiratory tract, it should not be a surprise that I might be more vulnerable to virus than usual. Mild weather also seems to be spreading more around this year than I remember. But even a week out now will seriously jeopardise my position come April 22.

I will aim to do some light exercise Wednesday, come what may, and avoid taking potshots at the economics profession until I’m better.

Resting heart rate 49

Weight 70.5 kg

Mood

Unscheduled rest day

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In terms of recovery, the birth of a child must rank among the biggest of body traumas requiring adequate rest. It was reported this week that Paula Radcliffe has already resumed running just over two weeks since the birth of her first child.

This might not be so bad, but in continuing the theme of a bias to overtrain and under-recover, this article notes the experience of 1987 10,000m World Champion and serial marathon winner Ingrid Kristensen, from whom Paula reportedly sought advice:-

“Speaking earlier this year, Kristiansen admitted that she had done too much, too soon. She added: ‘I think Paula can come back in really good shape for the Beijing Olympics but she has to be patient. I did a little bit too much.’”

My own recovery seems to be going just fine. A virus is not a baby, after all. I ran intervals today, for the first time pushing the pace element to one-minute. I did this four times, then a four minute break, then another four times. As for recovery between intervals, instead of measuring by time, which I have done in the past, I followed the Bath University Human Performance Centre advice and waited until my heart rate had fallen to the recovery zone. Interestingly, the first several recoveries took a full minute, but thereafter the recovery rate improved to about 40-50 seconds.

Having pushed my heart-rate up to over 170 bpm, albeit briefly several times, it has left me tired, although with a sense of neurological adaptation. The post-run recovery feels quite different, more uplifting than a normal run.

Resting Heart Rate 46

Weight 71 kg

Mood

Exercise Energy Consumed 575 kcal (35 mins interval/fartlek run, 10 mins bike)

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Recovering from a virus, I was advised by an expert friend to do two or three gentle 5k+ runs, before increasing intensity or distance. In the past I’ve always come out of illness like a bull at a gate, trying to catch up for lost time. Now my strategy is all patience. The fact that I’ve lost three weeks, actually means the return should be even more gradual.

Claire Lane, who conducted my maximal test at the Bath University Human Performance Centre, also advised that if my heart rate rose beyond the appropriate zone I should ease back, to ensure that exercise remained appropriate for my conditioning or the training schedule.

I’ve not been good at this, because sometimes it seems to involve running uncomfortably slowly. There is always a tendency to push too hard, because we are driven to believe we must be making an effort: “If it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working”. Only last Friday I ran up a hill, pushing my heart rate up to 163 bpm, when it should have been no higher than 149, especially considering that it was the first day I was not sick. But the past couple of days, I’m starting to get the hang of it.

It is just intuitive to run up a hill. However, the advice not to is echoed by Tony Hope, of heart rate monitor firm Polar. He says that when using their OwnZone function (not available on my model, unfortunately) the watch will indicate you should stop and walk if the intensity of the workout, or hill, is judged potentially injurious. Their latest models can judge the variability in the interval between each heart beat to determine exactly how fit or recovered the body is (even within a workout) and advise accordingly. The Polar site has good information for recovering runners, although the examples for a virus do not cover a period as long as three weeks.

So this week, when I have been trying to keep below 149 bpm, I have stopped and walked more and more if there was an incline that was raising the heart. It is a strange discipline to acquire, but one I’ll need to learn more about as I’m trying to pursue a recovery, rather than work, based approach to training. UK Sport has a useful document on RBT.

Resting Heart Rate 50

Weight 71.5 kg

Mood

Exercise Energy Consumed 797 kcal (7k run, 10 mins bike)

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It did start to feel like it would never end. I’d begun to regard a heart rate above 50 as normal. I can’t recall when I’ve sustained such a measurement for such a long period. I was rewarded for not training yesterday: my resting heart rate this morning fell back to 47 beats per minute, indicating the passing of the virus. I suspect it could still go a little lower, as I didn’t have enough sleep.

