So goes the Talking Heads song, invoking our hunter-gatherer past. Nuts and berries must therefore be good for running, surely. I’ve not been consuming so many nuts of late, although there are still plenty left over from the Christmas larder. Berries are a different matter. At the best of times, they are expensive, and so not a regular part of the diet except in high summer. They are rich in anti-oxidants, and so good for fixing life’s daily damage. They’re supposed to be very good for muscle repair.

However, the past couple of weeks, we’ve started buying Innocent smoothies. They’re expensive compared with juice drinks. But it looks now like a false economy. The volume of fruit they contain seems enormous, particularly berries. And boy are they tasty. They do a kids’ version which has each portion that makes up that five-a-day equation marked out on the side. Feels like pure food, albeit from a carton.

Friday was a rest day, and today I remembered I could cross-train on the bike and save the legs some impact. Sunday is important for a long-run, the first in nearly a month because of virus, so saving the legs an extra day should be better in the longer term.

Resting heart rate 49 bpm

Weight 71 kg

Mood

Total excercise energy burned 588 kcal (45 mins bike)

There is a great book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called Fooled by Randomness, which examines the role of luck in all areas of life, particularly business and investing.

Taleb is a professor of mathematics and a derivatives trader. Not much to do with sport. But his business is complexity. There is something in statistics called “survivorship bias”. There is a danger that what we measure excludes those that have fallen by the wayside, distorting our view of the world.

Sport is a bit like that when it comes to injury and overtraining. The winner is the best on the day, and not necessarily the best over time. What we certainly don’t see at all are the no-shows, the non-runners, the might-have-beens. Imagine England’s rugby performance over the past few years if Jonny Wilkinson had not been injured.

Taleb is a fitness fanatic and keen cyclist. He says he is not interested in competitive sports, so he does not offer much to help an athlete understand success, except to offer the proverbial observation that a baseball hitter is normally cursed when he appears on the front of Sports Illustrated as it is normally followed by a reversal in fortune. (Mathematically, the previous winning streak was in fact an unsustainable run of luck).

In competitive sport, luck is not very likely to take an average athlete to a gold medal. But bad luck will certainly remove good prospects from the population of potential winners. Reducing that component of luck is what athletes strive for. In my own more modest marathon ambitions, I’m trying to do the same. Except there is not any pressure to win, just a pressure to turn up. That is not a small pressure, and if you are raising money for a charity, that pressure builds the nearer you get to the day. I ran my first marathon injured and while still recovering from a virus, dangerously toughing it out so as not to let down those who’d sponsored me.

Continue reading ‘luck, latent talent and training’

The English weather turned nippy last night with a sharp frost. Snow is forecast across the country tomorrow.

Despite his tough talking in a lecture a couple of weeks ago, 1970 Commonwealth marathon champion Ron Hill said cold weather is no time for heroics. He insists you should always make sure you are comfortable. And if the temperature is below 10 degrees celsius, that means wearing legwear. If it is below zero, he doubles up with two pairs. The reason being that knees are very vulnerable to the cold.

This is even more true when cycling, where windchill can reduce the temperature of the cartilage still further. Lacking flexibility, it is more likely to injure. It’s noteworthy that even footballers are now choosing tights in certain conditions. The point about being comfortable is not that it makes you soft, but that it protects you. To coin a term from business, and so much sport is now, this kind of injury avoidance technique is risk management.

It was freezing when I went out for a very gentle 5k this evening, and for the first time I did just that. Ironically, the two pairs of leggings that I wore were both made by the company Ron Hill founded. One pair must be 15 years old. As hard-wearing as the man himself, but then he does have a PhD in textile chemistry from Manchester University.

Resting Heart Rate 50

Weight 72 kg

Mood

Total exercise energy consumed 602 kcal (5k run, 10 mins bike)

Had it not been for Ben Gray’s swift turnaround, this website would not have been up Wednesday, and I would have missed my run. Ben produced the design (it’s called unsleepable), and does great work over at www.openswitch.org.

Ben likes running, but suffers from shinsplints.

He’s not alone. So many people are forced to give up running, which they enjoy, because of various overuse injuries such as shinsplints. I hope I won’t be one of them. Tim Noakes in the Lore of Running reports that shinsplints is a bit of a catch-all term, but it generally results from too aggressive an increase in training load. Studies have shown that army recruits suffered significant levels of such stress fractures, but that those that played ball sports suffered much less. Basketball seems to be particularly good for building up bone strength. A diet low in calcium is often to blame. Noakes says with the correct training load, strengthening and dietary adjustments it is completely curable.