Over three weeks of no exercise, my weight only drifted up a couple of pounds. Even so, I was eating a lot. Over the past few days, it seems to be moving in the other direction. From 73 kg (161 lbs) last week, my rather imprecise scales are now leaning the other side of 72 kg (159 lbs.) Following on from the BBC’s Truth about Food programme and its revelation that the calcium in dairy products like yoghurt drain fat from food, I’ve started eating quantities after some meals. I’ve also gone back to porridge and honey for breakfast – classic marathoner’s food and a staple of Paula Radcliffe. It certainly has left me full in the morning, even in the recent cold weather, so no need for a couple of pieces of buttered toast and marmalade. The Christmas cake is now but a small, drying triangle, and so much easier to overlook at coffee time.

I’m nervous about losing weight, and the Bath University Human Performance Centre staff warned me not to pay too much attention to it on a daily basis – I guess they’re only too familiar with the danger of obsessiveness in this area. I’m not particularly heavy. But my VO2 Max, or capacity to pump oxygen around the body, will certainly improve for marathon purposes if I dropped some weight. Combining that with higher intensity training looks risky. Two pounds in a week is probably a little too much to lose, and may be a case of more noise than signal, likely to even out on a week-to-week basis. But I’m happy eating lots of fruit, smoothies, pulses and organic meat.

Resting heart rate 47

Weight 72 kg

Mood

Total exercise energy consumed 568 kcal (5k jog, 10 mins bike)

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I was not a happy camper this morning. After 17 days of virus, with some signs of improvement, I woke up with a splitting headache and a heart rate conservatively estimated at 58 bpm. This was not quite as acute as a bad migraine, but lasted all day. Ron Hill would have put in two miles at least. I could barely make it to the bathroom. I doubled up on paracetamol and ibuprofen for the first time ever, and for a migraine sufferer that’s saying something.

The good news is that by the end of the day it seems to be over. And the upper-respiratory tract infection looks like it has shifted too. But this leaves me effectively three weeks behind my training schedule, nevermind the effect it has had on my work.

Resting heart rate 58

Weight 73 kg

Mood

Sick with virus (day long severe headache, nauseous) clearing by nightfall

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How in touch are you with what your heart is telling you? In exercise, probably the best information you can get is from your heart. Heart rate reveals exertion, stress, infection, rate of recovery.

Every morning when you awake, it is possible to find out a lot about how the day might be, and how to organize it, if you were just to measure your resting heart rate. That can include work, exercise and leisure. If your resting heart rate is raised above its normal, that can be a warning signal. You might be suffering from stress, or still recovering from hard exercise in the previous couple of days.

It can also be a warning sign before other symptoms that you have caught a virus. Skip a meal, work too hard that day, exercise too vigorously, or go out in the evening when you should stay home, and what might have just been a sniffle could lay you up for a few days, or lead to a more debilitating injury.

When it comes to a training schedule for a marathon or half-marathon, you will find that the best will often refer to different exercise bands or zones as a percentage of your maximum heart rate.

Finding out your maximum heart rate can be approximated for free, but is best done by visiting a sports performance clinic, like the one at Bath University. For a little less than £100, you’ll get the same kind of information about your physiology that world-class athletes require, and you’ll be using the same facilities used by greats like Olympic hurdler Colin Jackson. If it sounds like a lot of money, realise that it may save you a lot in the long-run. It might just reveal some hidden talent, a possibility I’ll deal with in the next post.

The so-called long run started in earnest today. This is to build up my stamina and endurance, in other words get me used to spending a lot of time on my legs to last the three to four hours I expect my participation in the Flora London Marathon to last.

From here on I’ll be posting my vital resting and exercising statistics at the foot of each blog entry. I hope they’ll prove a useful training aid.

Resting Heart Rate 48

Weight 72 kg

Mood

Total exercise energy burned 1037 kcal, 10 mins bike, 1:08 hours run

Discomfort in left foot after 20-30 minutes, apparently associated with earlier tendon injury

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